Collective Punishment

A few weeks ago, a shul-friend of mine casually suggested the following "solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict: "for every one they kill of us, the IDF should kill five of them." I think the left is quick (and correct!) to jump on the moral reprehensibility of this kind of collective punishment - of wanting to bomb all Palestinians into submission, or a Kahanist ethnic cleansing, but could benefit by responding to the efficacy of these proposals as well.

Telling acquaintances that their politics are abhorrent to me won't change their minds, but a conversation about the efficacy of their politics could be productive. Here are three sources on the (in)effectiveness of bombing an enemy into submission that I came across in recent readings:

1 -
In his book "On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman discusses the military theory that inspired the extensive strategic bombing campaigns that were waged during WWII, and the consequences of those campaigns.

Prior to World War II, psychologists and military theoreticians...predicted that mass bombing of cities would create the same degree of psychological trauma seen on the battlefield in World War I....authorities envisioned vast numbers of "gibbering lunatics" being driven from their cities by a rain of bombs....

This body of theory...played a key role in establishing the theoretical foundation for the German attempt to bomb Britain into submission at the beginning of World War II and the subsequent Allied attempt to do the same to Germany. This strategic bombing of population centers was motivated by quite reasonable expectations of mass psychiatric casualties resulting from the strategic bombing of civilian populations.

But they were wrong.

The carnage and destruction, and the fear of death and injury caused by the months of continuous blitz in England during World War II were as bad as anything faced by any frontline soldier...For the Germans it was worse. The might of the vast British Empire was brought to bear on the German population via Britain's nighttime area bombing. At the same time, the United States devoted its efforts to "precision" day light bombing. Day and night for months, even years, the German people suffered horribly.

And yet, incredibly, the incidence of psychiatric casualties among these individuals was very similar to that of peacetime...Indeed, bombing seemed to have served primarily to harden the hearts and empower the killing ability of those who endured it.

2 -
In his book "The Best and the Brightest," on how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led America into the disastrous Vietnam War, David Halberstam's gives a detailed account of how Lyndon Johnson was led to believe that the North Vietnamese could be bombed into submission. Johnson's bombing campaigns did not have their intended effect, and instead dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam. Collective punishment in Vietnam is a big part of how a small and poor country, Vietnam, was able to claim a resounding military victory over the world's richest and most powerful country, the United States.

There was an unofficial decision on the part of the principals not to look at the real darkness, to protect the President from what might be considered unpleasant realities, not to ask the hard questions. If anything there was almost a deliberate attempt to avoid thinking and looking at the larger consequences, and above all of the likelihood of the North Vietnamese reaction, which was quite predictable. In Saigon in early 1965 the CIA completed two massive intelligence estimates on the situation in Vietnam and the possibilities for the future. The man in charge of them for the Agency was an experienced analyst who had spent more than ten years working on the country and who had been consistently prophetic about events. Now in his estimates he predicted that the Vietcong, and in particular the North Vietnamese, had an enormous capacity to escalate if the United States bombed.

3 -
Gordon Goldstein's "Lessons in Disaster: McGeogre Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam," describes the experience of America's bombing on Vietnam from the perspective of the North Vietnamese:

...Bundy's bombing strategy...would accomplish nothing with respect to its objective of extracting negotiated concessions from North Vietnam. To the contrary, as multiple intelligence analyses had predicted, bombing had the opposite effect. Nguyen Khac Huynh, a foreign Ministry official focusing on U.S. affairs who later served on his country's delegation at the Paris peace talks, emphasized the role bombing played in solidifying North Vietnam's determination to continue and escalate its guerrilla war effort. "The bombing was the key factor," he said, "and the cessation of bombing was our key demand....every Vietnamese citizen would have felt ashamed if we sat down and talked with you under the pressure of bombing. This is the reason why so long as you continued to bomb the North, there could be no negotiations."

Tran Quang Co, who served as first deputy foreign minister, would make the case that the American bombing campaign was critical to national morale in North Vietnam. "Never before did the people of Vietnam, from top to bottom, unite as they did during the years the U.S. was bombing us."