scm: You are absolutely incorrect about the bombing. Have you been reading the numerous threads on this board regarding that? “What may be civilians” is not an honest appraisal of what the military (at least our military) is doing. They’re bombing legitimate military targets. Try to wrap your mind around that, please.
Only the loser of a war commits war crimes. I didn’t see any Americans at trial in Nuremburg, and if Iraq repulses America, we wont see any Iraqis on trial in the Hauge.
-C
You mean only losers get convicted of war crimes.
It’s doubtful any trials would take place in the Hague. Probably Qatar or something.
War has rules to prevent any sort of moral sanction for things like the Holocaust, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanjing, the My Lai Massacre, Andersonville, Bosnia, yaddita yaditta …
Need I go on?
But again, Zenster, only the losers ever get nailed for stuff like that. Now, you might have an argument from causality here (only losers in war ever need to use such tactics in the modern era, etc) but it remains that currently the victors get to point the moral compass wherever they want.
-C
The victors have always, and will always write history.
I strongly disagree about victors pointing the moral compass in whichever direction they want. Some things are so immoral that winning a thousand wars will never justify them.
If you don’t believe in war crimes, why not just nuke Baghdad and be done with it?
It would be wrong, that’s why. War crimes are just like any other crimes: they exist to show a shared standard of behavior.
The psychological warfare argument is a false one, as one would hope was demonstrated by the current conflict. Wars are never fought between peoples. They are by definition fought between governments, and governments in a fight for their survival don’t care about people.
Counterexamples: Japan and Alabama.
Trinopus
As we humans become more enlightened as a species, the hope is that we are moving from war and will one day abandon it. Seeing that we are in a transition, and how wars are barbaric and inhuman, we made rules to reduce as much sufferings as we can.
War crimes have exactly the same purpose and legitmacy as “peace crimes”. They are a self-imposed (at a national/societal level) bound upon acceptable behavior.
The notion of “war crimes” is an extension of Just War Theory. This article - http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/phil/blphil_eth_warjust.htm - states the criteria for a just war include:
Just Cause
Right Intention
Legitimate Authority
Last Resort
Probability of Success
Proportionality
Noncombatant Immunity
The three main monotheistic religions generally agree on these principles. It should be pointed out that Saddam’s religion, IMO and to what extent it is a religion, is Stalinism. He will not hold himself to the standards of a just war, making the coalition’s job more of an uphill swim.
War crimes are sort of analagous to police crimes. The practice was for the military organization having some members who went outside accepted practice to punish those members internally. Like the Internal Affairs department polices the police.
When military or police internal affairs can’t or won’t handle the job someone else has to step in and in war crimes this is a relatively new field so the procedures are still unsettled.
There is unquestionably an element of “the winner decides” especially when the war crimes charges are taken down to low ranking soldiers. It can be difficult to decide how punishment is to be apportioned to the superior and the underling.
As an example, late in WWII my bomb group was briefed for a mission to a German town. We were told in the briefing that the Germans had started using fake red cross markings on military targets so we should ignore all such markings at the target. We had no independent way of confirming that was true and had we lost the war might very well have been tried for a violation of the rules of war.
The expectation would be that the winner punishes his own criminals and that happens sometimes, but not always. A US lieutenant and sargeant were courtmartialed for the shooting of about 75 German prisoners during the Normandy invasion (Omar Bradley, A General’s Life). However some German prisoners were shot during the Battle of the Bulge because of garbled communications (John Toland, Battle: Story of the Bulge) and no one was punished for it.
It seems like your mixing up jus ad bellum and jus in bello. (The last two are jus in bello.) About.com puts them together, but I’ve always understood them as separate things. Whether to go to war and how to fight a war are two different questions.
I prefer the au jus in belly. 