Equations of Death

Now that the deadly, bloody fighting of the Lebanese-Israeli conflict seems to have settled down and the criiticisms of the Israeli leadership are coming from the Israelis themselves (thought not for the reasons we'd like to see but rather that the Israeli forces weren't brutal enough), The Washington Post casts a paean to the Israeli leadership in an attempt to depict them as some body of conflicted souls who really, really feel the pain of every civilian death they cause. Or, at least, Blumenfeld paints former military chief of staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon as a man of conscience, which he may well be. As for the rest of them, especially head of Shin Bet, Avi Dichter, they come across as mindless in their approach to the conflict.

But I wonder if the Israeli leadership hear how they sound when some of their consideration in the program of "targeted killing" involves this sort of reasoning:

They also asked a mathematician to write a formula to determine acceptable civilian casualties per dead terrorist.

Admittedly, a difficult task that. Determining an acceptable kill ratio is something the Israelis have apparently never quite figured out and, indeed, this is admitted:

How many civilian casualties were acceptable? The mathematician whom the military had enlisted had failed to produce a formula.

I'd like to know who this so-called "mathematician" was, but one thing is clear, he couldn't have been very good. Wasn't this "formula" in eight grade algebra?

I apologise for the facetious tone but how else can one respond to such absurdity? Either the Israeli leadership thinks that engaging such calculus portrays them as empathic or they're simply nuts. Is it not obvious that there is no such fucking formula?