Unless one is a pacifist who opposes all wars on principle and is willing to live with the consequences, one is faced with the difficult problem of deciding when wars are justified and when they are not. The search for criteria for ‘just wars’ has evolved over time but while much of that effort has focused on finding legal rules, modern warfare has exposed the need for moral rules that go deeper. In a review of a new book Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos by Neil Remic, Anand Gopal writes about the criteria that had been in place.
We have been conditioned to judge the merit of today’s wars by their conduct. The United Nations upholds norms of warfare that, among other things, prohibit such acts as torture, rape, and hostage-taking. Human-rights groups and international lawyers tend to designate a war “humane” when belligerents have avoided harming civilians as much as possible.
But now modern remote controlled warfare that leaves one side immune from any casualties has changed the calculus. Gopal starts out by looking at what happened to the city of Raqqa as a result of sustained aerial bombardment by the US .
For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters. Clotheslines were webbed between stray standing pillars, evidence that survivors were somehow living among the ruins. Nobody knows how many thousands of residents died, or how many are now homeless or confined to a wheelchair. What is certain is that the decimation of Raqqa is unlike anything seen in an American conflict since the Second World War.
And yet, the US did not suffer even a single casualty because it had no one on the battlefield and its adversary was in no position to strike back. Remic says that because of things like this, the old standards of what constitutes a just war are no longer valid.
He argues that, when assessing the humanity of a war, we should look not only to the fate of civilians but also to whether combatants have exposed themselves to risk on the battlefield. Renic suggests that when one side fully removes itself from danger—even if it goes to considerable lengths to protect civilians—it violates the ethos of humane warfare.
The core principle of humane warfare is that fighters may kill one another at any time, excepting those who are rendered hors de combat, and must avoid targeting civilians… What really matters, then, is the type of danger that someone in a battle zone presents. The moment that a person picks up a weapon, whether donning a uniform or not, he or she poses a direct and immediate danger. This is the crucial distinction between armed personnel and civilians.
But what if the belligerents themselves don’t pose a direct and immediate danger? Renic argues that in such theatres as Pakistan, where Americans deploy remote-controlled drones to kill their enemies while rarely stepping foot on the battlefield, insurgents on the ground cannot fight back—meaning that, in terms of the threat that they constitute, they are no different from civilians. It would then be just as wrong, Renic suggests, to unleash a Hellfire missile on a group of pickup-riding insurgents as it would be to annihilate a pickup-riding family en route to a picnic.
The problem with legal rules is that many countries find them fairly easy to avoid technically breaching them even while unleashing massive carnage that results in civilian deaths. As Gopal writes about Raqqa, “The U.S. razed an entire city, killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.”
The essence of this legal code is that militaries cannot intentionally kill civilians.
…A second pillar of the legal code is the rule of proportionality: states can kill civilians if they are aiming for a military target, as long as the loss of civilian life is proportional to the military advantage they gain by the attack. What this means is anyone’s guess: how do you measure “military advantage” against human lives?
…When counter-insurgency doctrine was in vogue during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces sought to win “hearts and minds” by embedding in population centers. For an Afghan, few sights stirred as much dread as a column of beige armored Humvees snaking through a crowded market. If a suicide bomber attacked the Humvees, Americans would rightly condemn him for his disregard for the surrounding civilians—even if he had the force of the law, in the guise of proportionality, behind him.
It is clear that governments have realized that as long as they can avoid their own soldiers getting killed or injured, their populations will ignore or overlook never-ending engagement in wars that will result, despite technical adherence to the laws of war, in the inevitable deaths of large numbers of civilians. They will avoid taking the necessary steps to avoid civilian casualties if doing so poses any risk at all to their own personnel.
