Andrew Sullivan says, of my argument that war crimes are not tied to having bad motives for your war:
I'm sorry but this is preposterous, uninformed, ahistorical. The United States has managed to go to war for two centuries without the president authorizing and monitoring the torture of prisoners. The Bush administration's legalization of torture and withdrawal from Geneva is unique in American history. Yes, wars will lead to individuals committing war crimes in the heat of battle. Yes, it carries a horrifying logic. But an advance, pre-meditated decision by the president to engage in war crimes is new and unprecedented. Bush really is uniquely awful as a president in this respect: an indefensible war criminal, who has permanently stained the country he represents and betrayed the soldiers who expect decency and lawfulness in their commander-in-chief.
I did not say that what the Bush administration has done is no different from what any other president has done. I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an "aggressive" war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)
What the Bush administration has done has been a choice of the Bush administration. They did not have to make it, even after they had gone to Iraq. They could (and did) make those choices even before we went to war in Iraq; they didn't stem from the fact this is a special, bad kind of war that requires torture in a way that other wars don't. Torture is a tactic that works just as well (or as badly) in defensive wars as in other kinds. The decision to do it is not an inevitable outgrowth of invasion. Lots of defending peoples have committed atrocities against their invaders.
I am arguing that it is dangerous to attribute war crimes to the type of war you are waging, because the implication is that when you fight a "good" war, you won't have war crimes. That tilts the calculus too heavily in favor of future wars.
As you well know, Greenwald's problem with you was that you ignore your government's use of torture.
You shifted the issue to a debate on torture, saying torture happens in any war, an issue not in debate due to the obviousness of its nature.
You also smear Greenwald by using "aggressive war" instead of the correct "war of aggression."
I said it on the other thread, but Sullivan is either deliberately or inadverdantly misreading what you wrote. Sullivan does this sort of thing a lot, I suspect because Sullivan is, well, to be charitable, out there just a wee bit on the right tail of the ol' self-involved curve, and if someone won't make a statement that allows Sullivan to put forth the rebuttal he is just dying to post, he just pretends as if they did. He does this so frequently, to so many people, that I suspect he isn't even aware of it.
With all that, I still visit his site, because he is an interesting read.
Agreed that just wars can be waged in unjust manners (Dresden, Hiroshima) and agreed that it's at least logically possible for unjust wars can be waged in more-or-less just manners.
But I think there's a plausible correlation. If we disrespect the justice or legality of entering into a war, we are likely to have few qualms about bending/breaking the rules of just war once we are so engaged.
So, really, it's a matter of mutual causation. People (e.g. Bush) with little respect for the conventional accounts of justice are likely to violate both jus ad bello and jus in bello.
Cheney's 'Dark Side' Is Showing
Cheney, others OK'd harsh interrogations
They certainly did believe that "this was a special, bad kind of war." They still do.
But you did say that: "The point is that when you choose war, you choose war crimes--and that this is true regardless of why you are choosing the war." Surely you're not suggesting that no other President has chosen war?
You're right, the fact that war crimes have occurred is not the result of choosing an "aggressive" war vs. some other kind of war. The fact that war crimes have occurred is the result of how the Bush administration has chosen to fight this war. I've been trying to get you to realize and accept that.
Glenn Greenwald's point, if I'm understanding it correctly, was that the same mindset that led the Bush administration to pursue an "aggressive war" also led them to approve and possibly order the use of torture on detainees; they are two symptoms of the same moral disease. Greenwald is saying that these are bad people who intentionally have disregarded our laws and treaties because they found them inconvenient to their doing whatever the heck they wanted in the world in whatever manner they wanted to do it. They are a lawless regime and they have essentially turned the United States into a rogue state, rampaging around the world like a bull in a china shop. It has to stop; and it should have been stopped long ago.
To elaborate on Susan’s point above, I believe that “aggressive war” means, roughly, “wars undertaken neither in self-defense nor in defense of another country.”
