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The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man
An anonymous reader writes "The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by Yale's Stephen L. Carter entitled 'The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man.' He provides a retrospective on the War in Iraq and discusses the ethical and legal implications of the War on Terror and 'anticipatory self-defense' in the form of drones and targeted killings going forward. He writes: 'Iraq was war under the beta version of the Bush Doctrine. The newer model is represented by the slaying of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen deemed a terror threat. The Obama Administration has ratcheted the use of remote drone attacks to unprecedented levels — the Bush Doctrine honed to rapier sharpness. The interesting question about the new model is one of ethics more than legality. Let us assume the principal ethical argument pressed in favor of drone warfare — to wit, that the reduction in civilian casualties and destruction of property means that the drone attack comports better than most other methods with the principle of discrimination. If this is so, then we might conclude that a just cause alone is sufficient to justify the attacks. ... But is what we are doing truly self-defense?'"
Why not spin off SlashPol now?
Dark Reflection
assassination by any name is just as illegal
so is torture and a war of aggression
It can be stretched to mean defense of any US interests abroad. How many military actions since WW2 have truly been about protecting the homeland from attack?
Were these ever about self-defense?
The Iraqis were NEVER going to attack us. The doctrine is a lie.
The Taliban / Pashtuns were NEVER going to attack us. The doctrine is a lie.
Al Qaeda was an is a huge threat and needs an asymmetric warfare response to its tactics.
Never forget that we adopted the Blitzkrieg and our modern army's systems from the Nazis all we needed to become the monster wee defeated was a president to fucking stupid to know that he was a fascist ( in the classical Mussolini definition ) and a people to complacent and stupid to know that we had been cooped from within.
Try using that one in court...
Your honor, I shot my next door neighbour because I knew in a week's time he would start some shit.
There is no way this can be considered self-defense. Defense by definition is stopping an aggressor. This is executing people suspected of terrorism without trial.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
After all, they could grow up to be resentful teen agers that could vandalize my property. So I really had no choice but to slit their throats, chop them up into kibble and feed them to the hogs.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
War gains power, profit, and political coin for those in charge and for their lackeys. The USA will have war without end, what voters want is irrelevant.
Stuff that matters.
The morality is irrelevant. For the family of the "collateral damage" the US will be exactly the same as any other terrorist.
This kind of thinking will only result in MORE people thinking that terrorism is a legitimate way to combat terrorists. Guess what the result will be.
It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it.
...the real problem is making enemies faster than you can kill them. One could start to argue that you need to kill those who 'could' kill you too - then we'd truly have never-ending war... until some radical nation just decides to end it all, and bring about mutually assured destruction.
...that the reduction in civilian casualties and destruction of property means that the drone attack comports better than most other methods with the principle of discrimination.
relabel every corpse created as a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant," and bang! Less "civilian" casualties.
Winning the hearts and minds, one bullshit semantic after the next; the sad part? it fucking works.
What sheep we've become...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If it was one bullet, I would agree with you.
The problem is that we use rockets launched from drones. And those rockets take out an entire building when we are "targeting" one person.
So I better kill you, because you said you'd kill me if I was going to kill you.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Nope, you would never be acquitted for that, even if you could prove 100% that he was going to do something next week.
You would be expected to present your evidence to the police and let them handle it. In the case of international actions, that would mean bringing it before the U.N.
Alternatively, you could just be ready when he actually did do something.
The question posed was whether it was really "self-defense." This is an important question because the UN Charter allows nation-states to take action in self-defense." Thus every tinpot dictator, power-mad army, or simply state that otherwise wants to use violence without the sanction of the security council--i.e. what would otherwise be an illegal war--claims that their attacks are motivated by self-defense.
So if the U.S. wants to be able to target people in drone strikes (or otherwise, e.g. Osama Bin Laden) in what would otherwise be illegal acts of war committed within the territory of a foreign nation with which we are not at war, we have to be able to justify it as self-defense. Otherwise, it's illegal. If it's illegal, nobody can stop it, but it still undermines the power of the United Nations to declare certain wars illegal--which makes it harder to respond to illegal wars in the future, easier for warmongers to justify aggressive wars, etc...
Of course, the flipside of that is that every time someone takes a warlike act, calls it self-defense, and gets away with it, that expands the boundaries of what "self-defense" means on the international stage.
At any rate, this whole debate is why the Security Council passed the resolution they did for the second Iraq war--it was deliberately ambiguous, so that the United States could claim the war was approved by the security council (and thus not illegal) and the other countries could claim that they had not approved the war; it was effectively a nominal nod to the power of the security council to decide which wars are legal.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
IMHO, any preemptive military action is damned difficult to justify as self-defense.
However, I cannot agree with the stated argument that poses this question to start with:
From the summary:
Bush is blamed as the source in this essay, but he was just the most recent and blatant example since WWII.
Think about it...we can blame WWII on Pearl Harbor, but since winning that one, we started becoming more meddlesome globally.
Korean War(War on Communism)-we got run out
Vietnam War(War on Communism)-we got run out
Global(War on Drugs)-we are losing that one
Global(War on Terror)-we lost that one as soon as we declared it a 'War'
Not to mention Panama, but we did have one winning moment in the clusterfuck of Granada!
