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The Israeli goal of eliminating Hamas raises the question, is the war’s resulting civilian Palestinian death toll proportional, as the International Committee of the Red Cross puts it, “in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated?” More than 35,000 Palestinians have died in the Gaza war, roughly two-thirds of whom are women and children.

I sometimes wonder if our efforts at putting limits on civilian casualties are merely an attempt to salve our conscience. To deal with the conflict that war presents—how can moral people engage in such barbarous conduct1?—we create the fiction that we can, so to speak, sanitize the process.

What we are witnessing in Gaza is nothing new, and, regrettably, military action by the U.S. and its allies has always resulted in a significant number of civilian casualties.

Over the course of four days in February 1945, 1290 British and American bombers dropped incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, killing between 25,000 and 35,000 civilians. An 18-year old survivor recalled, “There was an indescribable roar in the air—the fire. The thundering fire reminded me of the biblical catastrophes that I had heard about.”

According to historian Donald Miller, “People’s shoes melted into the hot asphalt of the streets, and the fire moved so swiftly that many were reduced to atoms before they had time to remove their shoes. The fire melted iron and steel, turned stone into powder, and caused trees to explode from the heat of their own resin.”

On March 9, 1945, American bombers incinerated 16 square miles of Tokyo, killing 90,000 to 100,000 civilians. Several other Japanese cities were also firebombed. Army Air Corps General Curtis LeMay, who ordered the bombings, said, “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government, and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”

LeMay also acknowledged, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

The Vietnan War resulted in the deaths anywhere between 791,000 and 1.3 million civilians. Our bombing of North Vietnam alone caused 65,000 civilian deaths. To give a sense of the enormity of our war effort in the Vietnam War, American aircraft dropped 7.6 million tons of ordnance, far exceeding the amount we dropped in World War II and the Korean War combined.

Between 186,000 and 210,000 civilians died during the Iraqi War. It’s not clear how many of these deaths were caused by American forces alone.

We’re moved by the idea it’s possible to impose moral limits on conduct that prioritizes death and destruction. Sure, it’s a noble goal, but we’re no more successful than the Greek mythology character Sisyphus, who was doomed to push a rock up a hill, only to have it always roll back down.

We want to think we can rise above the inherent flaws of our human condition and put constraints on an activity that is barbarous and make it less so. But the reality is, we’re only slightly ahead of where we were a thousand years ago, when kingdoms plundered one another as a matter of course with no regard for loss of life.

Back then, soldiers and peasants alike were killed, and there were no rules. Today, civilians are still at risk, but now we try to nibble at the edges of brutality with rules so that war isn’t quite as messy as it might be.

St. Augustine wrote, “the monarch should have the power of undertaking war if he thinks it advisable, and that the soldiers should perform their military duties in behalf of the peace and safety of the community.” The problem is, no peace is ever lasting, and civilians always die in the process.

I suppose we have to try to put limits on war, if only so that we don’t have to admit we are doomed by our own human condition.

[A shorter version of this post was published in the Columbus Dispatch on July 19, 2024.]

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Jack D’Aurora writes for Considerthisbyjd.com

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