Does A. Sullivan really have knowledge in that detail of the treatment of prisoners in every war from 1789 to the present? He has never shown much sign of being a military history buff?
Exactly how many people have been waterboarded to date?
The suppression of the revolt in the Phillipines was close enough. It had "waterboarding," too, except they gave it the euphemism "water cure."
I'm pretty sure that Teddy Roosevelt put a stop to the use of waterboarding, once news of it came public, and I've never read anything which said that Roosevelt authorized it's use.
If Bush had just gotten behind the Gay Marriage push, Sullivan would be defending him to the death now, and arguing that torture should be mandatory.
Ellensburg is right....
What I would prefer personally is a President who disdains all forms of torture, and then is at least smart enough to use it when necessary without the whole world finding out...
As was said above, I thought that a war is supposed to only be fought as a matter of self-defense. If you aren't defending yourself or an ally against aggression, then you are the one initiating violence without cause. And I'm pretty sure that there's a word for killing people without a defensive justification. It starts with the letter M...
If you aren't defending yourself or an ally against aggression, then you are the one initiating violence without cause.
So if the war against Saddam was declared to protect our allies the Kurds that would be OK?
And if the current fighting was to protect our allies the democratically elected Iraqi government, that would be OK too?
Does it really matter that much what the stated reasons for a war are? Because if so, then Bush just needs to make a speech announcing that the current war is to defend our allies, and everything will be good again.
I don't think that's quite right, Thoreau. We weren't defending ourselves against the Japanese or the Germans, who had zero capability to conquer the United States or even inflict much serious harm on us. Nor was the north defending itself against the south, which had no interest in occupying it. We chose those wars, in my opinion rightly, as payback for attacks on our territory that did limited damage to non-military capacity. (And for other reasons besides, of course, but that was at least part of the basic motivation.)
We can debate on this topic forever, and seemingly will, but can we have it without mention of the Geneva Conventions?
They clearly do not apply to the Gitmo detainees.
Marcus
"But an advance, pre-meditated decision by the president to engage in war crimes is new and unprecedented."
Er, except for the Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Megan,
I think the problem is that you try to hard to make a point on some technical merit, that quite honestly, does nothing to refute the counter-party’s position, but merely clarifies some tangential topic.
You state: "..When you choose war, you choose war crimes..."
By going to war, you do not choose war crimes. This is akin to stating that Presidents go to in part because they have made the choice to commit war crimes. That is the equivalent of saying that when someone goes into business, they are choosing to commit fraud, because somewhere down the line, one of their employees may commit fraud. Please. Choice indicates that the action is a significant component of the decision making process. War crime activities (torture and unnecessary inhumane treatment of prisoners or others caught in the conflict) are a tactical decision made by individuals based on the idea that the current benefit outweighs the moral / ethical dilemma of such actions (or even the long-term ramifications). War can be conducted without deciding to take this approach (from a systematic, top-down view-point).
Greenwald is asserting that by pursuing this war in the manner this administration did, it actually did choose to commit war crimes as part of its tactical and strategic approach towards winning this conflict (however misguided). Glenn is not arguing in the least that war crimes do not happen in any war. But Glenn is arguing that there is a big difference between the rogue soldier or random acts in violation of the Geneva Convention, and the systematic approval for such acts by those responsible for setting the tone-at-the-top. You may question the use of “Aggressive” to define this decision, but you in your retort to Sullivan directly end-up agreeing with Greenwald all along.
However, as always, you are so interested in proving a tangential, often times semantics related point (in this case, you are trying to argue that there is no such thing as “Aggressive Wars”, and hey – war crimes will happen in all wars) which does NOTHING to refute Glenn’s assertion. I understand you were trying to win some form of tangential argument and trying to “prove” Glenn wrong, but you come across instead as vapid without much in the way of cognitive ability.
