By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.
~John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Ch. III, (kudos to Bron)
On the night of February 13th, 773 RAF Avro Lancaster bombers swept in low and fast on the Saxony railway town of Dresden. It was early 1945, The Third Reich was collapsing and some 600,000 people had taken refuge in the city to avoid the Allied onslaught. The presumed target was the military complex on the outskirts of town known as the Albertstadt. Dresden, itself, was riddled with military garrisons intermingled among the civilian population. In two waves, the RAF dropped 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000 lbs of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000 pounds bombs on the city center, all with little to no resistance. The entire city was ablaze. RAF crews reported smoke rising to a height of 15,000 ft. Fires were seen 500 miles away from the target.
The next day, February 14, 1945, as Dresden was trying to cope with the crisis, 450 U.S. B-17 Flying Fortress long-range bombers assigned to the 1st Bombardment Division of the United States VIII Bomber Command arrived at 1230 local time. Guided by the fires, they discharged 771 tons of bombs.
The results on the ground were horrific with an estimated 25,000 killed. Survivor Lothar Metzger recalled:
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
Some estimates bring the number of those killed to 100,000. Nazi propagandists took the figure to 200,000. RAF recon noted that ” 23 percent of the industrial buildings, and 56 percent of the non-industrial buildings, not counting residential buildings, had been seriously damaged. Around 78,000 dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged, but readily repairable.”
The raid, ordered by Churchill, rendered such a blow to Western psyche that he distanced himself from the raid saying, “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so-called ‘area-bombing’ of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our allies… We must see to it that our attacks do no more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy’s war effort.” Of mention, is no sense of the human cost to the enemy of the raid. Th emphasis seems to be purely egocentric: What kind of country will we have when this is all over?
However British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris was not so circumspect:
“Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.”
“War is hell” seems to claim the Air Marshall, and strategic concerns take precedence over humanitarian ones in a war zone. Is he right, or are both he and Churchill “war criminals” to quote some of the more animated commentary on the blog? Neither were prosecuted or charged with war crimes for the Dresden raid.
Which brings us to David Drumm’s fine posting yesterday about a claim of double-tapping Drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere in support of the war against the terrorists. The evidence published by the 18-month-old Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) claims that 6 instances of double-tapping have occurred with rescuers being targeted with second strikes. A review of 5 of those sources (ABC’s article was not easily retrievable) reveals that one arguably involved an attack on civilians, one was unclear on the status of the rescuers, and three reported second attacks on militants and extremists.
In response to my query on this point, David correctly pointed out that the Obama Administration does consider fighting age men in the strike zone “militants.” That fact was disclosed in a long New York Times article:
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
But does six instances of secondary attacks obscured by the fog of war prove that the US has a policy of targeting innocent rescuers? Can it even be said that we are indifferent to the humanitarian concerns of rescuers even as we attack our enemies on their home turf?
From a legal perspective, targeting killing of persons who present an imminent threat to a country is permissible. Obama himself has insisted on such evidence before authorizing the strikes though there are trade-offs, according to the New York Times. The CIA’s man in the White House, John Brennan, a crusty Irishman who has spoken in defense of civil liberties and to close Guantanamo but who has faced withering criticism for his role in post 9/11 interrogations, explains Obama’s analysis:
The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons’ lives. It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don’t like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.
Assassination of persons is generally regarded as murder although, by executive order, the US President may order the killing of foreign leaders who represent an imminent threat to the US.
Former U.S. District Judge (S.D. NY) Abraham Sofaer explains the difference:
When people call a targeted killing an “assassination,” they are attempting to preclude debate on the merits of the action. Assassination is widely defined as murder, and is for that reason prohibited in the United States…. U.S. officials may not kill people merely because their policies are seen as detrimental to our interests…. But killings in self-defense are no more “assassinations” in international affairs than they are murders when undertaken by our police forces against domestic killers. Targeted killings in self-defense have been authoritatively determined by the federal government to fall outside the assassination prohibition.
Likewise, Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser US Department of State, defends the use of drones as ” part of “responsibility of US to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.”
But what then about rescuers killed trying to aid militants?
Georgetown Law Professor Gary Solis, author The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War, and no friend of the US drone policy concedes that “Legal guilt does not always accompany innocent death.” In an example, published by Harper’s Magazine, Solis comments on a US helicopter attack on civilians rendering aid to combatants. “Can a van picking up wounded victims be fired upon? If the helicopter personnel reasonably associated the unmarked van with the presumed enemy personnel, yes. An “enemy” vehicle without red cross, red crescent, or white flag receives no special protection, even if wounded personnel are on board.”
