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Bringing Back the Good War
[SultanKnish] During WW2 our understanding of a moral war was not a war in which we did not kill any civilians (we killed a lot of civilians), it wasn't even a war in which we did not kill any civilians on purpose (we killed a lot of civilians on purpose), it was a war in which we did not kill civilians without having a good reason.
As background, for the past several centuries, as I recall, civilians have made up about 47% of wartime fatalities, through all the changes of morality and technology.
We might carry out mass bombings of entire cities to destroy the enemy's wartime production capabilities and demoralize his population.

Until recently, those were considered good reasons for killing civilians.

The moral context for these actions, snipped away from anti-war works such as Slaughterhouse-Five or Grave of the Fireflies which reduce the American bombings of Dresden or Kobe to the senseless acts of brutal monsters, is that we were fighting Germany and Japan using their own tactics against them.

...Mutuality makes morality and immorality in war self-regulating. If you firebomb someone else's cities, someone else will firebomb your cities. If you want your prisoners of war to be treated well, you have to treat the prisoners you take equally well.

Such mutuality is the only international agreement that truly matters. It takes humanitarian behavior out of the realm of idealism and into the realm of rational self-interest. It creates a direct and working program for rewards and punishments that does not rely on a League of Nations or United Nations.

...But the era of the free lunch arrived with terrorism. We unilaterally extend protections to terrorists that they do not reciprocate. Terrorists are excused from the laws of war, while everyone else has to abide by them. This only incentivizes terrorism and makes fighting terrorists a grim and impossible business.

Israel's fight against Hamas shows how unilateral humanitarianism decontextualizes warfare creating a completely impossible standard for a good war. With no context derived from what the other side is doing all that is left is the necessity of meeting a completely impossible standard in which no civilians on the other side ever die, even while the enemy uses them as human shields.

The Londoners who heard Lloyd George, the New Yorkers who heard George W. Bush and the Israelis who heard Benjamin Netanyahu understood the context in which the next phase of the conflict would be taking place. It was a context created by the tactics of their enemies.

But context is no longer acceptable in warfare. All wars must be fought to the same impossible standard.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2014-08-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=397425