And we are continuing that decades old losing streak in the Middle East to this day.
Methinks there could be a pattern here.....
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Okay, what military was it? Who's their Commander in Chief? Where is their version of the UCMJ published?
Or have you redefined "military target" to mean "apartment buildings"?
Here, why don't YOU define what is NOT a "military target" by YOUR "logic"?
If they were not dispensable why would we be sending them into lethal danger by the truck-load?
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Let me rephrase that as "Kill those who would kill you for invading their homes, establishing oppressive regimes and exploiting your country's resources." Who is defending themselves against whom here, exactly? Pick up a history book and read for yourself which two nations put the vast majority of weapons into the hands of those people the US is now remotely blasting the shit out of, and who trained them and essentially funded them for decades. Hint: It is the same two who on several occasions very nearly turned the whole world into an irradiated waste land over their big heads.
People around the world do not need all that much encouragement to resent and attack the USA and the rest of our Western countries; we have given them more than enough reasons.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
For an example, read through some of the posts here.
There are people in the USofA who seem to WANT endless war.
As long as it is against someone far away and weak enough to never pose any real threat to them.
But send our military in? Hell yeah!
Kill people with drones? Fuck yeah!
Borrow money to do the above? Hell fucking yeah!
I spent seven months in Kandahar City as part of ISAF. I say this so you know that I have seen the ground truth, not just whatever story comes out of whatever news outlet you care to believe.
The Taliban were providing direct aid and sanctuary to the people who carries out the 9/11 attacks, and then refused to hand them over for prosecution - or indeed, to enforce any limits on their activities in any way. This makes that regime an active accessory to international terrorism and indeed a legitimate threat.
On top of that, I cannot imagine any group of people less suited to govern a nation than the Taliban. During my tour, a couple of Taliban chose to douse a group of Afghan schoolgirls with concentrated acid, killing some, and horribly disfiguring the others - for the crime of attending school. Not a Western-funded school; an Afghan-started, Afghan-operated school teaching girls to read. This sort of despicable and flatly inhuman act was Taliban policy. There is NOTHING good about the Taliban. They are bigoted narco-thugs who actively seek to erase any sign of civilization, law, and order in the attempt to eliminate opposition to their drug farming slavery campaigns. The Afghan campaign was, is, and remains a just war.
The crying shame of the Bush administration was that, instead of applying a full-court-press to Afghanistan following the initial defeat of the Taliban and seeing the country Marshall Planned back to some form of stability, they took their eyes off the ball to go adventuring in Iraq. This allowed the Taliban to re-invent themselves as an insurgency, rebuild, and become a destabilizing force that has slowed reconstruction to a crawl.
Although the world does not morn the passing of Saddam, Iraq was completely unjustified and the diversion of resources away from Afghanistan is, as far as I'm concerned, criminal. Afghanistan is NOT Iraq.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The big question is what will happen when the shoe is on the other foot? When another country decides that one of our citizens is a threat, do they have the right to level their home with a drone or cruise missile? If the neighbours get wiped out in the process, are they just collateral damage?
The situation in Iran and North Korea have been made much worse by the war in Iraq(and Libya as well). The Ahmadinejad government would not be NEARLY as willing to risk their domestic standing(which is getting worse as the oil embargo hits, as the government often buys popularity with oil revenues) if it thought there wasn't a lot to gain by pursuing nuclear weapons. However, after seeing what happened in Iraq when Saddam DID give up his WMDs, and what happened with North Korea after they tested a nuclear weapon, the regime realizes that the best way to protect itself was to pursue WMDs at all costs.
Bush picked Iraq out of his "axis of evil" precisely because they were the country that was least able to defend itself(at least in a conventional sense). He wanted to score a cheap political victory and he did so by starting a war he thought would maybe last 6 weeks. And more recently Gadafi, who ditched his WMD program, is now dead as well. The message to dictators is clear, want to stay in power? Get weapons. THe world is a far more dangerous place because the man-child of a president decided he wanted to play army.
Monstar L
A doctrine of pre-emptive strike allows anyone to do anything to anyone at any time. All you need is to instill some fear and get away (quite literally) with murder.
I will go with a different interpretation. Although very similar to the "lying" option.
I'll say that they were "blustering" and "posturing" against a subject that the vast majority of voters would say was "not good".
My pessimistic point of view is that those people were doing so in an attempt to distract the public from other events (said events being less favourable to the person blustering) or to make themselves look as tough as their political opponents at the time.
More blustering and posturing. This time on Saddam's part.
I disagree with that. I still think it was the posturing and blustering that so many politicians involve themselves in.
The REAL question is whether the people making those statements were willing to take the political risk of committing the USofA's military.
Talk is cheap.
Soldiers coming home in boxes is very expensive.
I will disagree with that as well.
There were worldwide protests AGAINST our invasion.
The protests were so bad that almost none of our allies going into Afghanistan joined us in our Iraq invasion.
We sent 150,000 troops.