Thus, even critics of the drone program conclude that trying to render humanitarian aid to injured militants affords no protection unless they are clearly visible as such. There is nothing in any of the articles cited by the BIJ indicating that rescuers were so denominated.
What then to make of the double-tap policy and the humanitarian toll. I see no proof that US drone masters are “targeting civilians.” Targeting implies intention and given the Administration’s definition of militants in a strike area it is unlikely that there is the intention to harm civilians rescuers where proof of such status exists. The Administration argues that its definition is based on its decade long experience with al-Qaeda. One certainly can argue with the definition of “militant” given its breadth, but does this definition make us any more culpable that acknowledged WWII heroes Winston Churchill or Air Chief Marshall Harris in arguing that our prime responsibility in war is to deny the enemy the ability to wage war against us even as civilians are maimed or killed?
What do you think?
Sources: linked throughout
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
DonS:
All good points. I have one area of disagreement vis-a-vi the blowback. I agree there are significant risks in the policy long-term. However the first law of survival is to survive today, and that would be difficult to accomplish without what all the experts agree is the most effective tool we have to combat terrorism. Quite simply, al-Qaeda cannot survive the drone program and they’ve made that clear. To me that is justification enough.
http://articles.cnn.com/2012-06-05/opinion/opinion_bergen-al-qaeda-whos-left_1_abu-yahya-aqap-drone-strikes?_s=PM:OPINION
The USA is a warmongering nation. We have to many people, in influential areas, that can make a lot of money from war. We are the 600 # gorilla that’s afraid of its own shadow. We should have never been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, somalia, and others. No wonder so many countries, groups, individuals hate America. None of these countries were of the slightest threat to the USA. George Bush is the biggest criminal in the world. Millions of people had to die because on him and Cheney. The USA is the worlds biggest scaredy cat. Look what happened on 911. America went ballistic. We started 2 wars that is lasting longer then any war in recent history. What the hell is America so afraid of? 911 was an act of terror and we should of went after the terrorist, not attack 2 countries for 10 friggin years and counting.Now were bombing and killing in Pakistan. We are true war mongers.
We are obviously not going to agree on this. And while the question of “double tap” may be debatable, (I’d even concede it’s marginal relationship to larger issues), the entire drone program cannot escape much more serious criticism.
One criticism flows from the Lockian quote, “that which threatens me with destruction”, and brings the question of remoteness in time and place to the fore. It seems to me a incredulous stretch to connect many if not most of the targeted victims, much less the military age “militants” or innocent, with threats of imminent destruction. (unless you count the threat of jihad, in which case you can probably include most of the Islamic world on your target list which, I dare say, many of our fellow citizens would have not problem with).
The stretch to justify the drone program as part of the long war rather seems obvious to me. If anything it partakes of that pre-emptive or preventative “war” pseudo-rationalethat the Bush doctrine was so enamored with in Iraq, and with at least as shoddy a foundation.
As to the question mespo poses to Gene, “If Churchill and Harris weren’t considered war criminals after Dresden, why is Obama charged by some as one now?”, Gene’s answer relating to information now available is salient. I would add that one would have thought the morality of nation states would have improved since the lessons of WWII, Dresden, etc. You, mespo, explicitly hang your hat justifying all sorts of military action based on the inappropriateness of moral considerations in these matters. I have a somewhat more hopeful view. And too, I note, Spain has indeed indicted Bush, Blair, Cheney and other accomplices. Criticize that all you want; it speaks clearly to many.
Perhaps Churchill’s after the fact recognition that the allies were essentially poisoning the well should be a huge caution, even if one does not admit a moral dimension. While we are arguing the legal, theoretical, philosophical, and moral dimensions of the drone program, many respected authorities (you all know it) are waving a red flag on the blowback and counterproductive effect, including enhancement of Al Qaeda recruitment.
If you target rescuers, you target all rescuers. Some of the rescuers may be Taliban fighters, some may be Taliban doctors, some may be innocent neighbors and not Taliban at all.
The definition of “militants” could have equally well been applied to the whole of Bagdad. Indeed the infamous helicopter attack would seem to confirm that it did apply in spirit and application.
For those needing reminding, a helicopter crew spotted a groug pf ca 7-8 men leaving a building. All was recorded by their bore-sight camera, and the dialogue between crew members and the ground HQ control who gave permission to “engage”, ie shoot the fuckers.
