Over Here in GQ, there is a discussion going on about the bombing of Dresden. Many posters over there feel that bombing a civilian target like a city is a war crime.
In honor of JillGat’s new position as moderator in GQ, I am resisiting the urge to hijack the current thread and get it moved over here.
I don’t specifically want to get into all the details about Dresden, but I am comfortable with it and WWII as a good place to find examples. Hiroshima and Nagasaki also immediately come to mind.
I think that civilians are valid targets of a war, in some cases.
[li] When your country is defending itself from an aggressor.[/li]
[li] When you think it may save lives of your own country men.[/li]
[li] When a smaller country is being attacked by a huge powerful one.[/li]If a country has been taken over by a militant aggresive regime that threatens other countries, then I feel the citizens of that country have to share some of the responsibility of stopping the aggresion. Whether that means actively taking part in a underground movement, or risking being bombed by the other side, they don’t get a free pass from the reality of the situation.
FTR…
I think war sucks.
I think killing civilians sucks.
I wish everybody could just get along, but unfortunately it always seems that some prick gets into power somewhere and threatens the rest of the world.
Question: Does the killing of military personal somehow “suck” less than the killing of civilians?
Also, I am assuming you are talking about deliberately targeting civilian targets and population centers and not soldiers indescriminately killing civilians.
Anyway, here’s my 2 cents:
Industrialization created the concept of ‘total war’ where the entire population of a nation is involved in the mobilization of that nations armed forces. The civilians in the waring nations aren’t just going about business as usual. They are manufacturing the tanks, planes, and battleships that get shipped to the front.
The quickest way to end a war is to destroy the infrastructure of the country waging war against you. That’s why we won Desert Storm so quickly. Because we spent months bombing civilian targets like factories and powerplants. Fortunately for the Iraqi people, we had to technology to do this with relative percision. Unfortuneately for the people of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, etc the only way to destroy the industrial targets was to carpet bomb (or nuke) half the city.
Also, bombing the civilian population can have a demoralizing effect. If you take away a nations desire to wage war, you’ve won.
Part of the reason that WWI was such a stalemate was that it WAS a war of attrition between the military. The nations would just keep cranking out soldiers and guns and throwing them against each other in trenches. They didn’t have weapons like long range bombers or missles that could strike at the factories that made the guns.
War in general is bad. When you have to go to war, you should do whatever it takes to end it as quickly as possible. It’s better than letting it drag on for years and years.
First in re civilian targets in general: I believe that if there is a legitimate war-related reason – as in crippling the opponents capacity to wage war, either directly through war-related industries or indirectly, then the target is legimate. I suspect this is also the Int’l Law position.
Use of bombing as a terror weapon I think is largely illegitimate, and also as far as I have read also largely counter-productive. (In re terror weapon, I mean striking non-industrial targets, such as bombing residential areas – on purpose of course.) That is contra the supposition of mssmith, I have been lead to understand that the balance of evidence, such as it is, is that such generally tactics stiffen the spine rather than the inverse. Clearly H and N was an exception, but practicaly speaking I don’t think we will see such a situation again.
Again, I believe that’s probably the IL perspective also. There are good practical reasons for this.
In re Dresden, my memory has grown foggy, but I seem to recall the assertion was that Dresden lacked “legitimate targets” or that much of the bombing was deliberately aimed at residential areas or areas otherwise not containing legitimate targets.
In which case, yes it may have been a war crime.
So, in the larger picture, my answer would be that it depends, and that given limited resources, a military strategist is probably not well served by the second type of assualt (once again excluding the issue of nuclear war).
Just finished reading Slaughterhouse 5 so this is pretty fresh in my mind. If Vonnegut wasn’t stretching the truth in his book Dresden was basically untouched by the war before it was fire bombed. I doubt that if Dresden was the home of a major war production factory that it would have stayed untouched for as long into the war as it did. However, I’m sure that the city the size of Dresden did have military production facilities and thus did not lack “legitimate targets” in entirety.