England sent 46,000 troops.
Australia sent 2,000 troops.
Everyone else sent a total of under 2,000 troops.
Talk is cheap.
Dead troops are expensive.
No one else believed the talk enough to risk the political expense of dead troops.
No. It was pretty clear at the time. As evidenced by all those countries that did NOT participate. Even though Iraq is a LOT closer to them (and would have an easier time striking them) than the USofA.
you know, with that kind of logic you're *really* going to be confused by our War on Terror and our War on Drugs.
We don't think to oppose the pursuit of criminals by our police. That's effectively what has happened to the terrorists. This is made much easier with the drone war because we don't take the same sort of causalities. We just play whack-o-mole with the terrorists. And assuming we can manage the politics, we can logistically sustain the campaign indefinitely.
I'm not saying we should or shouldn't. I think he's right in saying that if we don't oppose it soon it will just become an institution like the drug war. This thing that sits there and we do but we don't actually think about it. It just happens. It has it's own momentum, budget, and everyone just expects it to keep rolling along for various reasons forever.
It's possibly too late to stop it already. The CIA has built it into their budget and that is one of the harder budgets to penetrate.
I'm torn... I don't want to fight anyone or kill anyone. But of course I recognize that if people are going out of their way to kill me or people I care for then they must themselves be engaged and destroyed. The whole fat man thin man situation is somewhat confusing in that we're not really dealing with any fat men. It's all thin men... lots of them. It's a very target rich environment. And we're capable of icing them with a high degree of efficiency. But then there's blow back, reprisal, revenge... it just this endless struggle to balance an enemy's fear and hatred. I don't want to be hated. But I do want to be feared if only because I think it will make me safer.
Fear might not be the right term. Respect would be a better term. And i don't mean respect as in liked or admired. I mean respect in the same way you respect a tidal wave, the sun, or a mountain. You don't mess with these forces. They will break you if you don't respect them. That's how I want my nation regarded. Like the mountain, I don't have any ill will against anyone else on the planet. But don't mess with my people or I'm going to find a reason for you to change your mind. Lets just not go there. Everyone go to their little corners and swear peace. First bastard that breaks the peace gets pounded into the ground like a tent peg.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
But is what we are doing truly self-defense?
To answer that question just ask yourself how people in this country would react if some other country started defending themselves in the U.S. the same way.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So as long as someone is a "known combatant" ... any strikes that include (or possibly include) him are okay by you?
And since you are a reasonable person, that must mean that anyone striking at any of OUR people who would be a "known combatant" is NOT a terrorist.
Even if such a strike killed lots of civilians ... ...
In a civilian situation
Say, like the WTC attack. You claim that it was NOT terrorism.
Interesting point of view you have there.
For those who are historically unaware, the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense was NOT originated by the U.S. In fact, the U.S. was on the receiving end of the attack by the British known as "The Caroline incident" that established anticipatory self defense as a part of international law. U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster eventually agreed that nations must have a right to take pre-emptive strikes in the event that "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation".
This is "the Caroline test" used to establish the validity of such strikes under international law, and it's not a trivial standard, as you suppose - simply claiming a need for self-defense is a far cry from satisfying the Caroline test. While this arguably supports actions such as an Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, it clearly would not support actions such as those Obama took in his recent attacks on Libya. Without a credible threat, it's pretty hard to reach the bar set by the Caroline test...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
At the time, the Taliban were not very well understood. They had only been in power a short while, and they were the cousins (in many cases quite literally) of the Mujaheddin who we had supported during the Soviet occupation. There is also a school of thought that if you make someone into a complete pariah, you lose the opportunity to influence their future choices and help them change their ways toward something more acceptable.
It is also worth noting that Afghanistan had been locked in civil war for almost a decade, and the emergence of a strong central government - no matter their ideology - opened the door to the idea that maybe the Afghan ship was finally righting itself. Maybe these new Taliban guys would turn out to be the saviors of Afghan society and the start of something like an Afghan peace.
Sadly, this turned out to not be the case, as the events of 2001 ultimately proved.
You've never made a new friend, only to find out he's really an asshole?
Not that I doubt the ability of Bush and his like to hold their nose and get on with it when there is money to be made, and no doubt there is a certain cynical calculus of self-interest whenever business interests interact with dictators and other less than ideal state governments. I am no fan of Bush. But at the same time, there is no question that the truth about the Taliban had still not fully come to light.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20:20.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I was there, right?
The Taliban constantly pressured the local populace to grow poppy and pot. It was how they financed all their operations. Being Taliban has WAY more to do with drugs than ideology (although you cannot separate the Pashtun from Pashtunwali)
That "the Taliban eliminated poppy farming" trope is a myth. The Taliban eliminated COMPETITION in poppy farming.
ISAF left the poppy farmers alone as a matter of policy, because it meant depriving a farmer of what little livelihood he had left. We pushed alternative crops (wheat, grapes, pomegranates) very hard, and where the security situation was good the farmers would happily take up the alternate crops (poppy farming is backbreaking manual labour) the Taliban were always keen t apply pressure to get the farmers growing poppy again.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book