To my eyes, accustomed to seeing muslim men leaving a prayer period, they exuded (that word again) peace, brotherhood, and love. None were armed, one a photographer had a large pro camera in one hand.
The camera was identified as an AK-47, an obvious miscall. And motivated the firing on ALL of them.
It is notable that one apparently was still mobile after being wounded and sought cover of a concrete wall. At that instant a van arrives, containing a male adult and two small children sitting next to him.
He stops the car so as to take the man to seek medical assistance. He and his van including the children were fired on, the children injured, to what degree I don’t know.
I leave the narrative at this point, only saying that to my knowledge this was never neutrally investigated, or reports published regarding the incident. We know of it solely due to the leak by Wikileaks.
Was this justified? Was it an indication that all men of weapon bearing age were regarded as combatants, to be emliminated at the slightest suspicion?
Let us go to the question of Waziristan and its villages in Pakistan. Does not everybody know how the Taliban operate there? The same way they did in Iraq. That is, they take informal control of a village, and all who are not for them are against them, although few do more than infrastructure services. Police chiefs must support them or die. This has been established over two years ago.
By our policies of engagement (all are guilty unless good intelligence can prove them innocent (what chance of that?)). In addition, if I am to understand the parallel with Dresden, the Air Marshall and Mespo’s interpretation, then not fleeing your home to seek refuge will lead to you being targeted as not being worth a single USA soldiers life. Men, women, and childree—-you are collectively found guilty by living in Waziristan.
As for the “double-tap” technique—it would be asinine to assume it would NOT be used. The chance that some Taliban would come back to the rescue is of course infinitesimal; but on Pentagon paper, what worked for the suicide bombers must be a good tactic for us to use. But the suicide bombers were targeting the public, of predominantly one sect (Sunni or Shia) in Bagdad. Here we are said to be wishing to target Al Quaeda and Taliban. So why the slaughter of civilians with double-tap tactics here?
Wars are not only hellacious. They bring out the worst in us. Ahhh, but the Taliban?
Well to my knowledge they were not behind 9/11 accdg to G2. I hate them, but can not sacrifice others to kill them.
But now they are terrorists. No proof has been offered and will never be. It is a national security secret. And only Mespo has access here.
Hope Burning
By Robert Scheer
May 30, 2012
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hope_burning_20120531
So now we have Rambo Obama, a steely warrior who, according to a lengthy leaked insider account in The New York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the good old USA. Including children. Those children are presumed guilty by virtue of proximity, and the Times plays along, not even modifying a targeted terrorist with the word “alleged,” as once had been the paper’s convention: “When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”
Obama as the cool triggerman is an image useful to White House operatives as they buff the president’s persona for the coming election. But what it reveals is the mindset of a political cynic whose seductive words cloak the moral indifference of a methodical executioner. Forget Harry Truman, who obliterated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Lyndon Johnson, who carpet-bombed millions in Vietnam. The Democrats have got themselves another killer, one whose techniques are as devastatingly effective, but brilliantly refined.
The story obviously was planted in The New York Times to benefit the Obama political campaign. Otherwise, why would the president’s former chief of staff, William Daley, and three dozen current and past intelligence insiders provide the newspaper with the most sensitive details of national security decision-making?
Pfc. Bradley Manning was held for many months in solitary confinement for allegedly disclosing information of far lower security classification. The difference is that the top secrets in the news article are ones the president wants leaked in the expectation they will burnish his “tough on terrorism” credentials. This is clearly not the Obama whom many voted for in the hope that he would stick by his word, including the pledge he made on his second day in office to ban brutal interrogation and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. “What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes,” the Times now reports concerning the early promises by Obama. “They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric.”
Parse that sentence carefully to learn much of what is morally decrepit in our journalism as well as politics. The word “realist” is now identical to “hypocrite,” and the condemnation of immoral behavior addresses nothing more than “rhetoric” that only the “fervent” would take seriously. The Times writers all but thrill to the lying, as in recounting the new president’s response to advisers who warned him against sticking to his campaign promises on Guantanamo prisoners: “The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.”
How telling that reporters who might as well be PR flacks are so admiring of the power of “wiggle words” to free a politician from accountability to the voters who put him in office: “A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies—rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention—that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”
The Obama answer to those human rights groups is the same as that offered by George W. Bush: Get the Justice Department to say that anything goes. When Obama wanted to kill “an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial,” the Times tells us, “ … the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” Obama approved, and two American citizens were assassinated, including Samir Khan, who was not on any official list of targeted terrorists. “This is an easy one,” Obama told his chief of staff.
