Israel Owns US Foreign Policy--?!


Brant Gaede

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The topic title is a quote from another thread.

Is this true?

How true and in what respect?

If true is this desirable?

Was it ever true of any other country--that is, Great Britain?

How would the truth of this proposition reflect the role of morality in foreign affairs?

The role of Judeo-Christianity.

Why would a true individualist even care?

Etc.

--Brant

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John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt created a political storm exactly seven years ago with their study of the "Israel Lobby." A shorter version of the book is here.

Should a true individualist care? True individualism means that every person has full autonomy over how each of the dollars he has earned is spent, including what percentage of his wealth goes to foreign governments.

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How would the truth of this proposition [israel owns foreign policy] reflect the role of morality in foreign affairs?

There is no morality in foreign affairs that I'm aware of.

"Diem legalized his brutality by creating special military courts to try [approximately 40,000] political opponents and to pass sentences of death in no more than three days... A reluctant Vice-President Johnson was sent to review conditions in South Vietnam. While abroad he informed the world that Diem was the 'Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.' When a reporter asked LBJ if he meant what he had said, he answered: 'Shit, Diem's the only boy we got out there!' [Loren Baritz, Backfire, quoted in COGGIG, p. 141]

"Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. So, why did we invade and occupy Iraq at a cost of $2 trillion and 4,400 dead?—not counting 1.8 million refugees and 100,000 Iraqi dead. In 2005, a Pentagon study found that one in four U.S. troops who survived the Iraq War came home with health problems that required medical or mental health treatment, over 79,000 casualties. U.S. officials accused Saddam of harboring and supporting al-Qaeda, but no evidence of a connection was ever discovered. They also claimed that Saddam had WMD—none were found." [ibid, p. 139]

"Rationality imposes the burden of evidence and an unencumbered commitment to discover and verify the pertinent facts. In the absence of conclusive evidence, the crush of exigency impels us to weigh scraps of data and make reasonable estimates and inferences. Bush and Blair turned this upside down, inventing and twisting scraps of lies at their leisure to cover up their covert purpose for invading Iraq (oil supplies for Israel*, suppression of militant Arab resistance). Rational foreign policy requires exactly the reverse, an integration of available evidence without prejudice or covert agenda -- a candid, unbiased, honest, democratic debate." [Laissez Faire Law, p.207]

* see also EIA data 2004-2013 http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTXEX_NUS-NIS_1&f=A

Israeli oil imported via BTC pipeline http://energy.gov.il/English/Subjects/Subject/Pages/GxmsMniIsraelsFuelEconomy.aspx

involvement of US govt in BTC pipeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baku%E2%80%93Tbilisi%E2%80%93Ceyhan_pipeline#Controversial_aspects

US-led funding of BTC pipeline http://web.archive.org/web/20080125051855/http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=9006669&contentId=7014358

Iraqi Kurds sell oil to Israel http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-22/iraq-government-condemns-kurds-for-illegal-oil-sale-to-israel.html

2003 Pentagon plan for Iraq-Israel pipeline http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-checking-possibility-of-pumping-oil-from-northern-iraq-to-haifa-via-jordan-1.98134

"Israeli entrepreneur Shlomi Michaels is in full business partnership with the Kurdish government,
providing strategic consultation on economic and security issues. The strategic consultation company
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"... They also claimed that Saddam had WMD—none were found." [ibid, p. 139]

This is, and has been disputed.

Factually, we do know that Saddam used WWD's in gassing the Kurds.

I have also heard that they may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war.

A...

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Saddam used [Weapons of Mass Destruction*] in gassing the Kurds.

I have also heard that they may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war.

-- supplied by the United States! http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/31/iraq.politics

rumsfeld-saddam.jpg

* chemical warfare (CW) is not exactly WMD, like an atomic bomb is.

