Waging War by the Rules in the 21st Century

This is a subject that I have discussed before but it just doesn’t seem to want to go away.  And realistically, it shouldn’t.   After writing The Angler and the Black Sites, a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross was released that covers how the U.S. Government treated what were called “High Value Detainees” in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention Program.   What is significant about this report is that it comes from the International Committee of the Red Cross.  One of the things that the Committee does is probe how people kept in captivity around the world are treated by the country that holds them.  Usually what it looks at is the treatment of Prisoners of War.  Its reports are seldom contemporaneously released to the public as if that were to occur they might lose some of the access to Prisoners of War that they – and really nobody else – have.    This policy is part of International Law as well as the so-called Geneva Conventions which establish rules on how wars are conducted and combatants and non-combatants are treated.  There is not universal acceptance to the principles, however you can read about what is established and form your own opinion. It does raise a question though, are there rules for waging war? 

One wonders as an incident in a 21^st  Century asymmetric war hit the news cycle the day this is being written, August 15, 2009.

Insurgents struck at the main symbol of the Western military presence in Afghanistan today, killing at least seven people and injuring nearly 100 others in a massive car bombing five days before nationwide elections.  The blast, just outside the front gate of the headquarters of the NATO force, was likely aimed at deterring Afghans from voting in Thursday's presidential and provincial assembly balloting, Afghan and Western officials said. The Interior Ministry blamed "enemies of peace and stability in Afghanistan."

To return to the original topic, it wasn’t until the mid 19^th Century, specifically 1959, that this query was seriously raised. It was formulated in a most inoffensive manner as follows:

Would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?" It was this question that led to the founding of the Red Cross. He also asked the military authorities of various countries whether they could formulate "(...) some international principle, sanctioned by a convention and inviolate in character, which, once agreed upon and ratified, might constitute the basis for societies for the relief of the wounded in the different European countries?

As is noted, this second question was the basis for The Geneva Conventions.

Thus the ICRC was born.  It has pursued this stated purpose as best it could through the many “European” wars during the remainder of the 19th Century and the more encompassing “World Wars” of the 20th.  Needless to say, it was difficult and rules agreed upon in a “time of peace and quiet” weren’t always followed once wars were started and waged to a conclusion.  To determine if this concept, as a policy, was or wasn’t followed in World War II is something that has engendered controversy as well as some consensus.  As an example, take concentration/death camps and the use of nuclear weapons. In a book about the opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Psychologist Kenneth Keniston makes the following salient points:

At Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration camps, more than six million Jews were systematically exterminated. Although their executioners were sometimes brutal sadists, acts of personal cruelty were the least momentous part of the extermination of European Jewry. Even more impressive are the numbers of "decent," well-educated Germans (who loved their wives, children, and dogs) who learned to take part in, or blind themselves to, this genocide. Murder became depersonalized and dissociated, performed by a System of cold, efficient precision whose members were only following orders in doing a distasteful job well.

Bureaucracy, technology, and science were linked in the service of death. Evil became "banal," in Hannah Arendt's words; it was impersonal, dissociated from its human perpetrators, and institutionalized in an efficient and "scientific" organization.... Keniston goes on to point out that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States was probably unnecessary, and that while Germany had done the unthinkable, "Hiroshima demonstrated how simple, clean, and easy (from the point of view of the perpetrator) doing the unthinkable could be."  

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fire-bombing of Dresden, all largely non-strategic attacks on predominantly civilian targets, killed perhaps a quarter-million people, while Hitler's gas chambers killed six million Jews. But are there distinctions between these horrendous acts in addition to those that turn on number alone? Consider at least the possible bearing of the following four points: (i) the American attacks on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden were at least justified at the time in terms of an avowed military function - shortening the war - and most of the people involved apparently believed this justification, while Hitler's slaughter of the Jews was never justified on any war-related basis, but rather with a quasi-religious ideology of "purifying the race;" (ii) the attacks were also by military organizations using weapons of war, not a separate operation using gas ovens; (iii) the attacks were brief, discrete actions, whereas the slaughter of the Jews went on continuously for nearly five years; and (iv) the bombings, of course, were at a distance, and the victims were not in direct view of the bombers.

I have no further comment on that, however World War II was so bad that after it concluded, another attempt was made by the survivors to establish basic principles on individual responsibility in any war.  These basic principles were agreed upon by virtually every nation including the United States.

In Nuclear Weapons and the United States, I discuss how the post World War II arms race fits into this paradigm.  My point, usually missed or totally misunderstood, was that the problem is not who controls nuclear weapons, the problem is nuclear weapons.   In support of this conclusion I provided a statement  from one of the prominent U.S. Cold Warriors serving Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who nonetheless saw the essential failure in logic in defining hydrogen bombs as useful military weapons.

In the real world of real political leaders, a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.

Essentially if one country attacks another country that also has nuclear weapons capability, it can be assumed that the country that was attacked will launch a counterattack also utilizing nuclear weapons.  So use one and you get one in return.  Would that be considered a good move on the attacking nation’s part?  That’s a rhetorical question.  FYI.

So where does this leave the debate concerning the U.S. Government and its use of torture?  Was what it did in any sense moral or legal in terms of  “individual responsibility in any war” as well as International Law? 

Now I would not argue that the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States didn’t have all the characteristics of an act of war, was planned and perpetrated by terrorists with the intent of causing mass murder and ensuing chaos and that a military response from the United States against those responsible for this horrendous act was expected and required.  Without question, it was an event analogous to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 which engaged the United States in World War II.

I really do not like to discuss what happened in 1941 and the United States involvement in World War II because, among other reasons, the nations it was at war with are now among its closest allies.  Perhaps all that remains relevant is that it raises questions about human behavior, which might be difficult to sum up better than what was said in the movie Chinatown in a conversation between actors John Huston and Jack Nicolson:  “Given the right circumstances, human beings are capable of anything.”  Indeed.

Return to the main point under discussion however, the real issue is in what manner the United States responded to the attack it suffered on September 11, 2001.  That the United States Government might have done something that in the minds of the terrorists who perpetrated the attack which, in their worldview, made it justifiable is not under consideration here.  Certainly none of the people who died or were injured or who suffered as a result were more responsible for any form of offense than the civilians at Hiroshima, Dresden or the holocaust victims at Auschwitz.  Anyone who believes differently than I do on this issue is dealing with the wrong person and invited to look elsewhere for help.

But I am only a single individual and I can do no more than pose a question.  The evidence is overwhelming in sources previously cited that individuals working in the employ of the United States Government committed acts that if judged by the standards of International Law were crimes of war and crimes against humanity.  The questions remaining are  (1) who was involved and (2) what should be done.  Finding an answer to the first question should not be difficult but it is still waiting to be officially investigated and accomplished.