Honor on the Battlefield

1
Honor on the Battlefield

• Conduct of War and Law of War

2
Introduction How to Prosecute a Just War

• Suppose the conditions of Jus ad Bellum (or the
  legalist paradigm) have been met e.g., Iraq,
  Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda . . .
• Does it matter how we conduct the war?
• CWO Hugh Thompson on stopping the My Lai massacre
  in Vietnam
• this was NOT what we came here to do

3
Contrast Operation Iraqi Freedom

• LtCol Tim Collins, we go to liberate, not to
  conquer
• If someone surrenders to you, remember they have
  that right in international law, and ensure that
  one day they go home to their family
• You will be shunned unless your conduct is of
  the highest, for your deeds will follow you down
  history

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The Warriors Honor(Michael Ignatieff)
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Walzer The War Convention

• I propose to call the set of articulated norms,
  customs, professional codes, legal precepts,
  religious and philosophical principles, and
  reciprocal arrangements that shape our judgments
  of military conduct the war convention (Walzer,
  p. 44)
• the soldiers who do the fighting, though they
  can rarely be said to have chosen to fight, lose
  the rights they are supposedly defending
• They gain war rights as combatants and potential
  prisoners, but they can now be attacked and
  killed at will by their enemies
• Soldiers fighting for an aggressor (or rogue)
  state are not themselves criminals the moral
  equality of soldiers requires that soldiers
  fighting against an aggressor state have no
  license to become criminals they are subject to
  the same restraints as their opponents, and their
  war rights are the same as those of their
  opponents
• The war convention rests first on a certain view
  of combatants, which stipulates their battlefield
  equality. But it rests more deeply on a certain
  view of noncombatants, which holds that they are
  men and women with rights and that they cannot be
  used for some military purpose, even if it is a
  legitimate purpose Walzer, pp. 136-37

6
War Crimes Soldiers and their Officers

• Officers responsibility for the behavior
• of their troops (Gen. Yamashita case)
• In the Supreme Court's decision, rendered in
  February 1946, the Court articulated a clear
  standard for military commanders with respect to
  the actions of their subordinates. In responding
  to General Yamashita's assertion that he did not
  personally participate in or order the commission
  of these offenses, the Court described the heart
  of the charge as being "an unlawful breach of
  duty by General Yamashita as an army commander
  to control the operations of members of his
  command by 'permitting them to commit' the
  extensive and widespread atrocities." The Court
  recognized that international law, through the
  law of war, "presupposes that violations of the
  law of war are to be avoided through the control
  of the operations of war by commanders who to
  some extent are responsible for their
  subordinates."

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Other Examples of Actions that could constitute
War Crimes

• Treatment of Prisoners of War (Walzers examples
  of killing POWs (p. 440)
• Deliberate targeting of non-combatants (p.
  442-446)
• Collateral damage double effect (Gen. Bradley
  at St. Lo, allied strategic bombing U.S. first
  use of nuclear weapons against Japan)

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Can Non-combatant status be sustained??

• Walzer and Nagel cite historical cases where this
  distinction seems to have been overridden by
  military necessity or the doctrine of double
  effect
• Is it fishy to classify conscripted soldiers as
  legitimate targets, and to exempt political
  leaders, weapons makers, and other loyal civilian
  supporters as innocent noncombatants
• In the present context of radically asymmetrical
  conventional war, he finds the distinction
  clearly biased in favor of the large powers
  (e.g., 9/11 or the U.S.S. Cole)

9
Inconsistencies in our Position

• Walzer and Nagel give limited approval to allied
  bombing of German cities, but condemn the U.S.
  nuclear attacks on Japan
• This (claims Reiman) is inconsistent the first
  principle of calamity ethics is that
  small-scale interpersonal interactions are
  governed by Kantian considerations, whereas
  utilitarian calculations supervene in large-scale
  international interactions
• The second principle of calamity ethics is that
  the acts-omissions distinction (and the
  significance of intentionality in double
  effect) tend to disappear in large-scale
  interactions, replaced by a positive duty not
  only to refrain from harm, but to try actively to
  prevent it (Hiroshima?)

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Problems with Reimans Problem

• Chairman Mao Zedongs asinine ethics Is it
  really true in war that winning always trumps
  fighting well?
• Walzer labels such views the utilitarianism of
  extremity (p. 231)
• Suppose we allow these opinions and observations
  to destroy the distinction between war and
  murder, and between the warrior and the terrorist
• then military professionals engaged in the
  defense of liberty and rights, or the enforcement
  of justice, are little better than overzealous
  domestic police officers whose behavior has sunk
  to the level the mere criminals they pursue

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The Purpose of Warfare

• What, then is the point of war? Against
  pacifism, JWT holds that war is sometimes
  necessary when its goal is the defense of liberty
  and rights, or the enforcement of justice.
• Yet, if in their conduct, soldiers routinely
  violate these principles, then the war is lost,
  even if all the military battles are won
• Baron von Clausewitz characterized war as the
  pursuit of political ends through non-political
  means thus such a result dooms the political
  ends of war-fighting

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The Contemporary Version of a Warriors Code

• We require of the intervening forces not merely
  that their controlling interests and command
  structures lack any personal conflicts of
  interest in the enforcement of justice,
  protection of rights, and establishment of peace
• We also require that they be willing to incur
  risk and put themselves in harms way for the
  sake of these moral ideals, and with an end of
  securing (and certainly not themselves
  threatening or destroying) the blessings of
  rights and liberty to the vulnerable and
  endangered victims whose desperate plight
  initially prompts the international call for
  military intervention
• In humanitarian (or counter-terrorist)
  interventions, as in domestic law enforcement, we
  cannot and we do not forsake our laws and moral
  principles in order to enforce and protect them.