However, the method chosen for Dresden’s destruction meant that everything in the city would be destroyed, from the houses to the shell factories to hospitals to the local branch office of the Nazi party. Dresden was basically turned into a moonscape and the only survivors where those who were in very deep bomb shelters.
Not the Allies brightest hour, but Dresden wasn’t the only city firebombed either (Hamburg and Tokyo were as well, and I’m sure others were as well). I think what makes Dresden special is that Kurt Vonnegut centered a book around it and that it occurred towards the end of the war when the surrender of Germany was inevitable. The Dresden raid was also likely more effective than earlier firebombing campaigns because the Luftwaffe had been degraded to the point where the Allied bombers had a much easier time of completing the mission.
IMHO yes, the question would then be do I want my people attacked with similar weapons if it has not been used in the action in question. Were we using NBC weaponry in Iraq? Could we have tac nuked baghdad, yes if we felt it was needed. Would Irag want to give us an excuse to, not unless they want to see Irag turned into a parking lot.
If Iraq wanted to land an assault force on one of our beaches to capture say the silicon valley in California. Are there going to be civillians hurt? Oh yeah.
Are they committing a legitimate millitary mission, yes. Would bombing the hell out of sunnyvale, santa clara, oakland, san jose, etc hurt the millitary, in the long run yes. They would invariably get a lot of civillians hitting these areas.
No need to feel anything: These days - since 1977, to be exact - it is a war crime. To quote “Protocol I, additional to the Geneva conventions”:
IOW, a Dresden-type attack would be a war crime today without a doubt. The entire protocol can be found here: http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-proto.htm
msmith asks:
Answer: The indiscriminate killing of both soldiers and civilians sucks more than the killing of soldiers exclusively.
Soldiers are by definition combattants and expected to run the risks of war. There’s no way they can be protected, except the obvious, avoiding wars. Not all soldiers will be volunteers, but noone has found a way out of that.
The protection of civilians and other non-combattants under the conventions is but an attempt to reduce the suffering in war. As there’s no serious advantage to killing lots of civilians - after all, the bombs would be better used against armed opponents - there’s a chance that any rule against it might actually be more or less adhered to.
In short, the conventions make it possible to install at least some real-world protection for non-combattants, so why not try for it ?
Like I said there, I don’t accept the validity of “International Law” or “Rules of War”. International law is like playing street hockey in front of your house. Whatever everybody arbitrarily agrees upon, become the rules. If the big kids decide on the fly that they don’t like the rules, then the rules don’t apply anymore. THAT is what international law is. And if one of the kids doesn’t like the rules or decides not to play, then what? What higher authority can you appeal to when there’s no referee, and the only authority in place is a consensus?
War is the product of a breakdown in the rules, and a failure of the system to work. As such, how can it have rules itself? Civilians DO participate in the war. Like it or not, that makes them combatants. We all have this attitude that war sucks, but I don’t mind it so much as long as it’s over there. So I believe in taking it right here as well. Let the people and the politicians who pull the strings have a taste of it, and maybe they won’t be so flippant about conducting a war.
If you’re already in a war, don’t half-ass it like Vietnam (how fast would that effort have fallen to pieces if there had been a few small attacks on the homeland? A perfect example of what happens when the will to fight isn’t there). Go the full 9 and commit. You can’t win just hitting the soldiers. They’ll keep coming as long as the people controlling the military tell them to. You have to hit it at the root and take away the desire to fight.
An important thing to keep in mind about the latter stages of the American daylight “precision” campaign, is not only it’s admission of the futility of the stated strategic goals but it’s continuation toward another, more pratical and immediate end.
The US military learned quickly that even pointless spite attacks have indirect, yet immediate military implications. The doolittle raid, while doing little in the way of damage, more or less forced the Japanese to divert some of it’s interceptor force to the main land to appease the concerns of the people. Of course there were also the psychological effects on both sides as well.