The 1988 attack on Halabja and other villages was tolerated by US govt

The United States exported support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war over $500 million worth of dual use [CW] exports to Iraq that were approved by the Commerce department ... Centers for Disease Control sold or sent biological samples of anthrax, West Nile virus and botulism to Iraq ... Washington Post reported that in 1984 the CIA secretly started providing intelligence to the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War. This included information to target chemical weapons strikes. The same year it was confirmed beyond doubt by European doctors and UN expert missions that Iraq was employing chemical weapons against the Iranians. Most of these occurred during the Iran–Iraq War, but [chemical weapons] were used at least once to crush the popular uprisings against Kurds in 1991...

There is deep resentment and anger in Iran that it was Western nations that helped Iraq develop and direct its chemical weapons arsenal in the first place and that the world did nothing to punish Iraq for its use of chemical weapons throughout the war. For example, the United States and the UK blocked condemnation of Iraq's known chemical weapons attacks at the UN Security Council. No resolution was passed during the war that specifically criticized Iraq's use of chemical weapons, despite the wishes of the majority to condemn this use. On March 21, 1986 the United Nation Security Council recognized that "chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian forces." This statement was opposed by the United States, the sole country to vote against it in the Security Council (the UK abstained)...

The Halabja poison gas attack caused an international outcry against the Iraqis. Later that year the U.S. Senate proposed the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, cutting off all U.S. assistance to Iraq and stopping U.S. imports of Iraqi oil. The Reagan administration opposed the bill, calling it premature, and eventually prevented it from taking effect, partly due to a mistaken DIA assessment which blamed Iran for the attack. At the time of the attack the town was held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas allied with Tehran...

In 2002, Scott Ritter stated that, by 1998, 90–95% of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities, and long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons, had been verified as destroyed. Technical 100% verification was not possible, said Ritter, not because Iraq still had any hidden weapons, but because Iraq had preemptively destroyed some stockpiles and claimed they had never existed. Many people were surprised by Ritter's turnaround in his view of Iraq during a period when no inspections were made. During the 2002–2003 build-up to war Ritter criticized the Bush administration and maintained that it had provided no credible evidence that Iraq had reconstituted a significant WMD capability.

On May 27, 2003, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency fact-finding mission in Iraq reported unanimously to intelligence officials in Washington that two trailers captured in Iraq by Kurdish troops "had nothing to do with biological weapons." The trailers had been a key part of the argument for the 2003 invasion; Secretary of State Colin Powell had told the United Nations Security Council, "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like." The Pentagon team had been sent to investigate the trailers after the invasion. The team of experts unanimously found "no connection to anything biological"; one of the experts told reporters that they privately called the trailers "the biggest sand toilets in the world." The report was classified, and the next day, the CIA publicly released the assessment of its Washington analysts that the trailers were "mobile biological weapons production." The White House continued to refer to the trailers as mobile biological laboratories throughout the year, and the Pentagon field report remained classified.

[Wikipedia]

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Saddam used [Weapons of Mass Destruction*] in gassing the Kurds.

I have also heard that they may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war.

-- supplied by the United States! http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/31/iraq.politics

rumsfeld-saddam.jpg

* chemical warfare (CW) is not exactly WMD, like an atomic bomb is.

The 1988 attack on Halabja and other villages was tolerated by US govt

The United States exported support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war over $500 million worth of dual use [CW] exports to Iraq that were approved by the Commerce department ... Centers for Disease Control sold or sent biological samples of anthrax, West Nile virus and botulism to Iraq ... Washington Post reported that in 1984 the CIA secretly started providing intelligence to the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War. This included information to target chemical weapons strikes. The same year it was confirmed beyond doubt by European doctors and UN expert missions that Iraq was employing chemical weapons against the Iranians. Most of these occurred during the Iran–Iraq War, but [chemical weapons] were used at least once to crush the popular uprisings against Kurds in 1991...