While I agree that the "aggressive" distinction is null after the fact, the onset and severity of war crimes is very much dependent on the actions/decisions/attitudes of the people at the top. Good soldiers with strong institutional barriers against abuse will take a lot longer to descend into war crimes that good soldiers whose institutions actually encourage them. It may be inevitable that they'll end up in the same place eventually, but the latter group will get there much, much faster, and probably do more damage as well. That's why Nazi atrocities not only predate the war itself by some number of years, but far exceed anything the Allies were guilty of.
That said, I do think your overall point is largely correct--there is no such thing as a "clean" war.
Matt:
I completely agree. It is why they have "Codes of Conduct" and "Ethics Handbooks" at Corporations. It is a called setting the "Tone-At-The-Top", and amazingly, this really does hold some weight.
But Megan only went to the University of Chicago, what would she know about Corporate or Organizational governance.
To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.
Oh come on. Are you that dense? Iraq is a war of choice. Japan was a response to Pearl Harbor. Germany was a response to attacks on our allies, though in that case a plausible domestic reponse was isolation. Japan's alliance with Germany was not a point in Germany's favor.
Which ally did Iraq attack? What harbor did they bomb?
So if the war against Saddam was declared to protect our allies the Kurds that would be OK?
No. It's only if our allies are actually in danger. I don't recall Sadaam making a credible threat against them, do you? If Hamas invaded Israel, I'd support retaliation. Rhetoric, OTOH, is just, well, rhetoric.
Megan, surely you agree that wars which involve lengthy occupations of other peoples' territory tend to involve far more war crimes? Look at the Japanese occupation of China, which was described as a "quagmire" by Japanese legislators at the time upset at getting dragged into an occupation as part of what had originally been billed as a limited intervention on behalf of the client state in Manchuria. Look at the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the British occupation of India, the Israeli occupations of Gaza/West Bank and Lebanon. Compare that to Gulf War I, Kosovo, Bosnia. Can't you see the tremendous difference in scale?
And I really don't know what you mean by this:
I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an "aggressive" war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)
The opposite of "aggressive" is "defensive", not "peaceful". This is really sophism.
I mean, one thing this debate about "aggressive war" makes clear is that the notion of war as something that should only be waged in defense of one's own territory has literally vanished from the map for Americans, because there is simply no threat to the US whatsoever. Canada? Mexico? Cuba? Why, if the US were to decide only to fight in defense of its own territory, it could never fight any wars at all! And we can't have that now, can we?
No. It's only if our allies are actually in danger. I don't recall Sadaam making a credible threat against [the Kurds], do you?
I do. It was called Anfal, and Saddam is estimated to have destroyed ~2000 Kurdish villages and killed between 50,00 to 150,000 Kurds. It was called a genocide by Human Rights Watch.
Furthermore if you recall, the northern no-fly zone was created in order to protect the Kurds from Saddam (Initially Operation Provide Comfort and later Operation Northern Watch). So yes, the US did in fact engage in an (inconclusive) 12 year low-level war against Saddam explicitly for the purpose of protecting the Kurds.
I'm not arguing that this justified invading, but it's not nothing either. Unless the claim is that Saddam no longer represented a threat to the Kurds (or the shi'ites in the south - Saddam's treatment of the Marsh Arabs was also considered a genocide), it should be acknowledged that removing Saddam did serve the purpose of protecting others.
It's also worth remembering that even the no-fly zones were also protested as being illegal and unjustified, so I don't think thoreau's assertion that the use of force to defend others is considered justifiable is correct - at least when the US is doing it.
I mean, one thing this debate about "aggressive war" makes clear is that the notion of war as something that should only be waged in defense of one's own territory has literally vanished from the map for Americans, because there is simply no threat to the US whatsoever. Canada? Mexico? Cuba?
Is it fair to read you as not supporting the war in Afghanistan?
Also, I believe the mass grave camouflaged as a vacant lot in lower Manhattan refutes your assertion that "there is simply no threat to the US whatsoever".
