This week, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Union Commissioner responsible for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy, travelled to Jerusalem, where she personally dressed down Israeli President Shimon Peres for his country's attack on Gaza, which Hamas claims has left more than 1,000 people dead in the past four weeks.

"You have the right to self-defence," she said, alluding to the thousands of missiles and mortars that Hamas militants have fired across the border, "but what is happening in Gaza is beyond all proportion."

Leaders such as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have also condemned Israel for a lack of restraint.

Yet as military experts and international law professors point out, the idea of proportional response is a grim, subjective calculus that does not rely on a tit-for-tat formula of dead bodies. Instead it pits the intent of a mission against the innocent lives that might be lost. In Israel's case, this means reconciling the increasing accuracy of Hamas rockets, the security of its cities and its nuclear facilities with the destruction it has wrought in Gaza. But the Israel Defense Forces is not the first army to confront the age-old quandary of overwhelming force and humanitarian concern.

Whether it be the Allies' incendiary bombing of industrial Germany cities, the brutal French tactics in Algeria, the British invasion of the Falklands or the United States in Vietnam or Iraq, almost every major military force in recent history has been accused of using excessive force. Even Pierre Trudeau was accused of using extreme tactics when he imposed the War Measures Act after the FLQ kidnapped two people in 1970.

"The problem with the idea of proportional response is that no two people who use it can define it the same way," said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D. C.

Philosophers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas have held forth on evaluating the loss of life for the greater good, and in the Middle Ages, a Catholic code could restrain at least some soldiers from taking the lives of innocents.

Paul Robinson, a law professor at the University of Ottawa's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, said the language of proportionality is a more recent phenomenon, tied up in the notions of a "just war," which means that the ambitions of an attack or campaign must outweigh the death and destruction that follow.

In recent decades, though, the fate of noncombatants during wartime has become even foggier. Initially, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 called only for the protection of civilians in times of international conflict. But the advent of what's known as asymmetrical warfare -- often involving shadowy militias entrenched in an urban battlefield facing down massive militaries -- changed all that. Guerrillas hid among populations. Homes and places of worship were used as operations bases, people as human shields. In the name of overwhelming force, major armies would often respond to these tactics with brutal abandon.

Modifications were made in the conventions to include non-combatants in theatre of civil warfare almost 30 years later, amendments that the U.S. and Israel did not sign on to.

In order to help the masters of war navigate this delicate terrain, human-rights law developed the idea of Jus in Bello, which means countries must be held accountable for their wartime behaviour.

Two mind-bending propositions in this category help politicians and generals measure the impossible.

The first, called discrimination, dictates that there are people an army should not hit, namely civilians. But some casualties might exist in a grey area.

Yet some philosophers have argued that the incendiary bombing of Dresden could be considered a war crime, even if it helped break the morale of the Nazi regime. The same argument could be made about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The next question relates to proportionality, in which the attacker knows for certain what the consequences will be. "If you were targeting a factory and you are going to kill 1,000 people, are those 1,000 people proportionate to the value of the factory?"

The problem, however, is that planners and politicians base proportionality on ambitious objectives, whether it be the domino effect of communism, weapons of mass destruction or ridding southern Lebanon of Hezbollah rockets. "You have no guarantee that in the longer term it will happen," Mr. Robinson said.

Still, the United States, NATO and Israel have a robust evaluation process, in which military planners, politicians, lawyers and even munitions experts gather to predict the repercussions of an attack. "Every target that is hit has gone through a proportional analysis, but it doesn't mean

there aren't mistakes," said Michael Newton, a leading expert on humanitarian law and war who teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "But no professional military commander ever intentionally targets civilians. It's a war crime."

Yet that dictum might be compromised when the targets themselves are hiding among the civilian population, which itself is considered a war crime. "That's where proportional analysis comes in," Mr. Newton added. "If you never target these people, you effectively endanger more people because you reward that behaviour."

One military analyst thinks that the entire notion of proportionality is irrelevant. "It's idiotic," said Martin Van Creveld, who believes only overwhelming force wins a war.

Since the Second World War, he added, most conflicts have been what he calls "luxury wars," or wars that are not waged for a nation's survival. "They have nothing to do with whether a war is just or not, so this whole point of view about proportion is irrational. So much straw blowing in the wind."

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