There is deep resentment and anger in Iran that it was Western nations that helped Iraq develop and direct its chemical weapons arsenal in the first place and that the world did nothing to punish Iraq for its use of chemical weapons throughout the war. For example, the United States and the UK blocked condemnation of Iraq's known chemical weapons attacks at the UN Security Council. No resolution was passed during the war that specifically criticized Iraq's use of chemical weapons, despite the wishes of the majority to condemn this use. On March 21, 1986 the United Nation Security Council recognized that "chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian forces." This statement was opposed by the United States, the sole country to vote against it in the Security Council (the UK abstained)...

The Halabja poison gas attack caused an international outcry against the Iraqis. Later that year the U.S. Senate proposed the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, cutting off all U.S. assistance to Iraq and stopping U.S. imports of Iraqi oil. The Reagan administration opposed the bill, calling it premature, and eventually prevented it from taking effect, partly due to a mistaken DIA assessment which blamed Iran for the attack. At the time of the attack the town was held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas allied with Tehran...

In 2002, Scott Ritter stated that, by 1998, 90–95% of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities, and long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons, had been verified as destroyed. Technical 100% verification was not possible, said Ritter, not because Iraq still had any hidden weapons, but because Iraq had preemptively destroyed some stockpiles and claimed they had never existed. Many people were surprised by Ritter's turnaround in his view of Iraq during a period when no inspections were made. During the 2002–2003 build-up to war Ritter criticized the Bush administration and maintained that it had provided no credible evidence that Iraq had reconstituted a significant WMD capability.

On May 27, 2003, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency fact-finding mission in Iraq reported unanimously to intelligence officials in Washington that two trailers captured in Iraq by Kurdish troops "had nothing to do with biological weapons." The trailers had been a key part of the argument for the 2003 invasion; Secretary of State Colin Powell had told the United Nations Security Council, "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like." The Pentagon team had been sent to investigate the trailers after the invasion. The team of experts unanimously found "no connection to anything biological"; one of the experts told reporters that they privately called the trailers "the biggest sand toilets in the world." The report was classified, and the next day, the CIA publicly released the assessment of its Washington analysts that the trailers were "mobile biological weapons production." The White House continued to refer to the trailers as mobile biological laboratories throughout the year, and the Pentagon field report remained classified.

[Wikipedia]

Anything capable of rendering a town for city deader than dust is a weapon of mass destruction.

A thousand B-29 raid where incendiary bombs are dropped is a weapon of mass destruction.

The U.S. took out 16 square miles of Tokyo and killed a quarter of a million people in one night in March of 1945. I would way the means used was a weapon of mass destruction. more people were killed in Tokyo that night than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

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Saddam used [Weapons of Mass Destruction*] in gassing the Kurds.

I have also heard that they may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war.

* chemical warfare (CW) is not exactly WMD, like an atomic bomb is.

The 1988 attack on Halabja and other villages was tolerated by US govt

Wolf, I believe we have a definition problem here.

Weapons of mass destruction refers to any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious physical harm through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors,a weapon involving a disease organism or biological agent ,or a weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life. http://definitions.uslegal.com/w/weapons-of-mass-destruction/

A weapon of mass destruction (WMD or WoMD) is a nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical or other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans or cause great damage to man-made structures (e.g. buildings), natural structures (e.g. mountains), or the biosphere. The scope and application of the term has evolved and been disputed, often signifying more politically than technically. Coined in reference to aerial bombing with chemical explosives, it has come to distinguish large-scale weaponry of other technologies, such as chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear. This differentiates the term from more technical ones such as chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons (CBRN).

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Saddam used [Weapons of Mass Destruction*] in gassing the Kurds.

I have also heard that they may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war.

-- supplied by the United States! http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/31/iraq.politics

rumsfeld-saddam.jpg

* chemical warfare (CW) is not exactly WMD, like an atomic bomb is.

