I find also a paper entitled Sanctions, Genocide, and War Crimes, presented to the International Law Association on 29 Feb 2000 by Shuna Lennon, LLB(Hons). Here are some quotations:
(Emphasis mine. Further citations, including one of Ms. Albright’s report, to be found in the linked document.)
Just FTR, Ramsey Clark’s International War Crimes Tribunal holds no position, official or otherwise, in world politics. It is noted affiliated with The Hague, the United Nations, or any other body empowered to hear matters of this nature. More information in this thread.
Nevertheless, it appears that the people writing the reports came equipped with a variety of citations and documentary evidence themselves. Then there’s the second paper to worry about.
Neither the citations provided by the International War Crimes Tribunal nor the second paper you link to establish, to any reasonable degree of objectivity, that the United States deliberately bombed schools and hospitals, which is what Sam asked for.
They certainly establish that schools and hospitals were bombed, and claim that 75% of all “dumb bombs” missed their targets. If a bomb missing its target is now a war crime, every party in every 20th-century war has a lot of 'splaining to do. Nevertheless, they still don’t establish that these facilities were deliberately targeted, and there is a gulf of difference between “indiscriminate targeting” and “deliberate targeting.”
The International War Crimes Tribunal, as I said, has no power or standing in world politics. It’s an organization created by Ramsey Clark to discredit the United States in whatever way he possibly can. Just because an organization is given an important-sounding name doesn’t make it important. I can assemble a bunch of cranks in an office building in downtown Arlington and call us the National Committee for the Prosuection of Hate Crime, but it doesn’t mean anything.
I’ve not turned up any citations, in an hour or two of library reference work, by authors other than Clark, that the US specifically targeted hospitals and schools.
However, I’ve found plenty of evidence for related accusations. An extensive laundry list of damage inflicted on non-combatant civilian installations and populations with little military importance, and a general account of the gross suffering inflicted on civilians by the US air campaign, is to be found in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,, 47:7, Sept. '91, p. 30-35.
The deliberate destruction of civilian water treatment plants, resulting in epidemics, as well as communication lines that could have warned civilians not to drink polluted water, are described in Michael Walzer’s contribution to But Was It Just?, a collection of essays on the war, edited by David E. DeCosse. Mr. Walzer is a leading theorist on the justice of war and wrote the textbook (Just and Unjust Wars) that was used in my and my brother’s college course on the same topic.
All right. Tell you what, Sam Stone, et al. I’ll concede that the deliberate bombing of hospitals has not been proven if you admit no one really knows who’s behind these attacks.
Firstly, it’s disingenuous to suggest that George I – a man whose career as a president, vice-president, and most especially director of the CIA showed no indication of scruples – would resist attacking civilians if it suited his purposes.
As for Ramsey, I hadn’t known he had supported war criminals. There’s no excuse for that, but I’ve seen similar things happen to a lot of people on the left, especially in the US. The left has been squeezed out of political debate, its parties marginalized or converted to the right. But the left-wing view and left-wingers are still there, and many of them are pushed farther and farther to the extremes. Perhaps Ramsey feels forced to match the zealousness of the America-the-Innocent argument with an equally zealous, and just as unproductive, America’s-Enemies-the-Innocent argument. After all, as I’ve discovered recently, no evidence of any atrocity committed by the US – whether in Japan, in the Middle East, or in Africa – is enough to convince many Americans that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t always the good guys.
I have yet to see one scrap of non-circumstantial evidence conclusively pointing to bin Laden, and yet we seem ready to put a country on death row for this one man’s alleged crimes. So why is simply opening an investigation into Bush’s conduct in the Gulf War so taboo? It is the realities of geopolitics, not the actual question of innocence or guilt, that seems to determine these things. And, following this thread back to the beginning, this is precisely why I wouldn’t want to give the US a carte blanche.
In closing, I’d just like to point out that while everyone was quick to jump on the word “deliberate,” not one of you disputed my point that a truly surgical war is an impossibility.
Bombs, as someone pointed out, miss. Should we then accuse everyone of war crimes? No. But if bombs are missing, then there are civilian casualties. Innocent lives. Then, contrary to Sam Stone’s claim of a “surgical war,” we might be forced to confront the basic fact which I reiterate again and again but which no one has yet disputed: we are about to massacre innocent people because we don’t like the policy of their government in protecting one individual who we suspect is responsible for massacring innocent people because he didn’t like the policies of their government.