How many civilian deaths in Raqqa were avoidable? In Tokhar, it was possible to reconstruct the evidence, but often it is not. Without transparency in the targeting process, the military usually has the final word. Yet there is one way we can intuitively know when an armed force has an alternative to causing civilian suffering. When U.S. forces are faced with a pair of ISIS gunmen on the roof of an apartment building, they can call in a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb—or they can approach the enemy on foot, braving enemy fire, and secure the building through old-fashioned battle. In the past, armies have sometimes chosen the harder path: during the Second World War, when Allied French pilots carried out bombing raids on Vichy territory—part of their homeland—they flew at lower altitudes, in order to avoid striking civilians, even though it increased the chances that they’d be shot down. For the U.S. military, however, the rules are blind to the question of risk. The law doesn’t consider whether an armed force could have avoided unnecessary civilian suffering by exposing itself to greater danger. For Neil Renic, wars waged exclusively through drones, therefore, point to the “profound discord between what is lawful on the battlefield and what is moral.”
Because of this new risk-free form of warfare for countries that have advanced munitions, the old military virtues of courage and honor are no longer emphasized because there is none when you are pushing a button from thousands of miles away to kill people and destroy things. In former days, aerial bombardment and even sniping were disparaged by other ground combatants because they were considered so risk-free to the perpetrator. Those scruples are long gone and with it the idea that any war can be morally just wars on an individual level may also have disappeared.
What we need is the end to wars or, if unavoidable, fewer and shorter wars. Period. Unfortunately these ‘cost free’ wars (at least in terms of casualties of the people in countries that have these remote killing devices) are only pushing things in the opposite direction, since the public seems to be willing to ignore conflicts as long as ‘our’ side does not suffer any casualties, as can be seen in the many forever wars that the US is currently engaged in.
My immediate thought is that if you find yourself engaged in a war against an opponent who can kill you without exposing themselves to any risk at all… surrender. You’ve lost. By continuing to fight, you simply guarantee more deaths on your side, both of combatants and likely of civilians, with no possible advantage to yourself. What possible justification can there be for prolonging a conflict like that, other than suicidal fervour?
Unfortunately, that does rather suggest that the US can invade almost anywhere with impunity and blame the inhabitants if they have the temerity to fight back. But… we’ve been there for decades already, haven’t we?
If the death of one soldier can save the life of one civilian, I’d say that’s a worthy sacrifice.
Now repeat that for the million+ civilians that died as a result of American invasions in the Middle East and it’s clear how “just” these wars are.
@ sonofrojblake No. 1
If I can’t fight you in my country, then I will fight you in your country. If you think you can kill my family, my community, my comrades with impunity, then I will teach you that you are not safe anywhere in your own bed.
Our national hubris keeps us from learning a lesson that even the reactionary Walt Disney understood in 1959.
“The U.S. razed an entire city, killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.”
Nonsense. The war crime is “area bombardment” -- firing untargeted munitions. The fact that they were untargeted is a fig-leaf that allowed the US to claim they were aiming at military targets, but that was the usual bullshit. The US, as is its wont, demolished a hospital and other critical civilian infrastructure -- another war crime. Not content with it, the US used white phosophorus munitions -- an illegal chemical warfare weapon that the US simply asserts is not illegal because we want to use it.
The US’ war crimes are obvious. Nobody should downplay them by allowing them to be treated as contested facts.
Not sure this is as new as suggested. Look at the firebombing of German cities. Or our sacred demonstration to the commies that we would kill without blinking EVERYONE (in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or the carpet bombing of North Korea during the Korean War. and so on and so on and so on.
(And it is not just us. It is the British, after all, not the Nazis, who invented the first modern concentration camps in South Africa)
Cécile Fabre and Seth Lazar wrote a book entitled The Morality of Defensive Warfare. I recommend it highly; it’s mind-changing. For one thing, they start out by deconstructing the arguments for offensive war and conclude that there are no good arguments for it, and further that arguments for pre-emptive war equate to arguments for offensive war. That dispatched, they consider some truly mind-bending things -- for example, suppose you have an occupying force; are you morally justified putting a bomb in their mess hall? Their answer is “probably not” on the grounds that you cannot claim to be engaging in defensive warfare because you don’t know if the people in the blast-radius are participating in the offensive war; some of them might be kitchen staff who are civilians. It’s thought-provoking and made me seriously re-assess the US’ reliance on contractors, since it amounts to placing human shields around occupation forces.
The upshot for me is that the words “war crime” are redundant. War is crime.
