A Sep 27 fatwa issued by a group of Islamic legal scholars in the United States has me scratching my head. From the Washington Post, Islamic Scholars Say U.S. Muslim Soldiers Must Fight for Country:
The clause “without a justifiable reason” seems peculiar. Maybe the fatwa was poorly worded. Although the term non-combatants was not defined in the opinion, I take it as a reference to anyone not actively involved in the war effort, which would exclude soldiers, spies, and civilian workers in the MIC. So, when is it acceptable to kill non-combatants?
When it’s incidental to the purpose of the action, is unavoidable, and the action is neccesary. Lets say that your opponent has missles armed with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, and is going to launch them at your country/troops. The only way that this attack can be stopped is by an airstrike or bombing of the missiles. Your enemy knows this, and has placed non-combatants at the place the missile is stored and will be launched. In that case, while regrettable, bombing the missile site is still neccesary, even though it will likely result in the death of non-combattants.
Are more non-combatants killed in modern wars than they were in the good old days of armies marching toward each other in open fields?
That would seem to be a drawback to the modern notion of Total War: attack the entire enemy country. Not just the oppsoing army, not just strategic sites, but everywhere. I mean, how many innocent civilians were “accidentally” killed in, say, the American Civil War? (That’s a rhetorical question, BTW.)
Depends on what “good old days” you refer to. In the 19th and early 20th century some (mainly European) wars were fought without severe civilian losses. But if you go back on your timescale to when armies lived off the land, and the loss of one year’s harvest meant starvation - if a war went on long enough, soldiers were bad news, never mind if they were theirs, yours or marauders on their own.
Middle age siege warfare certainly wasn’t easy on the non-combatants, either. They weren’t allowed to leave by those laying siege, and they were little more than useless mouths to feed for those under siege.
The concept of Total War had been practiced for ages before Clausewitz wrote it down. Going back through the history of warfare, the idea of noncombatants being owed any protection is a relatively new one - Rome didn’t really offer any protection to any Cartheginian (sp?) noncombatants. What protected the civilians was that the actual battles generally speaking were way smaller affairs than they are today.
S. Norman
Well…never. If we justify something we excuse it and say it’s ok that X happened because ___. It isn’t ok. It may be understandable, and necessary to stop worse things from happening, but it’s not ok that innocent people die. The loss of innocent lives should always be a sorrowful thing, because that, our ablity to feel the wrongness of it, is one of the few things that prevents wholesale slaughter of people who have done nothing wrong.
I see your point, Norman. And I thank you for articulating my point for me.
Who is really a non-combatant these days? Where the “innocent” German people who allowed Hitler to reek havoc on the the rest of the world really all that innocent? They did the work that gave Germany the wealth to terrorize all of its neighbors. But they had no choice… they were only following orders. BS. Many knew exactly what was happening and were working feverishly for the German war machine. They were not innocent and their deaths, whether intentional or accidental, helped the allies win WWII. If you live in a country that wages war… whether justified or not… your innocent death is always justified by the other side.
This same topic has been circulating through my school newspaper’s Letters to the Editor section lately, so maybe I can reiterate some of the general points made there.
Most people point directly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples. At each, roughly 100,000 people were killed and maybe twice that died later of radiation poisoning and injuries. These were almost completely “non-coms”. However, forcing Japan’s surrender in this way, depending on the estimator, saved maybe a million American lives… and many times more Japanese.
With that background, were these killings then justified? From a biblical standpoint, no, “Thou shalt not kill”. But from that standpoint War in general is unjustifiable, as killing soldiers is just as bad. I am not a great bible scholar, and I don’t know how they got around that point in the wars of the Old Testament , but in a simplistic way it works.
So, again, were these justifiable? My own opinion is yes, as well as much of Cal Poly (my school). In a situation in which killing a few can save many, I feel it is justified to kill anybody. Japanese philosophy backs this sentiment with the idea of Katsujinken, “Sword which gives life”. The idea here is that while a sword is an instrument of death, if it is used to kill so that other lives can be saved, then justice has been served. Oh course, that is only scratching the surface, but that is the basic substance.
In summary, I think, and I think most will agree, that if killing some non-coms can save many more, it is justifiable.