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
talkingbacktocspan:
“Let’s be clear: drone attacks, like hero Churchill’s firebombing of Dresden, Magdeburg, Chemnitz, Dessau, Halle, Zerbst, Frankfurt, Nordhausen, Potsdam, Halberstadt, Hamburg, Berlin and dozens more, are acts of cowardice.”
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How’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki grab you? Cowardice there, too?
Blouise:
“Such arguments always seek to justify evading the constraints of morality.”
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Whose morality? Ours or theirs? They feel quite certain they are following the express will of Allah and that they will be handsomely rewarded for it. Since there is no recognized authority to settle the question (i.e. no law) we fight. Shall we handicap ourselves with our morality in the fight even as they recognize no such constraints? See Hobbes, above.
Mike A:
“Those of us who are lawyers know that if I perform an intentional act with the knowledge that it will either certainly or most likely result in injury to others, my intention to cause the injury is established. And I cannot absolve myself from responsibility for the intentional taking of innnocent human life by redefining “innocent” to suit the situation.”
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Your reasoning is correct given the assumptions you make. The problem is that you make a profoundly erroneous assumption in your argument. It is best explained by Hobbes:
To this war of every man against every man this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ distinct, but only that to be every man’s that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition which man by mere nature is actually placed in, though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.
There is no central power in this international sphere recognized by Al-Qaeda, hence there is no law they will accept save the law of the jungle. They are as Locke says, ” not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey.” You might as well accord rights to wolves in the midst of the hunt. Law depends on a recognition and respect by a majority of the community for the power it wields. Take that away, Hobbes says, and there is no society and hence no law. Thus actions in war cannot be judged by anything besides the standards of the prevailing side. Isn’t that what we glean from Churchill’s and Harris’ exoneration from war crimes? Isn’t that why we must be on the prevailing side regardless of the cost? Since WW2 we have tried to implement international standards of conduct but we’ve provided no means to enforce them except the World Court. How’s that worked out?
We can disagree on the existence of morality in war, but can we really disagree with Hobbes’ assessment of man in his natural state?
forgot to source the quote … Jane Addams
“The Obama administration needs to come up with much better arguments than the pathetic nonsense we’re hearing now.” (Mike A.)
Such arguments always seek to justify evading the constraints of morality. Yet even the worst criminal amongst us depends on the moral restraint of others as he walks to the store or drives to the restaurant.
“The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of oneself.”
Israeli Psychiatrist Zvi Rex wrote: “The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” He was speaking about the projection that guilt parties often employ to cleanse themselves in their own minds, to assure themselves that what they did was OK, to comfort themselves for really understanding, in spite of all their defensive lying and victim-blaming, that they screwed up big-time and can’t just walk away from it unscathed. It leads, among other things, to something for which the phrase “secondary antisemitism” has been coined.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_antisemitism
It’s interesting how far some minds will go to deodorize their excrescence. I had not even heard of Zvi Rex until I read that quote. Remarkable. It’s like something another poster on another thread said, when, a couple of months back, she admitted prejudice against Blacks and then said it was justified because the Blacks kept carrying on about racism. (That same woman posting that on another thread has come to a different conclusion recently about what was really bothering her.)
The logical fallacy of the “Jews caused the Holocaust and then screamed about it” argument is this: How come Germany attacked all those OTHER European countries just because the Jews had attacked Germany? I don’t get it. Doesn’t seem fair.
Mike Appleton, I disagree with parts of the first part of your statement:
“The moral issues surrounding Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have never been resolved. ”
Agree. They have not been fully confronted, and until they are, the U.S. will be unable to stand on firm moral ground.
“They have been buried with the dead.”
If that is true, it is a mistake. Americans, Christians and Germans get holocaust shoved down their throats at every turn, but the full range of culpability has yet to be explored. That being the case, those who promote, i.e. drone warfare, appear to think that they can get away with the same war crimes that they got away with in Dresden, (Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, etc) and Hiroshimia and Nagasaki.
“The Nuremberg trials occurred for three reasons:
1. Germany initiated a war of conquest without cause.”
Jews provoked a war in Germany by enacting a boycott on Germany, which was intended to “starve Germans into submission” (in the words of Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the leaders of the international boycott). Economic warfare is warfare.
Furthermore, FDR lied to the American people to involve the US in war in Germany, and parties to the European conflicts rejected several overtures of settlement offered by Germany.
“2. Germany engaged in horrific acts of genocide.”
For which Germans were tried & punished. However, Allies also engaged in war crimes and equally horrific acts against innocent civilians, for which they have not been called to account. That lack of accountability has conveyed a sense on those guilty parties that they did get away with war crimes and can do so in the future.
Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex wrote that ““The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Or in other words, a guilty conscience has a surprising way of manifesting itself through aggression and claims to victimhood.” Precisely who is exhibiting “aggression and claims to victimhood?” Hint: It’s not Germans.
“3. Germany lost.”
Aye, Germany lost. And took its lumps.
bettykath
1, June 10, 2012 at 6:56 pm
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yup
Mike Appleton concluded: “The Obama administration needs to come up with much better arguments than the pathetic nonsense we’re hearing now.”
The problem may be that it will.
Once I heard oral arguments in a federal court about whether a convicted fraud, in court on a parole violation, should be released pending the actual violation hearing. The information about his continued frauds (against 45 homeowners, most of whom lost their homes thanks to the scam) was extremely convincing. But the attorney arguing for his release used about half a dozen foolish arguments (he needed to be out of prison to tell his children what he had done in an environment that would not frighten them; he blah blah blah; his real reason for wanting to be out for a few days was to give his “ex-wife” the numbers of the offshore bank accounts, without being overheard by guards or tape recorded on the prison phones) which were all shot down. Then the defense lawyer came up with an argument that was essentially incomprehensible. I can’t even remember it. The prosecutor was trying five different ways to respond to it and you could just SEE the judge wavering because he appeared to go for certain nuggets of information that were contained in the defense argument.
One of the prosecutor’s people dashed out and came back in with a witness of sorts, a “suit.” The prosecutor asked the judge permission to let him speak, and he said he was someone from the Maryland AG’s office, and if the defendant was released, the State of Maryland was going to arrest him at the door to the jail, so he would never get out of custody except for the time needed to hand him his paperwork and property, whereupon he would be cuffed and arrested. Then the judge denied the defense motion.
We all kind of left in a daze. What I realized was that the argument the defense counsel came up with, although nearly incomprehensible, had almost carried the day, and that only a “trick” had prevented that.
It is the ability to come up with that kind of argument that paves the road to Hell. And it is that infrastructure that will always get the most funding.
Esposito’s writing is a masterpiece of sophistry.
Let’s be clear: drone attacks, like hero Churchill’s firebombing of Dresden, Magdeburg, Chemnitz, Dessau, Halle, Zerbst, Frankfurt, Nordhausen, Potsdam, Halberstadt, Hamburg, Berlin and dozens more, are acts of cowardice.
When a heavily armed/weaponized force is unable to defeat an equally armed foe and so resorts to killing unarmed civilians, that is not honor, not self-defense, not legitimate warfare, not ‘protecting the homeland,’ it is cowardice.
Call it for what it is and maybe it will stop.
What Mike Appleton at 2:19 pm said.
If the destruction of Dresden had been the only “double tap” or even firebombing raid that intentionally targeted civilians, it might serve in the manner the author tries to use it. However, Dresden was not the only or the first or even the worst example of the use of firebombing against German civilians ordered up by “hero” Churchill and his eager helpers, FDR, the US Air Force, Standard Oil, and volunteer consultants that included Erich Mendelsohn, the architect who designed Chaim Weizmann’s residence and Institute in Israel.
Mendelsohn aided in the destruction of Berlin, more specifically, “working-class districts of Berlin.” In a 2003 paper in “The Guardian,” Jonathan Glancey explains that
“Churchill wanted to gas . . .working class districts in Germany and Japan. Killed and mutilated in sufficient numbers, the German working class would, he argued, rise up against Hitler and bring a quick end to the war. ‘It is absurd to consider morality on this topic,’ he told RAF planners. . . .’I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people, and not by psalm-singing uniformed defeatists.’ “
Although the project that Mendelsohn worked on in the Utah desert had developed anthrax bombs, which Churchill had requested be dropped on six German cities, including Berlin, as far as is known, RAF and USAF used only their vast arsenal of incendiary devices, researched and tested in the Utah desert at Dugway, and also tested in the field, using citizens of Germany as human research subjects. Before the tactic was perfected, 150 German cities had been destroyed, as many as half a million German civilians incinerated, millions rendered homeless, and, as Ernst Junger wrote in “The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945,” Germany’s bridge to its medieval past was destroyed.
In psychological assessments of German civilians after the war ended, American interviewers studied the reactions of Germans who had survived firebombing to assess whether the tactic had brought them close to the position Churchill sought — rising up against Hitler and overthrowing the Nazi government.
It had not. As one SS officer reported, “People complained, but they did their part.”
The U.S. Congress is intent on punishing Iran in order to cause so much misery among Iranian civilians that they will rise up and overthrow their government.
