Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Aggressive self-defense

Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2003 | 8:30 a.m.

NECESSITY is the mother of invention.

In the Middle East, for over half a century, the necessity of staying alive for Israelis has caused numerous inventions in the way they battle for homeland security. It has taken most of those 50 years for the United States and others to learn those survival methods.

The good news for America was that until Sept. 11, 2001, we didn't have any sense that our own country was vulnerable to the kind of attack that awoke us to a new world order in which order was lacking and the fight for primacy in a new world would be so clearly waged between forces of good and evil.

Yes, people who blow up innocent men, women and children are evil. And no amount of religious or political justification makes them less so. And those who endeavor to stop those who care not for human life -- including their own -- are on the side of good. That is about as black and white as I can make the argument.

Where it turns gray is when many of our friends and allies around the world disagree about the extent to which we should be willing to go to eradicate the evil and the speed and force with which we prosecute that effort. That doesn't make those with whom we disagree less good, it just makes them less enlightened to our way of doing warlike business. And, as much as I dislike the French for the way they are acting and have always acted toward us, they are still one of the good guys in a world in which the bad ones are recognizable by the bombs strapped to their bodies and the sheer hatred in their hearts.

It was not that long ago that Israel, in an act of self-defense, flew its planes to Iraq and, to the diplomatic horror of the rest of the world, destroyed a nuclear bomb-making plant that the Iraqis claimed was for peaceful purposes. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died in front of our eyes with his colleagues aboard Columbia, led that lifesaving mission over 20 years ago.

It was lifesaving because, as we have come to learn about Saddam Hussein and others like him, left to his own devices he would have made nuclear weapons and either used them against his neighbors or, worse, against American and allied troops during the Gulf War. In the world of 20-20 hindsight, what Israel did by defining self-defense in a way that justified that offensive effort, saved the world much grief and who knows how much agony.

A world that roundly condemned Israel for acting beyond its borders in the name of self-defense -- the United States was as vocal as any other nation -- finally came to understand the global importance of the decision that tiny Israel made in 1981 to save its own life. It is that lesson from which our president, George W. Bush, draws the legitimacy to act defensively in his efforts to change the regime in Iraq.

The reason the world is in the middle of a healthy debate about America's plan to remove Saddam is that we never openly discussed Israel's bombing at Osirak. Whether we just wanted it to go away -- given the heightened Cold War tensions that existed until the U.S.S.R. fell of its own weight -- or whether we couldn't justify the action in our own minds at the time, the fact is that there was no extended debate one way or the other. We are having that delayed debate now.

And it is none too soon because necessity may cause another Israeli reaction that could make Osirak look like child's play.

Lost in the concerns about whether or not the U.S. should go to war again in Iraq is the question about whither goest Israel should Saddam prove good to his word that he will attack our only democratic friend and ally in that part of the world. What will the Israeli reaction be to an attack of chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons from Iraq?

While I don't know the answer for sure, it seems self-evident that the U.S. has undertaken the responsibility for anything flying Israel's way from western Iraq, which is where those missiles would have to be launched to reach populated centers in Israel. There must be some stand-down agreement on the Israeli side unless, of course, something really bad happens.

But what about the other terrorist groups that are centered in Lebanon, for example. Hezbollah and Hamas seem to have their way with innocent Israelis even though they are sponsored by countries like Syria and Iran. What happens if they attack Israeli cities from the safety of Lebanon which, regrettably, is nothing more than a puppet-state for neighboring Syria?

My hunch is that necessity will invent an expanded theory of self-defense that may mortify the rest of the world just as Osirak did three decades ago. Logic tells me that if terror reigns down on Israel from states controlled by Syria, for example, that the Israeli defense forces will not attack the puppets but will head directly for the heart and brains of the operations.

It would not surprise me if the Israeli response is to attack Damascus and hit it hard because that is the place from where the signals are sent to the terrorists to kill women and children. The theory is the same as it always has been. Hold those who hold the power responsible.

Unlike the United States, which doesn't have to attack Iraq for our immediate survival -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't for the long-term health of the world -- Israel doesn't have that luxury. It is always do or die in that part of the world and, if we have learned anything from history, it is that Israel will do what it has to to survive.

I hope and pray it does not come to that, but if the worst does happen, there will be hand-wringing and condemnation, to be sure. There always is. But, in the end, the world will be safer because the necessity of life, once again, required the kind of self-defense that only the courage of a good offense could provide.