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The Self-Deception of Civilized Warfare -Global Policy Forum - International Justice The Self-Deception of Civilized Warfare
By Matthew Riemer
Yellow Times
April 10, 2003The Western mind in many ways is a mind preoccupied with rules and regulations, officialdom and doctrine, accreditation and certification, standardization and universalization. Every human endeavor must inevitably be analyzed with the scrutiny of the "scientific method," defined and then categorized if possible. It's little wonder then that this same mind would eventually come around to applying this to one of the most inescapable and natural, yet perhaps most unfortunate, of all human behaviors: war. Such intellectual and philosophical exercises regarding warfare are manifested today in what are known as the Geneva Conventions.
Essentially, the Conventions hoped to establish rules of conduct for armed conflicts that would transform something utterly barbaric into something a wee bit more "civilized" and orderly. And while this is a noble intent, the attempt to do so is indeed ironic, if not, to be blunt, completely absurd.
Let's take an example. Country X has just invaded country Y; soldiers on both sides are doing their darnedest to kill one another, to blow each other to bits. Decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, mutilations, the whole deal. But then suddenly when and/if a soldier is severely injured, captured, or surrendering, the enemy who was just trying to kill him must now take every care to avoid killing -- or even mistreating -- him for fear of violating the rules of "civilized" warfare. (There was recently a photo of a U.S. marine carrying a wounded Iraqi soldier to safety. CNN ran an article on mobile surgical tents where emergency procedures were carried out on Iraqi soldiers.)
What the conventions have done is to define conditions in which killing is permissible or even moral. For the most part, they have simply retread ground rules individuals already "feel" impulsively and instinctively. Most soldiers entering a bombed-out building hours after air strikes are less likely to shoot the badly injured, unarmed teenager they find than the opposing soldier charging them, gun in hand. Individuals are, for the most part, always individuals and interact with one another in this fashion, even when they "represent" different countries/cultures during times of war.
So when the soldier above approaches the injured teenager, it is their unique personalities meeting, not the United States and Iraq. Most human beings, perhaps in the manifestation of some kind of inherent and universal moral reflex, would refrain from killing the injured individual and certainly don't need some international code to tell them not to. Those who do, needless to say, aren't going to be influenced much by the mere existence of some abstract "rule."
One of the purposes of the Conventions, then, is to codify such visceral and generally accepted "rules" of warfare -- perhaps just to make them "official." So on the moral battleground of today, it is a "war crime" to beat, abuse, or kill prisoners of war, to kill or intentionally attack civilians in any way, to destroy key infrastructure that civilian populations rely upon for their continued well being.
This is one of the reasons why the Conventions are in part futile and rather silly, because they simply attempt to indoctrinate behavior already ingrained in most emotionally well-developed individuals. And, as mentioned above, for those incapable of making these decisions based upon their own code of morality, the fact that the Geneva Conventions have cataloged such actions as "immoral," "illegal," or "war crimes" is of dubious effectiveness, even if such cataloging is backed up with the capacity for legal action.
These observations in no way should be construed as a dismissal of the very concept of international law or standards of conduct, only a way in which to look upon conflicts from a psychological perspective and consider the effectiveness of the laws that attempt to govern them.
Unfortunately, there are other purposes -- ones, perhaps, unintentional at first and certainly well-less advertised -- that the Conventions have come to serve, namely the interests of the dominant military powers of any given age.
Over the decades of incessant warfare since their acceptance, the Conventions have come to be used by pre-eminent states to justify their own military endeavors while demonizing or rendering illegal those of less powerful, and inevitably, less militarily advanced ones -- another reason why the Conventions are rather ineffectual. And, of course, the United States' war of questionable legality in Iraq at the moment is a perfect example.
If the overwhelming superiority in every imaginable way, which the U.S. holds over Iraq and has chosen to use, isn't criminal in and of itself, certainly the awesome array and destructiveness of the weapons used by the U.S. is.
Land mines, for the most part, have been relegated for use in guerrilla warfare and are energetically denounced by every human rights group on the planet. Many are never triggered and lay dormant, killing the random passerby years after the fact. In Vietnam, dozens of people a year, typically children and farmers, are still killed by mines that were laid by the United States.
Yet today, the U.S. uses cluster bombs with great effect and moral certainty. The cluster bomb is essentially the new way of laying mines: a larger bomb containing hundreds of "bomblets" is exploded at a set height above ground, causing the mini-parachute-wearing "bomblets" to land perfectly spread out in the area of a given target. Either ironically or quite sinisterly, the "bomblets" happen to be a bright yellow color. Because of this, children are quite attracted to them and usually make up a good percentage of the victims. During the Afghanistan campaign, the food-aid packages air dropped by the U.S. just so happened to uncannily resemble unexploded "bomblets." Many a hungry Afghan went to their grave imagining they were about to dine on peanut butter and jelly from the Americans. The morality of the cluster bomb is never pondered by those in power and is just one of many insidiously destructive and deranged weapons used by the United States in its by-the-book, lily-white military endeavors.
So while one is considering the morality of cluster bombs, it's rather amusing to hear the United States complaining about "irregular" fighters who have committed the heinous act of not wearing a uniform -- an example of how the Conventions cater to power.
How are people living in a destitute land supposed to raise the money to manufacture potentially hundreds of thousands of uniforms? What if the infrastructure is so destroyed that there are no factories to make them in the first place? What if militias don't want to take the time to create some insignia and sew it onto their sleeves? Or what if people are simply fighting to defend their homeland and families from outside aggressors who have no appreciation or understanding of those they've chosen to make war on? When's the last time you've heard someone in the Bush administration complain about the treacherous acts and war crimes of the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan who drove out the Soviets after a decade of fighting just because they didn't wear uniforms? When the administration of George H. W. Bush encouraged the Shi'a and Kurd uprisings following the first Gulf War, were they concerned whether or not those fighting were donned with the appropriate insignia? Or did they just care about whose side they were on?
Yet the U.S., because of its economic superiority, is able to make war with things like sanctions. Why don't the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed through the implementation of austere, U.S.-led, U.N. sanctions constitute a "war crime"? The sanctions were maintained even though those responsible for their perpetuation were conscious of the fact that they were having a disastrous effect upon the Iraqi people, most notably causing widespread outbreaks of previously eradicated diseases among the very young leading to an explosion in the mortality rate of children under five. Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even acknowledged this exact view of the sanctions on national television. Of course, sanctions are a tool of the powerful, not the weak, and therefore aren't of great concern to those of the civilized world. Conversely, actions of the weak, like suicide killings, which do far less damage and kill far fewer people, are dramatized and exploited by the media as being the means of barbarous, despicable figures.
It's also worth mentioning that the United States was essentially founded on guerrilla warfare -- and developed many of the tactics used today by "irregular" forces throughout the globe -- while fighting the stiff and overly official British who detested the colonial and uncouth rebel scum.
War is a dirty, imbecilic catastrophe. To try and make rules for it -- ones which are inevitably biased and selective -- and then create distinctions between "civilized" and "savage" varieties while politically exploiting these suspect divisions is the height of cynicism and moral delusion.
[Matthew Riemer has written for years about a myriad of topics, such as: philosophy, religion, psychology, culture, and politics. He studied Russian language and culture for five years and traveled in the former Soviet Union in 1990. In the midst of a larger autobiographical/cultural work, Matthew is the Director of Operations at YellowTimes.org. He lives in the United States.]
Matthew Riemer encourages your comments: mriemer@YellowTimes.org
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