Along similar lines of reason, the USAAF continued bombing factories to no end in order to goad German interceptors into well…intercepting. The idea was to widdle the pilot pool down to the point where none would be available come D-Day. Needless to say, it worked. (As an interesting note, next time you see air combat footage of German or Japanese pilots being shot down, you can catch the documentarians’ lax film editor. Late in the war, when novice pilots were by far the majority in the Japanese and German airforces, many can be seen on film to have forgoten, in the inexperienced heat of the moment, to jettison their reserve tanks before combat. Often this footage is used to filler for the years of the war when gun camera footage is rare.)
I’m not commenting on the ethics of the doctrine. I merely wish introducing another facet for discussion.
You’re right that international law cannot be enforced in the same way that other laws are enforced, but there’s no reason not to try. Besides, there are consequences to breaking international law in times of war. (1) The other side may follow suit. Nerve gas attacks on your opponent’s cites may sound like a great way to kill his fighting spirit, but what happens when he responds in kind? (2) If you lose, there’ll be a war crimes tribunal on your ass.
If you want to define combatants that way, alright. We still have to consider whether or not we should attack these kinds of combatants. War is a less horrible thing when civilians are not massacred. If we can maintain military efficacy without massacring civilians, we should do it.
When has this ever worked? As SACLOS points out, bombing cities may have some beneficial military results. That does not mean that bombing cities is an effective way to win a war. We bombed Nazi Germany about as thoroughly as a nation can be bombed, and we still had to fight them until their military situation was beyond hopeless. Did the bombing of British cities even come close to forcing Britain out of the war?
I’m not sure what you’re saying here, so only one of the two criticisms below will apply:
If you are referring to a few small attacks on the U.S. homeland, then I seriously doubt that this can be the case. Could you honestly believe that an attack on U.S. soil would do anything but strengthen U.S. resolve to fanatical levels? The entire anti-war movement was based on the notion that we did not belong in Vietnam. An attack on the U.S. would make it quite clear theat we definitely belonged there.
If you are referring to a few small attacks on the Vietnamese homeland, I would say that these small attacks would probably have considerably less effect than “Rolling Thunder,” which was several large attacks (and which failed to bring about a resolution to the war).
Again, disregard the critique that does not apply. Thank you.
Conclusion: In total wars, which are fought for the very survival of one’s nation, there can likely be no effective limit on acceptable military targets. The same does not hold true for limited wars. We would have been wrong to bomb civilian areas of Sarejevo (sp?) in order to hurt their morale, for example.
The way I see it, from America’s point of view, WWII might have been the last war where killing civilians was a valid option. No war since has reached the scope of that war, and we certainly have not been seriously threatened since.
Korea, Vietnam, Panama, The Gulf War, Kosovo etc… are examples where we should have tried as hard as possible to limit civilian casualties. However, once you make the decision to enter into a war, you have to accept that some civilians will get killed.
There is nothing I hate more than putting the blame for civilian deaths on a military officer in the middle of a conflict. Any death that results from a conflict ordered by politicians, rests squarely on the heads of those politicians.
Now from other countries’ point of view, there probably have been countless examples where I would understand them attacking civilians, even if it were us.
Kosovo…
I still think we were an aggressor nation picking on a small vulnerable country. I always think that when someone picks a fight, they have to accept the consequences. Had Serbia found a way to strike at America and other European countries, I don’t see how you could fault them. They really had no hope of winning a straight up fight with them on one side, and the rest of the world on the other.
I don’t particularly think they would have been all that effective had they tried striking at other countries (terrorism like attacks), and they probably would have just galvanized public support against them.
I think a method like that works best over years, not months.
I rather think that that’s a unique case, don’t you? If you like, however, I am more than willing to admit that dropping nuclear bombs on countries without nuclear weapons is a pretty sure way to win a war. The firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities did not bring about an end to the war.
As noted, we dropped a phenomenal amount of bombs on north Vietnam (the statistic always quoted is WWI and WWII combined, in an area the size of Massachusetts. Don’t know exactly how accurate that is). Sure helped us win there…
As for the first SOB who bombs me during a war, I’m rising out of my grave to smack him around for bombing non-combatants
Well said. Bombing civilian targets in a certain limited wars would not only be wrong, it would be counterproductive. Attacking civilian targets just creates more insurgents like in Viet Nam.