The 1988 attack on Halabja and other villages was tolerated by US govt

The United States exported support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war over $500 million worth of dual use [CW] exports to Iraq that were approved by the Commerce department ... Centers for Disease Control sold or sent biological samples of anthrax, West Nile virus and botulism to Iraq ... Washington Post reported that in 1984 the CIA secretly started providing intelligence to the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War. This included information to target chemical weapons strikes. The same year it was confirmed beyond doubt by European doctors and UN expert missions that Iraq was employing chemical weapons against the Iranians. Most of these occurred during the Iran–Iraq War, but [chemical weapons] were used at least once to crush the popular uprisings against Kurds in 1991...

There is deep resentment and anger in Iran that it was Western nations that helped Iraq develop and direct its chemical weapons arsenal in the first place and that the world did nothing to punish Iraq for its use of chemical weapons throughout the war. For example, the United States and the UK blocked condemnation of Iraq's known chemical weapons attacks at the UN Security Council. No resolution was passed during the war that specifically criticized Iraq's use of chemical weapons, despite the wishes of the majority to condemn this use. On March 21, 1986 the United Nation Security Council recognized that "chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian forces." This statement was opposed by the United States, the sole country to vote against it in the Security Council (the UK abstained)...

The Halabja poison gas attack caused an international outcry against the Iraqis. Later that year the U.S. Senate proposed the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, cutting off all U.S. assistance to Iraq and stopping U.S. imports of Iraqi oil. The Reagan administration opposed the bill, calling it premature, and eventually prevented it from taking effect, partly due to a mistaken DIA assessment which blamed Iran for the attack. At the time of the attack the town was held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas allied with Tehran...

In 2002, Scott Ritter stated that, by 1998, 90–95% of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities, and long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons, had been verified as destroyed. Technical 100% verification was not possible, said Ritter, not because Iraq still had any hidden weapons, but because Iraq had preemptively destroyed some stockpiles and claimed they had never existed. Many people were surprised by Ritter's turnaround in his view of Iraq during a period when no inspections were made. During the 2002–2003 build-up to war Ritter criticized the Bush administration and maintained that it had provided no credible evidence that Iraq had reconstituted a significant WMD capability.

On May 27, 2003, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency fact-finding mission in Iraq reported unanimously to intelligence officials in Washington that two trailers captured in Iraq by Kurdish troops "had nothing to do with biological weapons." The trailers had been a key part of the argument for the 2003 invasion; Secretary of State Colin Powell had told the United Nations Security Council, "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like." The Pentagon team had been sent to investigate the trailers after the invasion. The team of experts unanimously found "no connection to anything biological"; one of the experts told reporters that they privately called the trailers "the biggest sand toilets in the world." The report was classified, and the next day, the CIA publicly released the assessment of its Washington analysts that the trailers were "mobile biological weapons production." The White House continued to refer to the trailers as mobile biological laboratories throughout the year, and the Pentagon field report remained classified.

[Wikipedia]

Anything capable of rendering a town for city deader than dust is a weapon of mass destruction.

A thousand B-29 raid where incendiary bombs are dropped is a weapon of mass destruction.

The U.S. took out 16 square miles of Tokyo and killed a quarter of a million people in one night in March of 1945. I would way the means used was a weapon of mass destruction. more people were killed in Tokyo that night than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

It was 100,000 - 125,000 people. Where do you get your fantastical data? Also, 1/3 the number of bombers.

--Brant

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It was 100,000 - 125,000 people. Where do you get your fantastical data? Also, 1/3 the number of bombers.

--Brant

The same place Westmoreland got his body counts I think.

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It was 100,000 - 125,000 people. Where do you get your fantastical data? Also, 1/3 the number of bombers.

--Brant

The same place Westmoreland got his body counts I think.

Westmoreland was an unimaginative PR general who told Johnson he needed 200,000 more troops after Tet when he should have said 200,000 could go home by Christmas. Result, Johnson threw in the towel and the war was lost. Ironically, it was lost, in a sense, a second time a few years later by the inevitable US getting out of town and a Democratic Congress cutting off too much funding to South Vietnam.

