A few weeks ago, the State Department’s incoherent spokeswoman Marie Harf all but accused Israel of war crimes. As Tablet
noted
at the time, Harf said that “the suspicion that militants are operating
nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many
innocent civilians.” She said a full investigation and accounting of
Israel’s actions was warranted (as if Israel doesn’t already conduct
such investigations). Expect her, then, to be asked about
the following:
The White House has
acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama
imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes
will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.
A White House statement to Yahoo News confirming the looser policy
came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen
civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a
Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria’s Idlib
province on the morning of Sept. 23.
The Obama White House appears to have expanded Richard Nixon’s famous
maxim to international law: when the (American) president does it, it’s
not illegal. The Obama administration’s air war on terror has operated
under the standard referred to as “near certainty”: that they be all but
certain no civilians will be endangered by air strikes. But as the
Obama administration continues withdrawing from these battlefields, that
gets more difficult to ensure since sources of on-the-ground
intelligence dry up.
Such sources weren’t there to begin with in Syria, at least not to
the extent they were in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it’s not as though
President Obama suddenly decided he doesn’t care about innocent Syrian
lives. It’s that he’s doing his best to prevent civilian casualties
within the realm of realistic but effective warfare. The double standard
is still glaring, as Jonathan
pointed out
last week. And it only becomes more so with yesterday’s report on the
shift in standards. The White House was asked about just how much effort
they’re putting into their aim after a particularly damaging errant
strike:
But at a briefing for members and staffers of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee late last week, Syrian rebel commanders
described women and children being hauled from the rubble after an
errant cruise missile destroyed a home for displaced civilians. Images
of badly injured children also appeared on YouTube, helping to fuel anti-U.S. protests in a number of Syrian villages last week.
“They were carrying bodies out of the rubble. … I saw seven or eight
ambulances coming out of there,” said Abu Abdo Salabman, a political
member of one of the Free Syria Army factions, who attended the briefing
for Foreign Affairs Committee members and staff. “We believe this was a
big mistake.”
Yes, a “big mistake” that mere weeks ago the State Department was
calling unjustified–tantamount to a war crime, in other words–when
committed by Israel. Now, there will be some leeway of course: it’s not
as though Obama’s a Republican, so the laws of war are of minimal
concern to the left. Additionally, everyone knows a double standard is
applied to Israel, so no one expected Barack Obama to live up to his own
words or follow his own administration’s sanctimonious pronouncements.
Nonetheless, even some Obama partisans are wondering if the president
is simply making it up as he goes along. The Yahoo story that confirmed
the removal of the “near certainty” standard quotes Harold Koh,
formerly the Obama State Department’s top lawyer, trying mightily to
figure out where Obama’s legal authority is coming from:
“They seem to be creating this grey zone” for the
conflict, said Harold Koh, who served as the State Department’s top
lawyer during President Obama’s first term. “If we’re not applying the
strict rules [to prevent civilian casualties] to Syria and Iraq, then
they are of relatively limited value.”
The difference, then, between the way the Obama administration and
Israel conduct war boils down to: Israel puts the greatest effort it can
into avoiding civilian casualties and then follows up with transparent
investigations, while Obama basically just hopes for the best. The press
should ask him about that.
Indeed, they should do more: will the
New York Times shove
down its readers’ throats a constant stream of enemy propaganda designed
to engender sympathy for genocidal terrorists at the expense of the
democratic West? To ask the question is to answer it. If Jews or
Republicans can’t be blamed, what’s the point?
More likely, however, is the possibility that the walking disaster
that is Marie Harf will be asked about it, since the diplomatic press
pool tend not to find her petty sniping and cheerful ignorance
intimidating in the least. Does she still think these acts are war
crimes, now that her government is the one conducting them? And does she
believe she owes Israel an apology? There’s no question she does owe
Israel that apology, and so does the Obama administration more broadly.
But it would be interesting to see if they could summon the necessary
integrity to offer it.