Hmmm. If we’re going to deny quotations from people who regularly supply misinformation, why stop at Clark? We could clean a good 75% of the cites from SDMB if we apply this rule all-round
Being the guy who organized a candlelight vigil for Matthew Shepherd on the anniversary of his death, I considered responding to this one in the Pit. But I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. :mad:
Suffice to say, your analogy would have carried more weight if I had been in Laramie, Wyoming on October 12, 1998, beating and setting fire to random objects, and discovered, too late, that one of those objects was Matthew Shepard. However, I was not.
No one is claiming that Bush spent the Gulf War reading to orphans, december. Everyone is agreed, I think, that he ordered bombings and that hospitals were hit. The only question, I think, up for debate is whether he was aiming for them.
Of course, december, if you want to raise the subject of hate crimes in the US, this war has certainly opened the door to that tragedy, and I’ll be happy to discuss it, although perhaps another thread would be appropriate.
On the other hand, if you wanted to discuss the dehumanization required to reduce a human being to an object simply because they are different, it might well fit in with this thread, because it’s certainly one of the reasons I don’t want my country to have any part of this war.
But perhaps you wanted to raise the subject of queer rights in the context of Operation Infinite Revenge? Well, then the subject du jour is that gays are now permitted in the military. Which either proves that all that bunkum about gays damaging morale is untrue because the one time you need a high morale is during a war, or that the one time the White House is happy to enlist gays and lesbians is when they stand a reasonable chance of getting killed.
Hamish, a ‘Surgical war’ does not imply zero civilian casualties. Hell, there were casualties from friendly fire in the Gulf War! War is messy, it’s complex, it’s chaotic. Stuff happens. It’s very sad.
Rather, a ‘surgical’ war is one in which smart bombs are used in populated areas to hit militarily important targets while avoiding, as much as possible, civilian collateral damage. Conventional bombs are used on massed troops and heavy installations. Civilians die in all of those places.
But I have never seen a shred of evidence that the U.S. intentionally bombed civilians in any way. First of all, what possible military purpose would that have served? Saddam had already shown complete indifference to the fate of the civilian population. And civilian bombing in the CNN era would have run the risk of turning the public against the war. You can believe that Bush is the most evil man that walked the face of the Earth, but he certainly wasn’t going to bomb civilians just for yucks.
But I think it says a lot about your anti-American prejudice that you believe that George Bush is a deranged serial murderer who would love to kill thousands of innocent people, simply because he was head of the CIA.
I suggest you stop listening to idiotic left-wing professors and start widening your reading material a bit. You sound like you’ve been pretty thoroughly indoctrinated.
As for proof that Bin Laden was involved - I suspect that much of that proof is coming from intelligence sources outside the U.S. And the U.S. is at war. So if you are looking for a detailed information that would reveal the source, get used to disappointment. The government has said that it will produce the evidence when it can do so without harming the effort. You’ll just have to accept that.
And we know that Bin Laden is not innocent - he’s been on the FBI most-wanted list for a long time before September 11. And he’s the head of one of the only terrorist organizations that has the resources to pull this off, and the people that have been captured so far all have ties to his organization. So even the public information we’ve seen so far is good enough for me.
But note that the U.S. is deploying troops all over the world, and not just near Afghanistan. It’s entirely possible that the U.S. has evidence of involvement by other countries, but they are holding it close and publically focusing on Bin laden in order to keep those other countries off guard and preventing them from alerting their forces. I would not be surprised at all if one of these days we get a ‘Breaking News’ report that says Iraq, Syria, Yemen, or some other despotic country is under attack. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I’ve read Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars and would be interested on what he has to say.
The US hitting communication lines was a neccesity of the war. It was vital to ensure that commanders could not rely orders or information to their troops.
I’ve been trying to find info on the water treatment plants, but it has been difficult. Any search yields a thousand sites of leftist propaganda that provides statements like “The delibrete destruction of water treatment plants by the US is tantamount to the attempted genocide of the Iraqi people!” which really is no help at all. The assumptions that A)we did it, B)on purpose, C)for the express purpose of killing as many Iraqis as possible are all assumed as fact by these sites and they make no pretence at even trying to be fair or accurate in their reportings. If the US had wanted to commit genocide, we’d have dumped nerve agent, blamed it as an accidental mistake by Saddam and been done with it.