--Brant

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Saddam used [Weapons of Mass Destruction*] in gassing the Kurds.

I have also heard that they may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war.

-- supplied by the United States! http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/31/iraq.politics

rumsfeld-saddam.jpg

* chemical warfare (CW) is not exactly WMD, like an atomic bomb is.

The 1988 attack on Halabja and other villages was tolerated by US govt

The United States exported support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war over $500 million worth of dual use [CW] exports to Iraq that were approved by the Commerce department ... Centers for Disease Control sold or sent biological samples of anthrax, West Nile virus and botulism to Iraq ... Washington Post reported that in 1984 the CIA secretly started providing intelligence to the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War. This included information to target chemical weapons strikes. The same year it was confirmed beyond doubt by European doctors and UN expert missions that Iraq was employing chemical weapons against the Iranians. Most of these occurred during the Iran–Iraq War, but [chemical weapons] were used at least once to crush the popular uprisings against Kurds in 1991...

There is deep resentment and anger in Iran that it was Western nations that helped Iraq develop and direct its chemical weapons arsenal in the first place and that the world did nothing to punish Iraq for its use of chemical weapons throughout the war. For example, the United States and the UK blocked condemnation of Iraq's known chemical weapons attacks at the UN Security Council. No resolution was passed during the war that specifically criticized Iraq's use of chemical weapons, despite the wishes of the majority to condemn this use. On March 21, 1986 the United Nation Security Council recognized that "chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian forces." This statement was opposed by the United States, the sole country to vote against it in the Security Council (the UK abstained)...

The Halabja poison gas attack caused an international outcry against the Iraqis. Later that year the U.S. Senate proposed the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, cutting off all U.S. assistance to Iraq and stopping U.S. imports of Iraqi oil. The Reagan administration opposed the bill, calling it premature, and eventually prevented it from taking effect, partly due to a mistaken DIA assessment which blamed Iran for the attack. At the time of the attack the town was held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas allied with Tehran...

In 2002, Scott Ritter stated that, by 1998, 90–95% of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities, and long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons, had been verified as destroyed. Technical 100% verification was not possible, said Ritter, not because Iraq still had any hidden weapons, but because Iraq had preemptively destroyed some stockpiles and claimed they had never existed. Many people were surprised by Ritter's turnaround in his view of Iraq during a period when no inspections were made. During the 2002–2003 build-up to war Ritter criticized the Bush administration and maintained that it had provided no credible evidence that Iraq had reconstituted a significant WMD capability.

On May 27, 2003, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency fact-finding mission in Iraq reported unanimously to intelligence officials in Washington that two trailers captured in Iraq by Kurdish troops "had nothing to do with biological weapons." The trailers had been a key part of the argument for the 2003 invasion; Secretary of State Colin Powell had told the United Nations Security Council, "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like." The Pentagon team had been sent to investigate the trailers after the invasion. The team of experts unanimously found "no connection to anything biological"; one of the experts told reporters that they privately called the trailers "the biggest sand toilets in the world." The report was classified, and the next day, the CIA publicly released the assessment of its Washington analysts that the trailers were "mobile biological weapons production." The White House continued to refer to the trailers as mobile biological laboratories throughout the year, and the Pentagon field report remained classified.

[Wikipedia]

Anything capable of rendering a town for city deader than dust is a weapon of mass destruction.

A thousand B-29 raid where incendiary bombs are dropped is a weapon of mass destruction.

The U.S. took out 16 square miles of Tokyo and killed a quarter of a million people in one night in March of 1945. I would way the means used was a weapon of mass destruction. more people were killed in Tokyo that night than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

It was 100,000 - 125,000 people. Where do you get your fantastical data? Also, 1/3 the number of bombers.

