Why proportional responses are a bad idea...

Every now and then on the West Wing, we would be lectured on the doctrine of "proportional response", a doctrine followed for too much of America's recent history. If a country or a terrorist group bombs an American embassy, the "proportional response" is to lob a missle or two, strike an embassy-equivalent target of the enemy, rather than bomb the enemy back to the stone age.

In some situations, there's nothing wrong with that option. But when the enemy starts to take advantage of your good nature and self-restraint, when he relies on it, when he starts to calculate that your measured response is a reasonable price to pay for whatever he hopes to accomplish by his attack, then a proportional response is no longer acceptable. At some point, the country under constant attack must respond in a much larger way in order to deter the enemy from further attacks. In the immortal words of Officer Jim Malone: You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.

I bring this up in the context of Israel's entirely appropriate response to the recent attacks on and kidnappings of its soldiers by components of the governments of Palestine and Lebanon, Hamas and Hezbollah. Apparently, Hezbollah drew up this plan back in January, and decided now would be a good time to execute it. According to a Lebanese blog, The Lebanese Political Journal:

When they [Hezbollah] dreamed up this plan in January, they thought the Israelis would respond as usual: bomb a few Hezbollah positions on the border, and perhaps attack Palestinian militant camps. They were not expecting the attack to occur at this fragile time with the Palestinians.

"Hezbollah was surprised by Israel's response," is the understated description of Hezbollah's reaction, according to lebanon.profile, a contributor to that blog, a self-described information analyst, journalist, and graduate student in Beirut. Indeed, the attack seems to have backfired on Hezbollah in more ways that one:

According to three Sunni shop owners in Beirut from Saida, they and their families are more upset with Hezbollah than they are with Israel. In fact, they understand the Israeli position.

Had Israel engaged in a "proportional response", it would simply have played into the hands of the cold-blooded terrorist calculators who use kidnapping and murder as political tools, and we would continue these tensions indefinitely, with no hope of any real change or end in sight.

By reacting as they did, by treating an act of war as an act of war, forcing the Lebanese government to make a stand either with or against Hezbollah, Israel is prompting real changes, changes which will, hopefully, make the entire region safer. If local, average Lebanese are indeed blaming Hezbollah for behaving stupidly, rather than reflexively standing up for fellow Arabs against the Jews, that is progress and a great sign for hope.

Of course, the Israeli response could provoke a war, too. Sadly, war is sometimes necessary to resolve disputes which have proven to withstand all efforts at diplomacy. Israel is walking a very fine line right now, but if they manage to stay on the tightrope, very good things could happen.

UPDATE: The Israeli Defense Force is making it clear that they will not follow the "proportional response" doctrine in this fight, according to this report from the Jerusalem Post:

The source said that the IDF's goal "was not to chase after every Katyusha rocket in Hizbullah hands but to hit the terror group hard and to impair its ability to continue to attack Israel."

"We are going to operate differently than we have in the past," he said. "We have a better ability to hit them than they have to hit us."