I did find a 1999 US state department report that, as one would expect, blames everything on Saddam.
While the report is of course biased, it does make the important point that the Iraqi government is almost certainly hindering the process of getting humanitarian aid to its own people for the purposes of propaganda. Judging by the left’s complete and utter belief that the US is soley responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi people, the true cause of which they make no effort to discern, the Iraqi government’s plan has certainly been a grim success.
Blackclaw: Thanks for your interest. I’ll return to the library tomorrow, find the book I quoted, and post some direct quotations in re: water treatment plants.
December: Did you deliberately set out to be as personally offensive to Hamish as possible, or did it just happen?
Incidentally, I just asked Hamish whether, as you suggest, he believes that the US is entirely, 100% responsible for the suffering of the Iraqis, or whether Saddam Hussein is responsible for a substantial quantity of it.
After he recovered from his laughter fit, he assured me that he is well aware that Saddam is quite substantially to blame.
He and I don’t believe it is unreasonable to suggest that Saddam and Bush are both to blame for the suffering of the Iraqi people.
Everytime I think I have a good battle shaping up here in GD, folks start trying to get all reasonable on me! I’m simply not going to let another good debate slip through my grasp!
So um… I’m going to place all the blame on Saddam. I admit freely that the ground I have chosen may not be the most defensible, but I’m going to give it a go anyway. So load up your logic cannon and take your best shot.
I’m quite aware of the chaos of war. That’s precisely my point. Knowing about that chaos, is it worth unleashing it to catch one man? Especially when civilian casualties are likely? Is that justice?
Serial killer? No. I’ve seen no evidence he’s personally killed anyone. But he was director of the CIA when they put Suharto in power. Given the results in East Timor, I feel that, among other things, shows a lack of concern with human life.
As for there being no evidence, perhaps there would be, if anyone had taken the accusations seriously enough to investigate. If similar accusations were made against any head of state outside the West, I’m quite sure someone would have looked into it.
Ahem.
Sam Stone, this belongs in the Pit. I don’t pretend to know anything about you, and I suggest you don’t make similar assumptions about me. I’m not going to enumerate all the events in my life that made me politically active on the Left. Suffice to say, being gay has given me some insight into the arbitrary cruelty of the religious right, and being poor has shown me the compassionless, arbitrary logic of the neo-liberal right. My realization that a better world was possible and passion to have some small part in building that world had already formed by the time I’d reached university. And my base of reading is quite wide – lately I’ve read more from the right-wing perspective than from the left.
No, I don’t speak for all Canadians. Neither do you. I don’t recall voting for or against you, and you are not an oracle of public opinion. The opinion polls claim the public is ambivalent, and that in spite of his rhetoric, that seems to be our Prime Minister’s view as well – fortunately, we have not yet committed any troops.
You have seemed eager, at every moment, to marginalize my opinion. As if left-wing thought in this country had ceased to exist, simply because the Liberals have vanished from the Left and the NDP has ceased to be much of a political force. Do you have any idea how many NDP supporters I spoke with who voted for Chrétien out of fear of Stockwell Day? Yet the ideas that the Left represents – the social safety net, health care, even the environment – are becoming more and more crucial to the public.
And even if they were not, your imputation that I am some fringe wacko simply because I raise valid questions about the value of human life is offensive. Your level of discussion towards me has been patronizing. I will not be treated like a small child simply because I do not share your view.
Your apologies on behalf of Canada for my opinions are presumptive. I am quite certain you would be offended if I did the same. And if you and your friends do not share my opinions, so be it. Unless your personal circle includes 30 million Canadians, please do not speak for the country.
As for asking questions, discussing ideas and beliefs, that is precisely what a debate involves. Questioning received wisdom – in this case the necessity of the poorly named Operation Infinite Justice – is, to me, a sign of maurity, not naïveté.
In short, lay off the ad hominem attacks.
As for the other points you raised in your last post.
Yes, we know bin Laden is guilty of other crimes, but would the public be willing to go along with this war if they knew he wasn’t guilty of this atrocity? It’s also my understanding that there are at least four other terorist organizations capable of pulling this off, and it could, instead, be the intelligence department of a hostile country, such as Iraq.
As for the trust you place in the CIA to look out for our interests while remaining under a cloak of secrecy, and trust in our governments to make the right decisions in wartime – well, let’s just say I find it very, very ironic that you have accused me of being naïve.