--Brant

Some estimates are as high as 250,000 dead. It was a beautiful raid. More beautiful than Dresden

The men who flew the bombers said they could smell burning flesh at 8000 ft.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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It was 100,000 - 125,000 people. Where do you get your fantastical data? Also, 1/3 the number of bombers.

--Brant

Some estimates are as high as 250,000 dead. It was a beautiful raid. More beautiful than Dresden

The men who flew the bombers said they could smell burning flesh at 8000 ft.

"Some"? Whose? Where? And about 300 bombers did the damage, not 1000. The B-29 bombers on Tinian took off on 4 8000' parallel runways, but even those runways couldn't have handled that many. There was no room on Tinian even to park an extra 650-700 B-29s.

There was nothing beautiful about Dresden. The only thing beautiful about bombing is when you're on the ground taking fire and your air-to-ground drops napalm on who is shooting at you. Puff the Magic Dragon pouring a stream of .30 cal. tracer fire--looks like ketchup coming down and only one in five is a tracer--is also beautiful. I once walked across an open field in the Mekong Delta that had gotten puffed. Every five to eight inches was a bullet hole. No where to run. No where to hide. Without a steel umbrella, kiss your ass goodbye.

--Brant

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You are right. Only 100,000 were killed in the Fire Raid on Tokyo. A little over a million were un-housed.

It was still a raid of mass destruction. 300 B-29s dropping incendiary bombs on wooden houses constitutes a weapon of mass destruction.

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From The Times of Israel:

Has the Hannibal Protocol run its course?

Drafted in 1986 to prevent the abduction of soldiers, the order has come under intense scrutiny after being executed in full in Rafah

By Mitch Ginsburg August 12, 2014, 12:18 pm

On Friday, August 1, some 75 minutes after the onset of a ceasefire, a three-person IDF squad advanced toward a suspicious location along the outskirts of the city of Rafah. The squad apparently did not ask for the standard fire support to accompany it, Haaretz reported, because a 72-hour truce was already in place. Instead it advanced on foot, surreptitiously.

Hamas operatives were waiting in ambush. Two soldiers, Major Benaya Sarel and Staff Sergeant Liel Gidoni, were killed, and a third, Lt. Hadar Goldin, was abducted.

Other members of their unit, Sayeret Givati, moved under fire to the fallen soldiers but did not at first realize that one of the three bodies was a fallen Hamas man, perhaps in IDF uniform, according to the Haaretz report. When it became clear that Goldin was missing, though, the officers in the field did not have to unfurl a long explanation over the army radio frequency. All they needed to do was utter a single word: Hannibal.

The Hannibal Protocol was drafted in the summer of 1986 one year after the lopsided Jibril Agreement, in which Israel traded 1,150 security prisoners in exchange for three Israeli soldiers, and several months after the ensuing abduction of the soldiers Yosef Fink and Rafael Alsheikh. The idea was to establish a set procedure, known to all soldiers, to limit the success of any abduction operation.

What we needed was clarity, said former national security adviser, Maj. Gen. (res) Yaakov Amidror, one of the three officers who drafted the order.

What arose was a protocol that ordered soldiers to thwart the abduction of a fellow soldier even at the price of harming or wounding our soldiers, but without directly attempting to kill them.

I asked Amidror if that meant, as I often heard officers say in south Lebanon, that soldiers are required to open fire with their rifles at a retreating vehicle even if it means putting one of their mates in acute danger, but to refrain from firing, say, a guided missile that would almost surely kill everyone in the vehicle, and he said, Exactly.

In Goldins case, it meant more. The IDF, already on a war-time footing a crucial difference from previous cases, such as the Gilad Shalit abduction in June 2006 brought immense power to bear, swiftly. A column of tanks charged into Rafahs inhabited neighborhoods, according to Haaretzs Amos Harel and Gili Cohen. Bulldozers tore down houses. Artillery batteries, tanks, and aircraft opened fire, isolating the abduction zone and reportedly targeting all vehicles leaving the area.