What makes such decisions particularly easy is that Obama does not have to release any details of drone attacks or the legal rulings of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that justify the assassinations—exactly the practice that Bush followed in regard to the OLC briefs that he cited for the legality of his torture policy. Michael Hayden, a director of the CIA under Bush and now an adviser to presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney, accurately described the danger that this poses to a democratic society: “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable. I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe.”
But imperial plutocracies do.
We have a long legacy of war crimes, we even have a college to teach these crimes to other nations:
In 1992, Everardo was captured by the Guatemalan military. Harbury demanded to know the whereabouts of her husband and held a hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House, which was covered by the media and made into a national story by “60 Minutes.” Harbury’s request was simple: she wanted the State Department or CIA to tell her what had happened to her husband. But both agencies didn’t acknowledge they knew of his whereabouts.
In an interview with Truthout, Harbury recounted:
After a year of trying to find out what had really happened to him, a young prisoner escaped from the army torture program and reported that Everardo was alive and being severely tortured. After my third hunger strike to save his life, in March 1995, then New Jersey Senator Toricelli disclosed that official US documents indicated that he had been killed by Guatemalan officers on the CIA payroll.
After receiving many files at last through the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], it became clear that the State Department and the CIA had known where Everardo was and that he was in the hands of our own CIA liaisons or assets, since the week of his capture. They also knew approximately 300 other secret prisoners of war were suffering the same fate. The files show that all these prisoners were tortured to death, thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., yet the truth was only revealed to us in 1995. By then all were dead. We could have saved them.
Harbury’s Husband Was Kept in a Body Cast to Make His Torture Easier
In fact, Everardo, Harbury discovered, was kept in a body cast to keep him constrained while he was tortured for more than two years before being executed, all the time with the full knowledge and likely operational involvement of the CIA.
And then there is, of course, the legacy of the infamous School of the Americas (now renamed the euphemistic Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation: WHINSEC). It has been accused of teaching torture, which was confirmed in a US government admission during the Clinton administration. Although now, under its new WHINSEC name, it claims to no longer offer such instruction.
Of the School of the Americas, Harbury told BuzzFlash in a 2005 interview:
Very simply, the School of the Americas is a US military institution that has given training and education to high-level military officials from across Latin America for 40 years now. The students who they have trained and educated, in huge numbers, turned out to have been the worst human rights violators in the Western Hemisphere, bar none. We’re talking about high-level people under Pinochet. We’re talking about eight to twelve of my husband’s torturers. We’re talking about people involved in massacre upon massacre within El Salvador, including people that were highly implicated in the murder of Monsignor Romero and the Maryknoll church women, etc.
The Current President of Guatemala Was Trained at the School of the Americas
The current president of Guatemala, Otto Fernando Pérez Molina, was trained at the School of the Americas and is accused of helping to oversee the Guatemalan military genocide and torture. Pérez was head of the Guatemalan military intelligence at the time of Everardo’s capture, and Harbury has sought to have him charged with human rights’ violations. There is also the allegation that Pérez participated in 1998 in the planning of the assassination of a Guatemalan bishop, who campaigned for human rights accountability.
Harbury points out that US agents are often reported, by survivors, of being in the torture chambers, outed by their American accents in Spanish or by their speaking in English. This was the case of Sister Dianna Ortiz, who was abducted in Guatemala in 1989 for speaking out on behalf of the poor. She was gang raped, forced to kill another prisoner with a knife, used as a human ash tray and was the subject of further barbaric acts of torture. Ortiz also recalls an American serving as a consultant while she was being tortured.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9685-the-school-of-the-americas-the-cia-and-the-us-condoned-cancer-of-torture-continues-to-spread-in-latin-america-including-mexico
Dredd is right about Japan, what we did to Tokyo was worse than Dresden. But we won so nobody actually questioned it in any serious way. Lets not even examine what we did to Nagasaki & Hiroshima.
But how do you prosecute a war without killing civilians? Particularly the way war is waged since 1939? It is pointless to say “we didn’t target civilians” when any rational person could look at the targets, understand the munitions and delivery method and easily predict 10s of thousands of innocent deaths.