No I never thought Saddam was an angel. And just for the record, I think the Taliban is worse. A few years ago, when I was an editor, I wrote an attack on moral relativism and the Taliban. And frankly, if there were some way of driving the Taliban out of power without hitting ordinary Afghanis, I’d probably be for it.
My point was this – if we go into war, we’re only going to make a bad situation worse, and ordinary people are going to suffer and die because of it. I can’t believe something like that could be called justice. Nor do I believe that this is about self-defence, even if bin Laden is responsible, since al-Qaeda stretches around the world and killing bin Laden is only likely to bring an even worse retaliation, destabilize governments, and galvanize a good chunk of the world against the US and its allies. From both a moral and a rational perspective, this seems a very ill-considered war.
Yesterday, the CBC announced that the Taliban had seized most of the food in the country, further starving the population in preparation for a seige against NATO forces. The Taliban did this, but we have to realize that we have some responsibility, too. We know things like this happen in wartime. NATO has simply accepted these sorts of things as necessary. Innocent people are going to die in this war, possibly more than did in the initial attack.
As for Saddam, the man is mentally unstable and paranoid. He seems to have shown as little concern for his people as Bush did for the Iraqis.
Much of my criticism of the US stems from two things – the premise for the war, and its conduct. The premise was a defence of poor little Kuwait against big bad Iraq, which sort of ignores that Kuwait is a dictatorship so awful, it falls somewhere between Iraq and the Taliban. The war was about oil. If it was about justice, the US would have moved in when the Kurds were being killed.
As for the conduct, I’ve discussed that in above posts.
It would be quite difficult to make the situation worse. Afganistan was already well on its way to a humanitarian disaster. With the arrest of Humanitarian aid workers, relief efforts were already in peril and the mass starvation that we now fear my approaching may have already been on the way.
Killing Bin Lauden may destablize his terror network as his confederates turn on each other for control. Or perhaps another monster would quickly take his place. If we kill him as well and perhaps the next as well it is possible that rational thought might cross the remainders’ minds that their current actions doom their political agenda and lead to a futile death.
After the WTC attack threats of retaliation are meaningless. They intend to kill us anyway.
On a moral perspective it could be argued that our inaction in response to the Taliban until now has been morally unsound. On a rational perspective, it is irrational to believe that continued inaction will achieve a different result.
We do not have any responsibility for it. As you say, the Taliban did this. We have not fired a shot so far. That the Afghani people are fleeing simply shows that they understand international dynamics. No nation on earth will tolerate an attack against itself without some response if it is capable of doing so. That is one of the reasons for forming a nation state, so that the collective might of the people can respond to aggression and deter future attack. As far as I know, only one nation has ever proved an exception to this and that nation is Israel which held back despite attacks upon its citizens during the Persian Gulf War, yet that nation got little credit or appreciation from Arab states for such restraint. If other nations do not appreciate restraint, why should we engage in it? If we are evil simply for being, we should at least show some force to act as deterrence. But the truth is that a much larger chunk of the world is behind us now than is against us. It is illogical to be held captive by a minority of the world that uses violence to get its way.
But Bush did show concern for the Iraqis, as evidenced by the fact that there are still Iraqis. We could have toppled their government, carpet-bombed their cites, and destroyed their capacity to exist as a nation state. We did not. During WW2 the steps that the US took in the Persian Gulf war to lessen the number of casualties would not have been considered or even technologically possible. It is simply not true to say that the US took no steps to lessen civilian casualties.
It is certainly true that the US acted because its vital resources in Saudi Arabia were endangered, but it it really fair to play mind reader and propose that that was the only reason for the actions. The crimes being committed by the Iraqis against the Kuwaitis were trully terrible. There was considerable evidence of torture and executionsd. Thousands of Kuwaitis are still missing to this day. The Kuwaiti government may be a dictatorship, but it certainly is above the likes of Iraq or the Taliban and in any case its people deserved a better fate than to be left in the hands of Saddam’s despotic regime.
The US could not act in defense of the Kurds. There was no support for it. The Arab support for the US to act came only after another Arab nation was attacked. The nations that provide the US with their military bases from which to strike (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) cared little about the Kurds until Iraq acted against Kuwait.
As for the conduct of the war, wars are violent confusing things and people die in them. Despite this, they occasionally still need to be fought. The US and its allies conducted themselves in the Persian Gulf War as well as they could at the time and still be successful in gaining victory.