The death toll reached 150, according to Palestinian reports.

Goldin, the army determined late the following night, had been killed in the initial attack.

Yehezkel Dror, a member of the commission of inquiry that examined the shortcomings of the Second Lebanon War, said Monday on Army Radio that the Hannibal Protocol should not be activated instinctively and that the situation in the densely populated city of Rafah was utterly unlike the sparsely populated hills of south Lebanon and, therefore, required the authorization of the political echelon.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) deemed the protocol illegal and urged Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to instruct the government and the army that such military actions are impermissible, both because of the threat to the abducted soldier and the carnage inflicted on civilians.

The implementation of the Hannibal Protocol in a densely populated area, the organizations chief legal counsel Dan Yakir opined, fundamentally violates the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law, and constitutes an illegal method of warfare that violates the laws of war.

The permission granted to soldiers to cause harm to a soldier to prevent his abduction, Yakir wrote, is illegal.

Amidror rejected both parts of the determination out of hand. War, he said, is a dangerous thing. Soldiers are killed. Soldiers are asked to stand and charge the enemy under fire, even at the cost of near-certain death. Soldiers, therefore, are also instructed to do everything possible, short of intentionally killing one of their mates, in order to foil an abduction attempt. Its a military operation to return a hostage soldier, he said. Soldiers [lives] can be risked.

The proportionality of the response and the consideration of the civilian battlefield, in the instance of an abduction, he added, should be taken into account only if you want to help the enemy.

After castigating ACRI as attuned only to the needs of Palestinian civilians, he conceded that Israel imposes on itself restrictions regarding the killing of civilians when considering offensive action such as an assassination, but argued that there was a big difference between targeting an enemy and saving a captive soldier, and said that in the latter case overwhelming force was fully justified. How will they fight? he asked of IDF soldiers, if they dont know you will do everything to save them from captivity.

If this preference for probable death over certain captivity sounds alien to civilian ears, it is, nonetheless, a prevailing ethos among combat troops. The commander of Golanis 51st Battalion expressed this in an extreme way in a briefing to his troops on the eve of Operation Cast Leads ground invasion in early January 2009. The abduction of a soldier, he told his troops, was Hamass Judgment Day weapon.

I dont need to tell you this, he said in an audio recording published by Channel 10 News, but no soldier from the 51st Battalion is getting abducted, not at any cost, not in any case, even if it means he detonates his grenade on whoever tries to take him.

MK Elazar Stern, himself a former general who is married to the bereaved sister of a soldier from his paratroop company, wrote on his Facebook page Sunday that many families would be happy to learn that their loved ones were being held in captivity rather than killed.

The Hannibal Protocol and the force it unleashes, he said in a Channel 10 interview over the weekend, are a symptom of a larger problem: the societal insanity regarding abductions. The willingness to do almost anything to stop an abduction, he wrote later, was born of a common understanding that a captive soldier is a crisis of national proportions.

Lives will be saved, on both sides of the border, and Israeli society will be more healthy, he wrote, if sanity is restored to all of us in the way we relate to abductions and the price we are willing to pay.

Rabbis Ido Rechnitz and Elazar Goldstein, in a 2013 book, Jewish Military Ethics, largely agreed with Amidrors position, stating that Halacha, or Jewish law, permitted endangering the captive soldier but not intentionally killing him. Suicide, and perhaps even assisted suicide, as evidenced in the fall of King Saul, was justified in certain cases, the two wrote, but one cannot deduce from this that it is permissible to [intentionally] harm a captive [soldier] when he himself did not request that sort of assistance.

Asked if, as an observant Jew and an officer, he had consulted the armys chief rabbi back in 1986 before drafting the once-secret order, Amidror croaked, Are you crazy?

When people are sick, Amidror said, the rabbis rule based on the expert opinion of the doctor. In this case, Im the doctor.

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