Collateral
This is a slightly modified post originally posted by me on Thaa Rev's blog, Manual Override:
How cognizant of collateral damage should leaders be when making the decision to use armed force? Per international law, attacks cannot be indiscriminate. Article 57 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions states that, in an international conflict, “constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians, and civilian objects.” Also, collateral damage from an attack has to be proportional to the anticipated military advantage. [Crimes of War, Gutman and Rieff, 1999]
Israeli troops have often used armed force to assassinate Hamas leaders and other Palestinians who Israel has deemed are either enemy combatants or are controlling enemy combatants. As often as not these attacks kill innocent bystanders. Israel’s rationalization of the collateral damage is that it’s proportionate to the anticipated military advantage. By killing a high ranking Hamas member, his bodyguards and a half dozen bystanders, Israel would argue, hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians would be saved.
Palestinian suicide bombers take no care to limit civilian casualties; obviously, their methods are designed to maximize these non-military deaths. In my opinion, the Palestinians who engineer these attacks and those who enact them are murderers, not soldiers. Their chosen methods, mass murder of civilians, make it difficult for me to empathize with their plight or argue on their behalf. Thankfully, for Israelis and Palestinians alike, a change in management on the Palestinian side may be the beginning of the end of this stupidity and cruelty.
As far as the American military is concerned I think the US often tries to adhere to the ‘rules of war’. I recall early reports of troops taking care not to direct fire against mosques and hospitals in Iraq until fire was received by them. The development of smart weaponry is not only better to kill with, but by design limits civilian casualties (if limiting civilian casualties was not in our interest, wouldn’t weapons designers build huge payloads and be less precise?). I don’t know if I’ve ever read about a war without collateral damage, but I do believe that the American military generally tries to avoid it. (tactics utilized in Vietnam are an obvious exception to this rule: carpet bombing, free fire zones, etc)
The exact opposite of trying to limit collateral damage is to purposefully target non-military civilian targets. The 9/11 hijackers fall into this end of the spectrum. And again, I see those 19 men as little more than mass murderers with the technical skills to allow them to pull off their mission. I believe they had intellectual blinders on allowing them to rationalize the murder of thousands of innocents and the cruelty to put their plans into action. And I hate people like that.
posted by 3XHAR @ 8:19 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Puzzleboy wrote: ##Maybe your emphasis on the above phrase is on 'often' or 'tries' but either way I'd be interested in your opinion about the 'highway of death' and suggestions that US committed war crimes against Iraq also quoting a section of the Geneva Convention(GC). ## And ##Was this a massacre or just the foggy stage of war preventing the regrouping and retreating of active soldiers? Did a violation of the GC occur here in your opinion? Can you think of any recent situations where the US has violated the 'rules of war' and the GC and it is justified to do so?##
A Geneva Convention violation did occur. The Iraqi’s did violate the 1949 Geneva Convention ban on pillaging which states, ‘Pillaging is prohibited.’ When the American air forces destroyed the Iraqi column on Mutla Ridge, Kuwait, in March of 1991, the Iraqi’s vehicles were stuffed with pillaged Kuwaiti goods.
I suppose an analysis of an American war crime would hinge on the status of the retreating Iraqis. Were they combatants? They were certainly combatants and had not surrendered. Once a combatant surrenders they cannot be lawfully killed unless they have committed a war crime and are executed as a result of a trial. It is not unlawful for combatants to kill retreating combatants.
As far as civilian casualties in the column of retreating troops, I don’t know if the American pilots could differentiate between a civilian bus loaded with civilians and a pillaged civilian bus loaded with retreating Iraqi troops. I don’t think a violation of the GC could be forcefully argued in that context.
Can I think of any recent American violations of the GC? There are some reports of pillaging in the current Iraq War, but these instances are prosecuted when discovered and the pillaging itself is not military policy. The most recent examples that leap to mind would be actions in Vietnam. But, some of the articles about protecting civilians were adopted in 1977, and technically would not have applied to American actions in that conflict (carpet bombing is indiscriminate, was used in Vietnam, and is prohibitted in Article 51 of the GC, but was adopted in 1977).
I'm not sure if Abu Ghraib is a GC violation, I haven't done the research on the combatant status of the detainees. But, again, if it was a GC violation the idiots doing the violating are being brought up on charges, so it's hard to argue that what was going on was sanctioned by the US military...
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