It didn’t happen in Germany and it will not happen in Iran, for similar reasons: both peoples are united around strong traditions of culture.
People complain, but they do their part.
That spirit cannot be killed.
The United States is displaying not only a strong streak of brutality but also an inability to learn the lessons of history.
Donald L. Anderson 1, June 10, 2012 at 11:53 am
War crimes are war crimes whether “they” do it, or “we” do it.
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Yes.
911 was done by criminals, not an act of war by a nation state. The evidence should have been retained and a full scale investigation undertaken. But that doesn’t happen when it’s an inside job for war-mongers who have an oil/$$$ motive.
Al Queda was not an organization. It was a database of unrelated “suspects”. But that database has served as the boogey man for everlasting war. In the process we have made many enemies. It won’t stop until the empire collapses.
The costs of a predator drone:
http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/02/28/2-the-mq-9s-cost-and-performance/
I am probably the only one here who actually remembers this stuff in real time. There was a time when it was not clear the US and Allies would win the war. England was teetering on the edge of collapse. The six-engine Convair B-36 Peacemaker bomber was designed with the thought we might have to fly missions to Germany from US soil. My whole family was involved in the war effort. One of my friends was part of a B-17 crew who ended up in Buchenwald after he was shot down. My flight instructor was a P-38 ace who flew fighter escort on some of those raids in Europe. Another flight instructor was a Lancaster pilot who flew many of the night raids over Germany. Another friend, a surgeon, was a kid in Germany at the time and remembered the air raids vividly. For me, this is not an abstract argument, but is personal.
WW-II was fought with the notion we were either “all in” or not in it at all. Once we were in it, we won in four years. Think about that. We won a global war in four years! This notion of limited war is totally foreign to everything I learned when I was young. Limited war is why Vietnam drug on so long, and why we have been involved in Iraq and the middle east for more than 21 years. I have a philosophy about this kind of thing that is summed up by Robert Heinlein’s observation about gambling:
ARE,
Actually, the analogy works perfectly. Intentional doesn’t have a damn thing to do with rationalizing away collateral damage among allegedly allied forces and civilians under the color of “we’re doing what is necessary in our national interests”. If you don’t see how that’s an additional violation of sovereignty and adding insult to injury? That is your failure to consider the perception of others in conducting foreign policy. A reckless disregard of non-combatants and alleged allies will earn nothing but animosity and eventually escalated and more official forms of retaliation. When you are on Red Team and you shoot someone on Red Team to get to someone on Blue Team and it’s not intentional but simply reckless? That will still eventually get you fragged by your own team.
The US has only hit a very few of friendly forces of Pakistan, and when that does happen, the US admits it, apologizes, pays tons of money to the relatives,.So the fact is that the collateral damage that is being discussed here is NOT official Pakistan forces, but the relatives and members of militia which is fighting against Pakistan as well as the US. I can care less about them since they are active particiapants in the warfare going on there.
I guess you would have put Gen. US Grant on trial for war crimes in the seige of VIcksbug too. Union artillery bombed the hell out of the whole town, and starved men, women and children, not just combatants. I think Grant was quite correct as does history.
The US and lots of other countries have taken similar action in the past. In fact, my grandfather was part of Pershings expedittion into Mexico to get Pancho Villa. The Mexican government allowed that one too. When the mission failed, the Mexican government said enough and asked the US to get out which we did.
Not for nothing, but is anyone, besides Gene and Mike Appleton, keeping track of Mark’s arguments lately?
For all you ‘drone death disciples’ for ‘collateral damage’, particularly Mr.mespo727272, how is it going to be for you when the family, friends and acquaintances of the victims take the same posture as ‘the President of the bright shinning light on the hill spreading democracy around the world’ claim the same ‘congressional authorization to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons determines planned, authorized, committed. or aided the terrorist attacks, as well as against anyone who harbored them plus the WAR Powers Act’ ‘RETALIATES’??? Can ‘they’ not claim & carry out the same policies as the “greatest nation on earth”? Oh, yeah…..it’s not terrorism if the US does it. That thinking is especially tragic when the truth of 911 is acknowledged, that people within our own government brought those building down for support of wars & corporate profits and to increase the Empire’s holdings. False flags are a part of the United States history. Do the research! A Critical Thinker researches, questions, weighs and considers and follows the ‘TRUTH’ where ever it leads. ( And it ain’t pretty!) They do not swallow the ‘states propaganda’ and support it with ‘the twisted laws the Emperor himself’ has ‘made up’ to support his war policies. It is indeed, a sad day in America.
Con tigo, amigo mio.
Hasta la guerra. Es normal.
Gene H.: Correcto.