Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102240280
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY GREG RAVER-LAMPMAN/ LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The oil release was just one "rule" Saddam broke. His government has taken hostages. It has tortured prisoners. It has poisoned its own citizens.
Most people consider Saddam an international thug, bent solely on the preservation of his dictatorship.
Still, accusing Saddam of war violations leaves a nagging question: Just what are "rules" of war? Who enforces them? How can something as uncivilized as war follow rules?
The question has haunted theologians, philosophers and professional soldiers for centuries. Not everyone agrees that war rules make sense. In the Civil War, U.S. Gen. William T. Sherman was accused of brutalizing citizens, violating any sense of decency.
"War is cruelty," Sherman responded. "There is no sense in trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."
Former Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr., a retired four-star Army general who fought in Vietnam, agreed that fighting wars by rule books is virtually impossible.
"War is a terrible thing," Palmer said. "Men are animals."
Dean Rusk, a former secretary of state, once denounced war as "an obscene blot on the face of the human race."
Still, professional soldiers have attempted over the centuries to hammer out rules to make their deadly occupation less cruel. Some of the rules have evolved from Catholic church doctrine, some from chivalric standards, some from ancient taboos. Many rules are codified in the Geneva conventions. Others remain a gut sense of what is right.
The sources of these rules tell us a lot about debates over the war in the Persian Gulf. Here are some of the highlights:
King Arthur
Some ancient European notions of the right way to wage war date back to the days of the legendary knights of the Round Table. Northern European knights, whose lives were steeped in blood and violence, developed a code that transformed gory sword fights into theatrical acts of chivalry and valor.
Among other things, the chivalric code admonished knights not to attack civilians. There were practical reasons. Because battles were often over productive land "you wouldn't want to wage a scorched-earth war," said James Johnson, a professor of religion at Rutgers University.
In addition, a knight "wouldn't want to take the chance of being hurt in a battle with non-combatants," Johnson said, "because he wouldn't get any valor out of it."
Over the years, the chivalric tradition became an increasingly complex kind of war etiquette. The rules transformed some battles into a kind of lethal sport. That chivalric etiquette remains an integral part of European war tradition.
Among other things, the age of chivalry gave the military the model of the noble warrior and the tradition of military codes of conduct.
Love thy neighbor
The Christian war tradition is more complex. For the first century of Christianity, rules were crystal clear. Christians did not wage war or serve in armies.
"That begins to change in the second century as the church moves from being a minority religion," said Johnson.
As the Catholic church grew powerful and assumed quasi-governmental powers, theologians developed the concept of the "just war." At first, the concept was little more than a "debate among the elites, the clergy, about whether it's right or wrong for Christians to participate in war," said Johnson.
Scholars, citing the admonition to "turn the other cheek," initially ruled that it was immoral for Christians to fight in self defense. But they came upon another phrase, "love thy neighbor." That phrase, some scholars felt, justified Christian participation in war.
"They take the idea of loving a neighbor as central, and raise it to the idea of what you should do if your neighbor is attacked," said Johnson. "Suppose you are walking on the road in the wilderness and you come upon another traveler being attacked by a criminal. What do you do?
"It's your duty in love to try to keep this from happening, and if it means violence, so be it."
Violence could also be permitted "to stop it from taking place," Johnson said. "That's the paradigm that really is the core of the Christian War Doctrine."
Just war
Once theologians determined that war could be moral, they had to decide which wars were moral. They came up with a list of rules. Among other things, a "moral" war must:
be declared by a legitimate authority;
have a good chance of success;
> result from a serious harm or violation of rights;
be declared after all other means are exhausted;
and do more good than evil.
The doctrine has been revised, twisted and rewritten. But the moral arguments are just as thorny today as in St. Augustine's day.
Almost every element of the "just war" doctrine has hidden moral snares. For instance, the doctrine holds that "just" wars must be declared by a legitimate authority. On its face, that would make revolutionary uprisings "unjust." Some rules have been revised to allow for legitimate revolutionary armies. But those rules are never clear. Just who is "legitimate" - the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the African National Congress, the leadership of the Nicaraguan contra armies? What about Ho Chi Minh? How about the Muhajadeen rebels in Afghanistan?
Even experts in the just war doctrine argue about whether one battle or another is "moral" or "just."
Still the concept of "just war" remains alive today. When the U.S. sent troops to Panama to arrest Manual Noriega, killing hundreds of people in the process, the Bush administration harkened to St. Augustine, declaring the action "Operation Just Cause."