One could ‘justify’ this by saying the enemy was hiding amongst the civilians and that breaking the will to resist saved lives. Both are true and the cost/benefit calculations will never truly be known.
But that was for a war against a government and a country. It has no bearing on this mindless war on a noun. The only way this war ends is when people see no need and have no desire to strike back at a monster sized enemy they have no hope of confronting directly. Killing women and children has the opposite affect. Since morality and human decency can not be allowed to be part of this discussion lets not argue them. Lets point out that this tactic is foolish, wrongheaded and will only result in more noun, not less.
I don’t have the exact wording or arguments regarding the justification of carpet bombing of cities during the WWII. But the question of culpability in bombing the cities and their civilian populations was recognized and addressed during WWII.
In very crude terms the conclusion was something like the Allies and the Axis were engaged in total war. Civilian populations were necessary for the war effort and therefor were legitimate targets. The conclusion was that a successful war effort had to include not just the targeting of factories producing war materials but also the civilian populations that worked in the factories.
We may disagree with the rationalizations used; We may disagree with the conclusions reached in WWII.
But the comparison of a drone attack with attacks like Dresden is not on point. Moral comparison of our drone policy with the policy of carpet bombing cities may be reasonable. But I think the legal comparison is questionable at best.
There has been no determination that the entire society in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries is a just or legal target. The fact that they define men of a certain age group as militants shows that even the administration distinguishes combatants from non combatants in those societies – even if we consider their distinction questionable or specious.
The claim is that the administration targets non combatant populations or that they have not shown the requisite care to distinguish noncombatant populations when they target militants.
I think the claim that they target non combatant populations still stands as a question that demands explanation.
mespo,
It has long been argued here that the AMF Bush pushed through Congress on a wave of irrational fear was overreaching and part and parcel to his illegal invasion of Iraq. Just because Congress hasn’t remedied or mitigated their mistakenly broad grant of power to the Executive doesn’t make it ethically right even if it is technically legal. Don’t forget that despots from Hitler to Pol Pot committed their atrocities under the color of legal authority. We both know law is a tool and as a tool is capable of abuse. I’m all for responsible (including ethical) tool use.
“If Churchill and Harris weren’t considered war criminals after Dresden, why is Obama charged by some as one now?”
The word “unindicted” comes to mind. As to why Obama is being “charged” by people if not the system, it is the same reason Bush and Cheney are being charged: the masses have both more information and greater access to direct mass communication in expression than they did during the 40’s in the form of the Internet.
I think the drone program of assassinations/bombing is criminal and does more harm to US and international law as well as US interests than it helps.
http://www.theurbanpolitico.com/2012/06/president-obamas-kill-list-murder.html
Of course Romney would be no better so really this just shows how both parties have decided that maybe John Yoo was right about a lot of things.
The same things were done to Japanese cities, only worse.
Robert McNamara points out that he and LeMay did commit war crimes, and LeMay knew he would be prosecuted for them if they lost the war.
Fog of War (click on 1945) …
Gene H:
“Quite frankly I’m embarrassed for you Mark. It shows not just a disregard for domestic and international law, but a preference for the Hobbsian amorality of action in international relationships that perpetuates and exacerbates war. War is a tool of last resort or proportionate response to foreign state action.”
********************
Don’t worry. Being compared to Hobbes is no embarrassment for me.
Regardless of your feelings and while this doesn’t fit the historical paradigm of a state vs. state war, there is a Congressional authorization to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks” as well as against anyone who “harbored” them. That, coupled with the War Powers Act, makes the use of armed force “legal” against these folks.
By the way, I thought I answered your question. But what about my question: If Churchill and Harris weren’t considered war criminals after Dresden, why is Obama charged by some as one now?
Obamas drones did kill a number of Pakistani troops:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2011/11/26/nato-drones-allegedly-kill-pakistani-troops/wPw7tz9NsnnguQw91xm5ZO/story.html
The Pakistani army said Saturday that NATO helicopters and fighter jets carried out an ‘‘unprovoked’’ attack on two of its border posts in the Mohmand tribal area before dawn, killing 24 soldiers and wounding 13 others. The troops responded in self-defense ‘‘with all available weapons,’’ an army statement said.
Pakistan army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani condemned the attack, calling it a ‘‘blatant and unacceptable act,’’ according to the statement.
We now know that the bombing of Dresden was specifically requested by the Red Army as it fought its way west. There was an SS Division that was coming through the city enroute to the Eastern Front, and while the bombing did not catch the division in the city, it did result in its being diverted to ameliorating the effects of that bombing. Thus one full division was prevented for a number of weeks from reaching the front.