Besides that, Vietnam and Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia don’t actually manufacture the weapons they use. Most of them come from other countries. There’s no strategic advantage to bombing some Bosnian widget factory.
The problem with many of these ‘limited wars’ or peacekeeping missions is that the line between civilian and military becomes blurred. Somalia didn’t have a formal military structure. Yet 75 American soldiers were killed or injured in a battle with armed militia and warlord goons. Leveling all of Mogadeshu(sp?) would not have helped Americas relief mission there.
That’s great philosphically. In reality, the field commanders are responsible for controling the actions of their men. You can’t blame the politicians for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam because they weren’t there. Such actions are against the “rules of war” and are in direct violation of Army doctrine.
Let me clarify my point. I’m not talking about rounding up random civilians and blowing their brains out.
I’m talking about things like when when we blew up that train in Kosovo when we were aiming for the bridge. Now I don’t think we should have been there at all, but that is a political decision. Once it has been made, you can’t blame the soldier if a train has the bad fortune to cross a bridge that is about to be bombed.
Another example would be if a Kosovo has a pizza guy delivering lunch to a legitimate target. If he gets killed while waiting for his tip, that death goes on the heads of the politicians, not the soldier who dropped the bomb.
The conventions are probably the nearest thing we’ll ever get to rules of war - and they are at least so recognized that even the most brutal regimes try to defend themselves when accused of breaking them.
The practical limitations they put on the conduct of war aren’t as big as one might expect - whoever penned the rules knew that if they were impractical, they’d be ignored. They’ve been adjusted over the years to take diverse developments into account - like the 1977 Protocol. Dresden & the like were eye-openers.
I, for one, believe that the conventions are just one more factor in the soldiers mind, nudging him in the direction of completing his mission without unnecessary pain and suffering. There’s enough of that in warfare as it is. When soldiers know that Red Cross personnel is protected, that surrender must be honoured, that food can’t be booby-trapped, that an attack directed against civilians is illegal - perhaps most soldiers will obey most of the rules most of the time, and it won’t impede their success or lack thereof in any important way.
Dresden (to keep using that example) was an indiscriminate attack. The same military objectives could’ve been achieved without reducing an entire city to rubble and having people perish in firestorms. Perhaps the effects caught the Allies by surprise, I certainly would prefer thinking that.
Freedom makes a good point re the Serbs:
Absolutely true. If Serb special forces managed to sneak into, say, Germany, and blow up a bunch of legal targets, it would’ve been a act of war, not terrorism. It would also be counterproductive in the extreme.
Centers of production are valid targets even if civilians are doing all the producing. What are invalid targets would be the indiscriminate destruction of civilian targets. Such as blowing up neighborhoods that had no factories for example.
And believe it or not limiting your attacks to soliders, and war time production facilities, is the best way to end the war. During WWII the Germans had Great Britian on her knees until Hitler decided to stop bombing military targets and start bombing cities.
Well the politicians should be accountable for their decisions. To some extend we do hold governments responsible for such actions (reparations and such). You can’t really blame the politicians for things like the Kosovo bridge incident just because you disagree with their foreign policy.
Well you can, if the politician’s actions invite it.
In the case of My Lai, if you have armed forces who have been encouraged to see the Viet Cong as sub-human (gooks) and then see all Vietnamese as potential Viet Cong, and the government has encouraged this policy of demonization of the enemy, then they are at least partially responsible. I think that a War Crimes Tribunal would have found that US politicians were at least partially culpabale for some of the excesses of the Viet-Nam war. However, because no such formal tribunal was called, we shall never know. However, IIRC, and informal tribunal in the seventies/eighties did lay out prima facie evidence of war crimes tracing all the way to Johnson and Nixon.
I suppose in the grand scheme of cosmic things they might be responsible. But since it wasn’t standard US policy to round up civilians and execute them I don’t think it is fair to blame the politicians.
Also I can’t think of any war where the enemy wasn’t dehumanized. And in Viet-Nam just about every village you walked into stood a chance of having VC presence.