Christian way of war
Once canon lawyers decided that war was just, they had to decide how to wage war and still remain moral.
The church didn't seem too worried about war crimes against pagans. Pagans were considered sub-human. "The church started imposing restrictions on what could and could not be done in wars between Christians," said Michael Howard, a military historian at Yale University.
Although scholastics drew up a fairly elaborate list of rules, "the main point was you should not exercise more force than was absolutely necessary," Howard said.
In the 16th century, the Spaniards invaded Central America and committed horrific atrocities against Indians, including women and children. Influential Catholic theologians at that time started insisting that war rules be followed "irrespective of who the enemy was," Howard said.
Church authorities "preached to the Spaniards that the American Indians couldn't be treated as pagans," said William O'Brien, a Georgetown University professor. "They had to be treated as human beings."
That was the beginning of what came to be regarded as a universal war doctrine, applicable to wars against anyone, anywhere.
Civilians, soldiers
One of the oldest precepts of "war rules" is the notion that soldiers fight against other soldiers, and leave civilians alone as much as possible. War rules "tend to be written by professional soldiers who think they are going to fight other professional soldiers in a clean, limited battle," Howard said.
War rules made it clear "you just can't open fire on innocent civilians," said Robert Drinan, a former congressman who is now a professor of law at Georgetown University.
At the same time, civilians aren't supposed to shoot soldiers.
"If they did take up arms, if they did start firing at your troops, that was an offense against the laws of war and you could execute them," said Howard. "If you were taken with arms in your hands and not wearing a uniform you were pretty much fair game and could be shot."
Distinguishing between civilians and combatants has posed problems over the years. During the American Revolution, British soldiers marched into battle in formation, and expected Americans to do the same. Instead, Americans hid behind trees and took potshots at the redcoats.
"The normal laws of war around the 18th or 19th century did rule out guerrilla war," said Howard. "Everyone had to be wearing a uniform and under military command."
British complained that "we weren't fighting with regular troops," said Howard. "They cried foul. It didn't do them much good."
In wars like Vietnam, where the enemy melts into the population, targeting of civilians is a lot harder to avoid and is often justified as a military necessity. At times, such efforts reach extremes. When the U.S. Army torched a Vietnamese village called Ben Tre, an Army officer explained, "We had to destroy it to save it."
Killing the tyrant
A lot of people wonder why we don't just kill Saddam. One clear reason is a 1970s executive order prohibiting assassination. But at another level, assassination has been frowned upon in Christian culture, no matter how detestable the dictator.
"The problem with assassination in Christian thought is that it looks too much like murder," said Johnson. "You do not target any specific member of the enemy army."
Drinan explained that rules against assassination stemmed from the sense that the church couldn't allow "the direct killing of a human being."
The bombing of thousands of soldiers is not considered "direct killing" because nobody is targeting a specific soldier.
Listen to reporters asking whether we are "targeting" Saddam. Officials usually respond that no one would weep if Saddam accidentally walked under a bomb. But they say he is not being targeted. Unintentional killing of a leader is OK, but it has to be an accident.
This rule has some questionable moral angles to it. In waging war, President Bush has said repeatedly that his beef is not with the "Iraqi people" but with Saddam. So is it moral to kill thousands of people when our argument is with one man?
Hafez Farmayan, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Texas in Austin, said Muslims look at assassination from a different perspective. In the early years of Islam, teams of assassins plotted the extermination of evil rulers. It was considered more moral to kill evil rulers than to launch into a war that would result in thousands of deaths, Farmayan explained.
"Wouldn't you have rather had Saddam Hussein and 10 other persons killed, and save billions of dollars, and save thousands of lives, and save all this misery that is going to be with us for years?" Farmayan asked. "After all, don't we take a prisoner, a robber, a killer in the street and kill him? Why isn't there a taboo on that?"
Farmayan stressed that he isn't calling for the assassination of Saddam, but is expressing an Islamic view toward assassination. He said Muslims have a hard time understanding our repeated statements that we are not targeting Saddam. "They don't believe it," Farmayan said.
Soldiers, doctors, lawyers
> As the Christian concept of war rules grew more elaborate, canon lawyers attempted to recast the moral doctrines into law that everyone would follow, regardless of their religion. "That's when you have a move from something that was basically a moral doctrine into something that was basically a legal doctrine," Johnson said.
Elements of chivalric standards and the Christian doctrine were combined and portrayed as "natural law."
