Committing genocide by trying not to

You can commit genocide by fighting with too many ethical constraints and dragging a war out indefinitely. You can also commit genocide by fighting in a way designed to avoid winning by war.

People have been dying in shocking numbers for America obstinately perpetuating wars in this way. It has even become politically fashionable in some circles to do just that.

Some presidents have felt that it’s a sin to win by war and avoided following through when they were on the cusp of winning. We have ended up with unending conflicts that could reach genocidal proportions.

Obama did that in Syria. More than half a million died.

You can also do this if you are constantly doing virtue-signaling to your domestic critics who call themselves “antiwar”. You do it so you can tell them that you’re really “for peace”, in their distorted meaning of the phrase.

Biden and Trump have done this with their repeated ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The ceasefires have compelled Israel (and sometimes America) to fight all over again for ground that had already been taken. They have also broken the momentum of our advances and enabled our enemies to get a second wind and fight on.

The death toll from these three unresolved wars has not yet been as terrible as in Syria and cannot honestly be called genocidal, not yet at least. But it is high –100,000 and counting. It risks becoming far worse unless we get over our fake virtue signaling and return to the practice of making rational ethical calculations for our wars.

The evil of virtue signaling

All three presidents have done their fake ethics as a form of virtue signaling to the wrong people.

In the case of Obama and Biden, it was virtue signaling to their own political base – the mainstream media and the progressive wing of their party. In the case of Trump, it has been virtue signaling to his enemies – the same media and progressives, and the Nobel Committee to boot.

These people who have come to be treated in our society as our arbiters of virtue, thanks to their domination of our political communications. They are in reality the opposite of being politically virtuous. Virtue-signaling to them comes at the cost of actual virtue.

The vast number of additional dead in just these recent wars is a sign of how evil the virtue-signaling can be.

Israel’s real but lesser share in it

Does Israel share in the guilt for this search for guiltlessness, even if to a much lesser extent than Biden and Trump?

Yes. It is proud of being “the most moral army in the world.” But as a result, it risks sliding into scrupulosity, a behavior that is the opposite of honest scrupulousness.

“Scrupulosity” is defined as a sin by the Catholic Church. This is because it doesn’t want to take responsibility for making the necessary choices to get a necessary task done. It allows far greater evils, rather than muddy its own hands with some of the evil. In mainstream secular psychology, it is described as a pathology that consists of looking for scruples in order to use them as a means for avoiding needed choices and actions.

The sin of it was seen when Israel exchanged 1,027 Palestinians, many of them terrorists with terrible crimes to their name – including Yahya Sinwar – for one of its own. There was a reason for this, to be sure. It was important for the morale of Israeli forces to know that they will not get abandoned. That was a good reason; just not a good enough reason. It was not as good as the reasons that militated against doing it. Sinwar proceeded to plot and start his new war, aiming at genocide – at a real genocide, killing as many of the Jews in Israel as he could. October 7 came of that, and thousands of dead.

When this is said honestly, it is often pointed out in response that some of our sages said that “He who saves a single life saves an entire world.” That actually makes sense, stated correctly: it saves that singular world-perception that is seen from within that single life. The teaching is often modified, however, in a way that makes no sense – as if saving a single life saves “the” entire world.

That makes the saying sound like a profound moral paradox. In reality, it turns it into profoundly nihilistic moral posturing.

It is nihilism, not morality, to suggest that there is no limit to what should be sacrificed to save a single life.

Too high a price has already been paid for this nihilism. Netanyahu has been right to quietly put it to the side, as best he can.

It is time to condemn this nihilistic doctrine in theory, not just shelve it sometimes in practice. Until we do this, our societies will continue to pay a high price for it.

Estimating the death toll from refusing to win

A large faction of our societies refuses to put the nihilism to the side. Many people have consistently demand ceasefires with almost no conditions, in the name of saving a few lives in a war and declaring it over, no matter the actual cost of this in far more lives.

Many times in the last three years, our governments have deferred to this demand. The world is paying a terrible price for it: tens of thousands of additional deaths, and a series of unwon, unresolved wars.

A careful estimate by Gemini AI is that 47,000 of the deaths in Gaza – a majority of all the deaths – would have been avoided if the U.S. had allowed Israel to proceed with an uninterrupted war there. And the war would be almost completely over, as Hamas would not have been able to re-recruit and rebuild a force of 20-30,000 fighters.

What are the factors that went into Gemini’s estimate? There are the extra deaths from retaking areas yielded in ceasefires. There is the larger number of extra deaths from allowing the regrouping and further recruiting of enemy forces, so they’ll be able to fight on after the ceasefire. And there is the large, though harder to estimable, number of extra deaths from the recovery of enemy morale that a truce, by halting a rout, permits.

Time to get back to true virtue and win

In old-fashioned war ethics, it was taken for granted that, when a war can be won, it is a virtue to win it quickly. This is not the only ethical consideration in a war, but it is often the most important one.

It is time for us to return to it.