No one can doubt Fareed Zakaria’s level of education. But after hearing him express concern about Israel’s war to destroy the terrorists controlling the Gaza Strip—asking on his CNN show: “Has it been proportional to the damage that Hamas inflicted on Israel?”—I’m sure his early education was lacking in sufficient exposure to Bugs Bunny cartoons. When Bugs would declare, “Of course you realize, this means war,” he taught us all we need to know about proportionality in conflicts.

I learned a lot from the countless hours I spent as a child watching Bugs Bunny. I learned classical music from “The Rabbit of Seville” and “What’s Opera Doc.” I learned that one could prove the world is round by throwing a baseball in one direction and then catching that ball, now covered in travel stickers from cities around the globe, from the other direction.

But one of the main things Bugs taught me was about proportionality in war. Basically, I learned that one should not strive for proportionality. Rather, Bugs taught me that one should be slow to begin a conflict, but when properly provoked, the goal had to be total victory, not proportionality.

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This was the theme of almost every Bugs Bunny cartoon. Bugs would be minding his own business, singing a song, when Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, or some other menace would begin tormenting him. But Bugs didn’t simply escape the boiling pot intended for rabbit stew or evade the bullets of the shotgun. He had to completely defeat his enemy. Justice and proper deterrence demanded it.

When Bugs was visiting the Ozarks, he encountered the Martin brothers, Curt and Punkinhead, who each shot at Bugs with their comically long rifles. Bugs disabled both of their weapons, but this was not sufficient. Bugs had to achieve total victory.

Eventually, Bugs did this by grabbing a fiddle and calling a square dance in which he compelled the Martin Brothers to “grab a fence post, hold it tight, whop your partner with all your might. Hit him in the shin. Hit him in the head. Hit him again ‘til that critter is dead.” It was a square dance, so they had to do whatever the caller said.

After beating each other with fence posts and whirling through a hay baler, the Martin brothers were instructed by Bugs to walk off the edge of a cliff. It was far from proportional, but it certainly felt like justice.

The Bugs Bunny way of war was informed by the experience of World War II. America had been slow to enter the war, but when it did, it used overwhelming force to achieve the unconditional surrender of its enemies.

Completely defeating one’s enemies was easier to support when the country was united in the belief that the United States was a force for good in the world while our enemies were advancing evil. Proportionality, such as bombing ships in Tokyo Bay as the Japanese had done to us at Pearl Harbor, would not have felt like justice because it would have left unchecked the evil they would have continued to perpetrate had we not achieved total victory.

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The craving for proportionality stems from a loss of confidence in the righteousness of our side. Watching cartoons, I knew that Bugs was good and that Yosemite Sam started the whole thing, just as I knew America was good and that the Germans and Japanese started the whole thing. But a growing number of our ruling elite and their political supporters are not sure about who is good and bad or when anything really starts.

Happily, the American people still believe in the basic goodness of this country. And they see Israel’s fight against Hamas as part of our global struggle against evil. Zakaria and his ilk may think fairness demands that we call for a halt in fighting when the number of Palestinians dead equals the number of Israelis slaughtered, but this is not how most Americans think. They support having Israelis fight until the threat of Hamas spreading its evil has been eliminated, even if the number of those killed is highly unequal.

Israeli leaders and their American supporters are not advocating violating the rules of war, such as the intentional targeting of civilians. But those rules do not require equal death and destruction.

During World War II, Germany lost about 7 million people, and Japan lost about 3 million, compared to less than half a million Americans. Almost every American understood then, and most continue to understand, that proportionality in death or destruction is not the measure of justice in a war. Justice is when good does what is required to defeat evil.