Only defensive wars are justified and that is defensive as in the enemy has marched in an army onto your territory (and solidly owned to boot, no spurious or disputed claims on an area).
The US did commit a war crime in by not targeting the defensive & military installations of ISIS but just bombing the city. And it is not possible to argue that the US did have no other choice since it has that capability of targeted destruction. So this is the US, again, deliberately going after civilians and that makes it a war crime.
@sonofrojblake(#1):
Why continue fighting? Sometime the goal is not to win or even tie but to lose in a certain fashion. In this case the US turning a large city into a post apocalyptic hellscape would have cost ISIS some equipment but in return they probably got a battalion or 10 in new recruits. And embedded a hatred of the west/the US in the survivors. So all in all a win for ISIS. Which would have worked wonders if the US would have tried to actually occupy the territory, especially since the US army cannot do what is needed to convert a hostile area like this, that is to lose soldiers, lots and lots of soldiers by getting shot first and only retaliating in the narrowest possible sense.
Oh yes, and I’d say that’s legit, if I’ve come to your country. The only difficulty with that approach is how long into the past you consider it legit to carry a grievance. I came to your country last week? Can’t complain if you bomb a school in my neighbourhood this week. My ancestors came to your country seventy years ago and we’re still there? Fair enough. My ancestors came to your country a hundred years ago and left five years later and you’ve been taught from your mother’s knee to hate me and everyone who looks like me? Not so much.
I respectfully disagree. In 1982 Argentina sent an invading military force into the Falklands to take over, against, well, everything -- international law, the wishes of the inhabitants, the public preference of the British government, everything except who common sense and a glance at a map would suggest the islands should sensibly belong to.
At that point, as far as I can see, ANY Argentine present on or near the Falklands became a legitimate target.
Fuck ’em. They’re either imported from the occupying power, in which case they’re combatants whether they’re wielding a rifle or a potato peeler, or they’re employed from among the local population, in which case they’re collaborators. Either way, fuck ’em.
Only if civilians are (a) local and (b) under duress, rather than paid employees, do they count as “human shields”. ANYONE coming into e.g. the Falklands from Argentina in 1982, Iraq from the US or e.g. the occupied Palestinian territories from Israel, whether they’re in a uniform or not, is an occupier and hence a morally legitimate target.
(Note: I’m conscious that the occurrence of the Falklands was VERY convenient for the then struggling Conservative government under Thatcher. I’m therefore very suspicious that it was allowed to happen in the first place. Victory gave her a landslide in ’83 and another eight years and her party another fifteen in power. That said, with the “opposition” (and those quotes are VERY heavy) being Michael Foot, the worst leader Labour had until Jeremy Corbyn’s joke candidacy became all too serious, there’s no guarantee she’d have lost in ’83 even without a successful war behind her. She would have been significantly weakened, though, and might not have had the hubris to make the sweep changes that gutted the manufacturing base of this country and changed it forever. My name’s Ben Elton, goodnight.)
This topic touches especially close to home this week. My brother just arrived at the Air Force Training school where he’s starting on the path to learn how to fly Reaper drones… I can’t bring myself to congratulate him the way other members of my family are.
sonofrojblake@#8:
Fuck ’em. They’re either imported from the occupying power, in which case they’re combatants whether they’re wielding a rifle or a potato peeler, or they’re employed from among the local population, in which case they’re collaborators. Either way, fuck ’em.
What do you think of Noam Chomsky’s argument which is that, as a US taxpayer, he is at least complicit in US imperial wars?
@sonofrojblake No. 8.
Back in the ’90s, as a magazine journalist, I covered the Bosnian War from Cleveland, Ohio. Why Cleveland?
Because Cleveland had the world’s largest Croatian community in exile and a very large Serbian community as well. The very first interview I conducted was with a leader of the Serbian community who started out with:
I also interviewed Croatians and, surprisingly to me, a Bosnian freedom fighter traveling in the United States to raise money. Everyone I talked with was angry about events that happened before their great-great-great-great… grandparents ever drew breath.
