Saving Innocents

I confess that my foreign policy views have in part, perhaps large part, been shaped by my Jewish identity. My rule of thumb is that when the U.S. has the power to prevent innocents from slaughter, at minimal or no danger to American lives, it should do so.

Particularly influential in shaping that rule were the actions, both military and administrative, that could have been undertaken by the Allies during World War II to save Jewish lives and were not. David Wyman detailed those failures in his magisterial The Abandonment of the Jews

Perhaps the best known of those American actions is the failure of the Allies to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz, or at a later stage, after the transportations had stopped, the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz itself. By mid-May 1944, the deportation of over 300,000 Jews from the eastern provinces of Hungary to Auschwitz, under the supervision of Adolph Eichmann, was nearly complete, and another 350,000 Jews were concentrated in Budapest.

By mid-June, urgent requests from Europe had begun to pour into the War Refugee Board (WFB) requesting that the Allies bomb the tracks to Auschwitz, along with detailed maps of the primary rail lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. Those relaying the requests – Isaac Sternbuch representing the Vaad Hatzala, Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress, and Giti Fleischman and Rabbi Michoel Weissmandl from their bunker in Bratislava, among others – well understood the urgency. By that time, a detailed thirty-page report prepared by two Slovakian Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, had laid out in great detail the systematic murder of 1,750,000 million Jews in Auschwitz over the preceding two years.

The WRB duly forwarded the request to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, who responded on multiple occasions that the idea was impracticable because it would require the "diversion of considerable air support of forces now engaged in decisive operations." But, in fact, the Department of War never undertook any study of the feasibility of the proposal in response to any of the multiple requests sent to it by the WRB, whose mandate was to assist in the rescue of victims of the Nazis where rescue was "consistent with successful prosecution of the war."

Rather it responded with the same boilerplate language each time. In truth, the 15^th Air Force division based in Italy was well within striking distance of Auschwitz in southern Poland, and it was not involved in Allied military action in any other theater.

On July 27, 452 bombers crossed two of the five rail lines over which Jews from Hungary were being transported, in the process of bombing oil refineries and other industrial targets near Auschwitz. Between July and October 1944, 2700 bombers carrying 6600 tons of bombs passed along or near to the rail tracks to Auschwitz on the way to bombing oil targets at Blechhammer, about 35 miles from Auschwitz. By that time, the Allies had almost complete control of the skies in the region.

To be sure, bombing the train tracks, or the bridges over which those tracks passed, or rail depots, which were also military targets, would not have saved all, or perhaps even most, of Hungarian Jewry. Train tracks, even bridges, are relatively quickly repaired. And after the transports stopped, bombing the gas chambers themselves would have come too late for most of Hungarian Jewry, but still tens of thousands of Jews might have been saved.

The refusal to bomb Auschwitz or the rail lines leading to it, the only failure of Allied forces to save Jews. As Wyman notes, "Not a single Allied ship was ever requisitioned to transport Jews to safe havens during the war. But transportation somehow materialized for over 100,000 non-Jewish Yugoslavs, Poles and Greeks to dozens of camps that sprung into existence."

WHILE the abandonment of the Jews obviously will always be the most emotionally resonant for me, it also shapes my view of a host of other conflicts worldwide and the proper response of the great powers. Thus, the slaughter of up to 700,000 Tutsis by their Hutu neighbors over a period of 100 days in the summer of 1994 strikes me as a horrible moral failure on the part of the West. How difficult would it have been for a modern military to bring to a halt the butchery, most of it carried out with machetes? What to have done next, I don't claim to know, as ethnic tensions between the two groups had a long history. But slaughter on that scale should not be tolerated, at least when it can be stopped on the cheap.

In the first Gulf War, coalition forces quickly defeated the Iraqi army and forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. But after liberating Iraq's overwhelmingly Shiite southern provinces from Saddam Hussein's brutal rule, coalition forces, led by the U.S., withdrew. Worse, after initially encouraging the Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north to rebel, the U.S. did not enforce a no-fly zone over the two areas, which allowed Saddam Hussein to easily reassert his absolute control over the entire country. Enforcing a no-fly zone would have substantially weakened the reign of terror Saddam maintained over Iraqi citizens, and was fully within the capabilities of coalition forces.

Today, the second Gulf War, in which President George W. Bush did what his father had failed to do by ousting Saddam from power, is widely viewed as the height of folly, and is frequently condemned as an immoral war. But I have a hard time classifying the ouster of such a brutal and cruel dictator, whose sons enjoyed tossing political opponents or anyone who annoyed them into meat grinders, as self-evidently immoral.

Unwise in execution for sure. But the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens discovered in mass graves, who died of poison gas used by forces loyal to Saddam, or the 60,000-70,000 Iraqi children who died annually of starvation, in the last years of Saddam's reign, while he diverted resources to his security services and presidential palaces, makes it difficult for me to label the end of his tyrannical rule as immoral.

Ironically, the U.S. president who came closest to enunciating a rule close to my own was Barak Obama in 2011 when he justified initiating "kinetic military action," without seeking congressional approval, against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The United States will not stand by and watch as military jets and helicopters are unleashed on those unable to defend themselves, he said.

The only trouble was that he thereby intervened in what was essentially a civil war, in which those arrayed against Gaddafi included many with ties to Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups, and were unlikely to prove any more benevolent rulers than he had been.

And it should serve as a further warning – at least to myself -- of the need for further refinement of my principles for military intervention that the strongest proponent of intervention in the Obama administration, Samantha Powers, had also advocated for stationing a large US force in the West Bank to protect Palestinians from Israel. And two of the strongest advocates at the time of the so-called "duty to protect," Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, were perennial critics of Israel's human rights violations.

ALL this brings us to the current war with Iran. One might think that I would find a moral imperative to intervene in Iran on the basis of the regime's resolve to shed as much blood as necessary to remain in power, as evidenced by its mowing down of over thirty thousand unarmed civilian demonstrators in January. Indeed, I was, and am, critical of President Obama for offering only the most tepid verbal support for the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, out of a misbegotten desire to turn the mullahs into allies. And I'm filled with moral revulsion at all those mourning the death of the late supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini.

Still, I would not advocate for a military intervention against the Iranian government solely to prevent the slaughter of Iranian civilians. For it is obvious that cannot be done without regime change, and securing that regime change cannot be done on the cheap, without risking American lives and treasure.

But the gunning down of 30,000 or more unarmed protestors is not irrelevant to the case for war: It demonstrates clearly the theological fanaticism of the regime, a fanaticism which renders it immune to any rational cost-benefit analysis in Western terms, and thus immune to either incentives or threats of any kind.

The Shah was ousted from power in 1979 because his security forces were in the end unwilling to kill as many protestors as necessary to keep him in power. The Basij militias and their IRGC masters have no such compunctions.

Iran's rulers are immune to deterrence on Western terms. Mutual assured destruction means nothing to them. And that is why they must never be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, or the means to hold the world hostage by closing the Strait of Hormuz, or to spread their tentacles through equally fanatical terrorist groups.

Put that way, this war is about self-defense, the highest imperative for any nation.