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20th-century rules will not win a 21st-century war.
by Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal EFLShortly after September 11, the phrase "9/11 changed everything" got popular. I thought it a useful overstatement. More than anything we needed unity, and that helped. Almost five years later, it looks like an understatement. Politics in America, the law, the conduct of war, the West and Islam, U.S. allies past and present--all changed. But there's a difference. Normally when something changes in the physical world we can see what replaced the old. In the post-September 11 world, about all we can see is that the old templates for understanding these things are under pressure and may be broken. But in nearly each instance, the new template for how we think about them isn't clear. Should prisoners from the terror wars be moved here from Guantanamo and put under established U.S. law, or is something less than that more appropriate? In an important speech delivered Monday in London, the British Defense Minister John Reid suggested that we consider revising the Geneva Conventions regarding conduct in war. He wants to accommodate the altered reality of modern terrorism. "I believe we need now to consider whether we--the international community in its widest sense--need to re-examine these conventions," Mr. Reid said. "If we do not, we risk continuing to fight a 21st-century conflict with 20th-century rules." The Geneva Conventions were shaped 50 years ago, Mr. Reid said, but "warfare continues to evolve, and, in its moral dimensions, we have now to cope with a deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism by our opponents." This summary does not do justice to Mr. Reid's speech, which was at pains to seek a balance in the tension between a West that struggled to mitigate the savagery of armed conflict and an enemy that daily dishonors those principles. He is not suggesting that we adopt the enemy's methods. He is worried that the old rules are putting the soldiers on our side at unacceptable risk. "If we act differently today from how we behaved yesterday, it is not necessarily wrong. Indeed it may be wrong not to." . . . . . . The central issue raised in the speech by U.K. Defense Minister Reid involves the tension between what up to now has been illegal in war and what in the future should be illegal, if the purpose of law is to protect the innocent against barbarism. My view is that the likelihood of the U.S. or the U.K. "losing its soul" if it upgrades the rules to suppress a shame-free terrorism is about nil. Yes, September 11 changed everything, and it's time to start talking about whether the changes are helping us, or them. Those italics in the last paragraph (in the original) are the key point. The purpose of the law of war is to mitigate the effect of war on noncombatants. It does this by dividing the universe of potential targets into "combatants" (people you're allowed to deliberately shoot) and "noncombatants" (people you're not allowed to deliberately shoot), then requires the combatants to wear uniforms and carry arms openly. If a combatant follows the law of war in this respect, making himself distinct from a noncombatant, he gains certain protections for himself such as POW status. The enforcement mechanism is not an "international tribunal" or some such, but reprisal. If a combatant violates the laws of war, by blurring the distinction between himself and noncombatants, or by deliberately targeting noncombatants, he loses those protections--that is, the Geneva Convention permits the opponent to then shoot prisoners and such. As countless old movies remind us, "spies" (i.e. combatants out of uniform) can be freely shot or hanged. There have been various attempts, including a 1970s "amendment" to the Geneva Convention that the US never signed on to, to dilute these rules by giving "guerillas" a privilege to be pose as noncombatants, use civillians for cover, and so on. In the present conflict, the "antiwar" movement (i.e., folks rooting for the other side) has tried to do something similar, by repeatedly claiming that the US and coalition partners are bound to treat the terrorists as POWs, and so on, even though the terrorists have never observed the laws of war in the first place. If that becomes the new rule, and there is no disadvantage to routinely violating the laws of war, then there is no incentive to follow them. Posted by: Mike 2006-04-07 |
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