Americans have very short memories because we are a very young country. Most of us are surprised when we meet someone who is still upset about a war we fought only 160 years ago. Back in 1976 a British colleague of my father confided in him:
I will defer to William Faulkner here:
The problem with most of this is it’s not the root issue of the issue. Even the defensive-wars-only stance depends on a good deal of agreement about who owns land, how that happens and what justifies it. The consensus on that is that there is no consensus. Talking about morality in terms of defensive wars is just the start because it’s an immediate reaction to checking your logic by flipping things around and seeing if they still hold true if the sides are changed. But it still doesn’t address the underlying issue of how you get to the point of fighting a defensive war in the first place.
If Jordan invades the West Bank, who gets to cry foul and say they’re fighting a defensive war? If your criteria can’t even begin to justify an answer that then at least you’re being honest with yourself. I certainly don’t know myself. But I do know for certain that there would be no generally accepted answer to that and even if there were, it wouldn’t be based in any morally sound reasoning.
I dunno, maybe I’m just confused but it really feels to me like answering the moral war problem without first answering questions about how land use and governance are decided is glossing over the causes and implications of war. Off the top of my head most justifications for land ownership by groups eventually comes down to squatters rights and some manner of self-determinism about who gets to run the place. As moral justifications go that doesn’t sound like much to work with, especially the former.
@Marcus Ranum, 11:
By that logic, anyone who has ever bought anything in dollars, or ever bought anything made by an American company (can of Coke? iPhone?), or ever worked for an American company (like I do right now), is complicit in their imperial wars. Anyone who in any way contributes to the American economy, even if they’re an exploited, abused illegal immigrant doing so against the laws of the USA itself is, by definition, contributing to the situation whereby the USA can invade almost anywhere with impunity. Does that make all those people morally legitimate targets? I’d say obviously not.
We could putter about trading hypotheticals about what might constitute a morally legitimate target, but I’d say as long as you’re aiming, and your aim is reasonably good, at active duty forces or the people directly supporting them on the ground, in theatre, you’re in the clear. If you’re aiming at someone in a different country who’s never seen a rifle and probably gone a year since even seeing a soldier, then you need to take a long hot bath with yourself and consider your life choices.
In my lifetime the IRA bombed army barracks on mainland GB. Some people in Army barracks are civvies… but they work in Army barracks. They know the deal. Apart from anything else, anyone regularly going into barracks in the 90s (and, I assume, in the previous couple of decades) was regularly reminded that they might be subject to attack by Irish people and to take suitable precautions. I suspect I would not be popular among my former colleagues for observing that such actions are, at least arguably, possibly legitimate. However: the IRA also placed a bomb in a bin outside Boots the chemists in the middle of Warrington the day before Mother’s Day. I sat on that bin, and possibly practically on the bomb, less than fifteen minutes before it exploded and killed two children. There’s nothing you could say that would convince me that was a morally legitimate attack.
I see Chomsky’s point, but I would counter thus:
-- has he been given a choice to pay only that portion of his taxes that does NOT fund war? No. In fact if he tries to withold some of his taxes on moral grounds, he’ll be imprisoned.
-- has he been given a choice to vote for a government that will NOT go to war? No. And if he tries to interfere with his government’s ability to wage war, he’ll be AT BEST imprisoned.
So no, I don’t see American taxpayers as individually morally culpable.
@hyphenman, 12:
It’s hard to impossible to reason with a position like that.
Conversely, the English (and I’m careful to not say “British” here) don’t understand that point for the opposite reason -- we’ve not been successfully invaded for almost a thousand years, and it shows. (My mum’s house was built before the Mayflower, for instance). We’ve not even, until within my father’s lifetime, experienced any kind of immigration that noticeably impacted everyday life. Oh sure, Huguenots and Jews, Chinese and Black people came or were brought here, but not in any kind of numbers worth talking about until after WW2.
We therefore don’t really know what it’s like to have a proper grudge against anyone because we’ve spent the last three or four hundred years being the people other people develop a grudge against. The nearest we’ve got is our relationship with the last nation to successfully invade us, the French… but nobody I know really means. One bloke I know who claims to hate the French is incandescent he can’t get to Meribel this year as he has for the last twenty five. Go figure.