I know that for most in the west saving Red Army lives meant nothing, and indeed some would argue that we should have let the division reach the front to kill more commies. This was not in any way a war crime for a number of reasons. One is that the target and objective was strictly military and the people of that city had been warned that the place was a military target and subject to this kind of military action. Two that while it was brutal and killed lots of civilians, that alone does not make it a war crime. If you live next to a munition factory, you have no claim of improper actions if your house gets bombed as part of operations against the factory.
In contrast to the Nazis who bombed the Spanish town of Guernica, the US and UK did not directly target civilians. In Guernica the Nazix deliberately bombed the town when it was most crowded and without warning. They were trying in fact to kill as many people as possible, mainly ALL civilians. Dresden did not fit this pattern at all. It was initiated at night, the civilians had more than adequate warnings, had in fact been TOLD that the whole city was a target, None of this appled in Guernica. The raid was simply another standard operations the US and UK forces had been doing for a number of years. Brits bombing at night, the US by day.
The drone strikes are done in areas that are beyond the control of the Pakistan government, and the people of that region have basically not only declared war on the US, but also on the Pakistan government as well. If the US were killing Pakistani troops, THEN it would be a problem for the government. So absent any Red Crescent, it is fair to assume that male residents are combatants. Thus I say to Obama, good hunting.
I will add to the size of the question you have presented. Shall we think of this as war at all? When GWB declared a war on terror I thought it was frame incorrectly and would expand out of proportion. It went far beyond my imagination. I saw 9-11 as a crime, like Munich, and should have been approached in a similar matter, covert operations to attack the source of the problem. Therefore, how does the current strategy/tactics fit domestic and international law in dealing with a what is an outlaw group.
And Curtis LeMay was actively worried he would be prosecuted as a war criminal for his role in the firebombing of Dresden should the Allies have lost.
You are still distorting the fundamental issue by insisting that what is essentially a matter of criminals – not states engaging in war – is a matter meriting the responses of war including a willingness to accept civilian casualties.
I find the logic of this article to an exercise in rationalization after the fact for an inappropriate response to a problem that has been mischaracterized from the the start. The closest thing to state sponsorship of Al-Queada comes from Saudi Arabia who supplied the manpower and money for the 9/11 operation. The fact that Bush spent the first 72 hours afterward rushing Saudi royals and members of the bin Laden family out of American jurisdiction bolsters the connection to Saudi Arabia being more substantive than merely acting as a host state for criminals. If war was to be declared, they were the ones to declare war upon. All other matters should have been handled in the manner befitting criminals, which is not the same kind of response as warfare, or by limited action (as was the wise but unheeded strategy called for in dealing with Afghan training bases).
We are not at war with the State of Pakistan yet we insist on attacking within their territory and killing their civilians in the process. I ask you again: what would happen if Mexico made drone strikes into Arizona to kill drug cartel members – drug cartel members that pose a very real and legitimate militarized threat to Mexican sovereignty? What if those attacks killed innocent American civilians? What would happen?
We’d be at war with Mexico within 24 hours is what would happen.
This article comes across as a piece of rationalization for war crimes and disproportionate response. Quite frankly I’m embarrassed for you Mark. It shows not just a disregard for domestic and international law, but a preference for the Hobbsian amorality of action in international relationships that perpetuates and exacerbates war. War is a tool of last resort or proportionate response to foreign state action. This is an attacking action of first resort against criminals that violates national sovereignty. It is no different than the Mexico example and it shows the hypocrisy (and danger) of using a military response to any threat or problem instead of looking at other ways to handle it.
Mark writes:
Robert McNamara has said that war crimes are only done by nations who lost the war. To the victor goes the spoils.
Thus the doctrine, win at any cost.
The Universal Smedley knows that there are no good wars, only good soldiers, who are defined that way by their peers.
Until war is diagnosed as a disease, the war criminals will always exist only on the losing side.
Gary Solis’ argument is specious. I think we would need something more than a symbol (red cross, red crescent, white flag) to determine such a thing. If the enemy knew of such symbols and we honored them, all militants would walk around with a red cross on their hat and a white flag strapped to their shoulder.
What determines “aid” is not symbols, it is acts. As for aiding militants with medical care to fight again, perhaps that is being an accessory to their crime.
War crimes are war crimes whether “they” do it, or “we” do it.