"They had to find a way of relating their beliefs and their assumptions about the world to the rest of the world," Johnson said.
In the late 1800s, the Red Cross played a major part in developing international laws of war. They pushed for rules against firing on hospitals and hospital ships. International conferences in Geneva hammered out these regulations until a "well elaborated system for rules of war was adopted, at least by the European powers," Johnson said.
Those rules of war, dealing with prisoners, hospitals and civilians, form the core of the Geneva conventions.
Technology
For centuries, technology has played in important part in war ethics. Time was, people fought face-to- face, with swords. Throughout the years, weapons grew increasingly lethal. Soldiers moved from swords to crossbows, to rifles, to cannons, to machine guns, to bombs to nuclear missiles.
The wayt war rules adapt to technology was illustrated in World War II. The idea that you don't target civilians had been established for centuries. Nazis violated those rules with buzz bombs that fell randomly in England. The allies responded in kind, launching devastating bombing runs on German civilian targets, with the idea that we would destroy morale. By war's end, entire cities, including Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were virtually wiped off the map.
Although rules barring slaughter of civilians were well established, "nothing was ever said about bombing," Howard said. "All those laws of war were drawn in the pre-bombing age. There was no enthusiasm to extend the Geneva conventions to bombing because we felt it was necessary."
Palmer, the retired Army general, said the bombing clearly violated the spirit of international war rules.
"We established in World War II that strategic air warfare against cities was OK," he said, "even though if we had lost the war we would have been tried for it."
Since World War II, weapons have grown more powerful. The entire nuclear arms race is based upon the presumption that a nuclear war would virtually wipe out civilization.
In the Persian Gulf war, however, the ultra-modern, computer-guided bombs add a new twist to the ethical debate. The Patriot missile offers the equivalent of a gunslinger shooting the pistol from his opponent's hand. It is an anti-weapon weapon. The techno-jousts in the Middle East sometimes seem utterly bloodless, with the flavor of Army generals boasting, "my machine killed your machine."
With our ability to precisely target military installations and weapons, we now express disgust with weapons, such as Scud missiles, that have no sophisticated guidance systems.
"I think as far as the moral question is concerned, it's very good that we have developed these accurate weapons," said Johnson, the religion professor. "There is a very, very great difference in using the Tomahawk missile to attack the military of defense, and the the hospital next door."
Howard disagrees.
"Admittedly," he said, "we are not targeting civilians, largely because we have the kind of weaponry which allows us to target military installations. Saddam is targeting civilians in the way we did in World War II. Crying foul is a little selective."
The victors
Most debates over our roles in wars center on elements of the just war ethic. In the case of Saddam, much of the congressional debate was over whether we gave other options, especially economic sanctions, a chance. The debates never really questioned the notion of of the war ethic itself.
In truth, the rules themselves have been subject of debate. Farmayan, the Islamic specialist, said many Muslims discount some war rules as "Western laws" that "came from Christianity." Even some Christian groups abide by the old doctrine that Christian participation in any war is immoral, regardless of the provocation. "Thou shalt not kill" is an absolute.
Johnson, the religion professor, said people who reject the morality of war entirely have a lot in common with Gen. Sherman. After all, if war is utterly immoral, there's no sense in trying to define moral parameters for waging war.
Johnson said that people he calls "political realists" thinks that "wars are going to happen from time to time." The rules, he said, "seek to reduce the destructiveness, seek to limit the recourse to war."
In waging war in Iraq, the U.S. has been lucky. Although some people may disagree with our policy in the gulf, few defend Saddam. Saddam, a dictator the U.S. administration supported just a year ago, has successfully been transformed into an international villain. He is easy to hate.
The United Nations has sanctioned efforts to expel Saddam from Kuwait. An international coalition unprecedented in modern times has developed. Bush has repeatedly stressed that the United States is operating under a U.N. mandate, that we are avoiding targeting civilians, that we are fighting a "just war" in accordance with international law.
Bush also repeatedly denounces Saddam for violating the Geneva conventions and other rules of war.
Still, Howard, the military historian, said we can afford to abide by rules precisely because we are powerful.
"I would say that the stronger force does not find it necessary to break the rules," Howard said. "But if you find yourselves losing, the chances are you will do whatever is necessary to avoid losing."
Palmer, the army general, agreed. He noted that, in general, only people who lose are accused of war crimes.
"The rules of warfare are enforced by the victor, not the vanquished," Palmer said. "When you're defeated, you're going to pay for it."
by CNB