Lots and lots of responses to my challenge this morning; here's a roundup with my thoughts.

First, I posed the following scenario to Eric Coe in the comments section of the post below regarding our late unlamented Sheikh:

If the blood is on [the sheikh's] hands so firmly, let me pose another scenario. Suppose this same terrorist was cornered in a back alley by IDF troops. But somehow, he managed to grab a small child, and is holding that child up as a shield.

Am I missing something, or is this the exact same issue, differently posed? And if I'm not --- would you agree that the IDF should go ahead and pull the trigger in that case, and sleep the sleep of the just that night, knowing that they bore no responsibility for the death of the child?

Eric has blogged a response, concluding that --- assuming the IDF fired in the scenario above --- "It would bother me, and it would bother those IDF soldiers too. Even if you are morally justified, you probably will have trouble sleeping well, after dealing with a situation like that, with such a bloody outcome."

But reading through Eric's entire post, I'm not convinced he's fully understood the distinction I'm attempting to make. Eric's central argument (Coe, not Alterman), it seems to me, is that it is possible to morally justify the death of innocents if it will prevent greater loss of innocent life in the future. The problem is, I completely agree with that, and said so --- or at least, tried to --- clearly in my original post.

What I do not agree with is those who --- like Alterman --- seem to be confusing the kind of moral calculus Eric describes, which involves rationally weighing the benefits versus costs; the good versus evil outcomes of ones actions, with a kind of karmic "get out of jail free card" that magically appears if we're clearly after a bad guy. My objection to Alterman's piece was that he seemed to skip over the moral calculation entirely, preferring to simply wave his hands and say that it was all the sheikh's fault, and that any deaths that we happen to inflict aren't our responsibility.

That's nonsense. My point is that it is possible, and necessary, to make these difficult moral decisions, without losing our morality along the way. We must accept that we are better than our enemies, and that we do bear responsibility for the civilian deaths we cause. Sometimes this acceptance of responsibility will lead us to conclude that the price to be paid is too high --- and other times, we will conclude that for the greater good, that price must be paid.

PontifExMachina has also chimed in: "...you can't absolve Sheik Shehada of all responsibility for the attack -- he made his choices, and if he had chose diffferently, there would have been no attack. It's not as if this murderer was an innocent bystander, you know. To say that he contributed to the attack is not equivelent to the Palestinian excuses for their suicide bombings, as Bear asserts. It's called the 'asking for trouble' doctrine. And if you ask for trouble, and you get it, then you should probably look at yourself and say, 'Maybe I shouldn't ask for trouble next time.' A failure to do so is a lack of responsibility, but it doesn't absolve you of yours."

I agree that you can't absolve the Sheikh of all responsibility: I never said otherwise. My argument was never that the Sheikh bore no responsibility, my argument was --- and is --- against those who argue that the IDF does not bear responsibility, if you see the distinction.

As for PontifEx's further point regarding the "asking for trouble" doctrine, this is another instance of a disturbing trend I've seen in this argument, starting with Alterman's original post. Yes, the Sheikh asked for trouble. Of course. And yes, he got it. And you know what? I'm glad he's dead. If there was a way I could make him any more dead, I'd be happy to do it. But we're not talking about the Sheikh. We're talking about the little kids that died. Did they "ask for trouble"?

PontifEx also concludes with a question: "Why, why, why do we insist on making snap judgements on every single little combat sortie, from the comfort of our homes, far away from the front? Why does the shortening of the news cycle have to turn into around-the-clock pontificiating about small engagements?"

My answer? I think there's value in challenging oneself to identify the moral and the immoral in this world. Armchair generaling is one thing, but that's not what I, at least, am attempting to do. I don't claim to know good military tactics from bad ones --- but I do claim to know, from my own heart, at least, what I believe is moral, and what I believe is not. And I think engaging in debates like this one with honest folks of integrity as to where those lines are is time well spent.

But wait! There's more. Dr. Manhattan has a question: "What Bear seems to be saying is that Israel bears moral responsibility for the deaths of the civilians, but he is not saying that Israel's actions were morally unjustified. But isn't that the same question?".

Nope, it's not the same question. To say that Israel bears moral responsibility for the civilian deaths does not preclude one from concluding that, despite this, the net moral calculus comes out to say that Israel's actions were morally justified. As I've said before, if in killing the Sheikh and those civilians around him would prevent massive loss of civilian life in the future, then Israel's action was a morally just one, in my opinion. (And by the way, I'm not skirting the issue here: I haven't said definitively whether I think it was or was not moral on balance simply because I don't have the intelligence that Israel does; I am not well-informed enough to say what the magnitude of those future deaths might be.)

How much would you pay now? Still not convinced? JAE at WeekendPundit will throw in this free set of steak knives!

Actually, he won't, but he will disagree with me --- "the Palestinian militants, in making the conscious decisions to a) slaughter civilians, and b) house themselves in the shielding embrace of civilian populations, bear the responsibility for bringing about the circumstances that led to this unfortunate loss of life. Unfortunate. Nothing more, nothing less." ---- and also quotes himself from a previous post:

"It does not matter if the “ordinary Palestinians” are not so committed to the fight as the death-warped “martyrs” who bring their brand of righteous murder down upon school children and secretaries, the fact is that they tolerate these animals, and by tolerating them they are complicit in their actions. After the Second World War the Allies did not accept the protestations of German civilians who clamed not to know about the atrocities of the Holocaust so no thinking, reasoning person can give me any damned reason to start accepting excuses now. To the “ordinary Palestinians” I say: “If you are not actively opposing those of your people who would sow random death then you are guilty of murder. You are damned.”

To which I say: I think I've established my credentials as one with an extremely dim view of the dominant, murderously suicidal strains of Palestinian culture (seriously, if you haven't read that link, I'd appreciate it if you do: it provides valuable context to my feelings on the conflict, and besides, I think it's some of my better work).

But I have to ask JAE: I'm with you on the argument for the adult Palestinian population. But help me out here: we're talking about dead children. Are you saying that the children that died in the attack were "damned" because they didn't rise up to oppose the Sheikh? Little help, please.

Update: Win Fitzpatrick disses InstaGuy's defense of Alterman:

"Ultimately, the InstaPundit's legal analogy doesn't lend a whole lot of clarity to the issue, which makes it a pretty bad analogy. When the legalistic bafflegarb is stripped away, it boils down to: Hamas deserves anything it gets; if innocents are hurt in the process, too bad; if you think otherwise, you're a Hamas supporter and we don't need to listen to your sniveling moralizing."

and then for an encore, raps Meryl on the knuckles:

"Ms Yourish's argument boils down to: Hamas does bad things that kill innocents on purpose. The IDF wasn't trying to kill innocents. If the IDF kills innocents in the process of killing members of Hamas, so be it. Sorry, but I can't sign off on that. The IDF has a moral responsibility to carry out its operations in such a way as to minimize civilian casualties."

This guy's feisty. Better keep an eye on him.

Update 7/28: The subject of 'just war', in a classical sense, has been burning up the comments section. Folks have posted a number of links --- a reader also sent in this one.