No, I supported the war in Afghanistan: it was not a war of aggression, and it was necessary to eliminate a terrorist group that had attacked the US. But that's because I'm a liberal internationalist. It would be perfectly reasonable for someone of a less internationalist bent to argue that we shouldn't have fought in Afghanistan either, because we had no business being there. Yet that argument has vanished from the American political scene because it threatens to rule out US military activity anywhere -- which seems unacceptable because of American jingoistic militarism.
The US is unique among advanced industrial nations in that we have faced no territorial military threat in the last century. It seems not unrelated that we are also the only advanced industrial nation eager to engage in wars of choice.
And no, 9/11 was not a military threat to the US. It was a terrorist threat, which is different, and should not in general be contested through war. Terrorism should be contested through law enforcement and brief, deadly interventions, and through internationalist efforts to rebuild failed states, such as the one in Afghanistan. It should certainly never be addressed through efforts to turn effective states, such as Iraq in 2002, into failed states, such as Iraq from 2003 to today. But a misunderstanding of the nature of government and the state is at the core of the abject failure of the neoconservative project, so it's fruitless to hope that you will understand this.
I understand Megan's claim that the distinction between offensive and defensive war does not by itself determine whether war crimes will be committed in the course of that war.
But I think it is also true that certain types of wars will be more likely to produce war crimes than other types of wars. I also think that certain Bush administration failures are closely related to the specific type of war they chose to wage in Iraq.
A war to subdue an indigenous population with a different culture, against an enemy that is employing asymmetric guerrila tactics, will produce more war crimes than a war between advanced powers sharing a similar culture that is being fought over remote and sparsely populated areas. Fighting to impose a government on Iraq will produce more war crimes than, say, if the US fought with Denmark over some Arctic islands.
In addition, waging an offensive war is more difficult for a republic to do than waging a defensive war. It's easier to get all factions in a republic to agree to support a defensive war. It's not so easy to maintain support across all factions for an offensive war of choice. This makes it more likely that a government waging an offensive war of choice will find it necessary to engage in propaganda exercises, and will abuse its opposition, in order to maintain public support for its war.
Combine these two points, and this means that when you choose to wage an offensive war of choice to subdue an indigenous population with a different culture, against an enemy that is employing asymmetric guerrila tactics, it is likely that your war will produce a lot of war crimes, and it is likely that you will have to spend a lot of time lying to the public about these war crimes and about just about every other aspect of the war, and just about as much time demonizing the opposition as traitors. And this is exactly what we have seen in Iraq.
Yes, I agree that occupations tend to breed resistance and escalating counterresistance, but again, this is not a function of how or why the war was started it, or who started it. Plenty of defenders have ended up occupying the invader's territory, and plenty of aggressors have given up when their strategic objectives were attained.
I know that to many of you the only important conversation to have is about the special moral awfulness of the Iraq war, but I actually think it's quite important to establish what sorts of choices create war crimes or quasi war crimes, and I don't think that the aggressive/defensive distinction is very useful in that regard. One might plausibly argue that the things that make countries choose aggressive wars make them choose torture, but that's not, as many of my commenters and other bloggers seem to believe, a causal relationship.
One other thing to point out: Torture and genocide are special horrors which sometimes occur with war, and are easier to justify and get away with during war. But the main evil in most wars is the war itself and its surrounding damage. Fighting it according to some minimal rules of humane treatment (no genocide, no torture, no targeting civilians, no poison gasses, humane treatment of prisoners and enemy civilians, etc.) is an attempt to blunt some fraction of the horror. But there's really no way to make war clean or nice or decent, you can only blunt the horror a bit.
Without Guantanamo and secret prisons and ghost detainees and waterboarding and Abu Girab and all, with us scrupulously following the Geneva Convention and US and international law, the war would still be a horrible, bloody affair. That's what war is. In fact, my guess is that at the scale we're committing these war crimes[1], the damage done by them is a footnote in the long list of horror brought about by the brief war and the long, painful occupation we've maintained since.
[1] I don't think there's another term for our use of torture. It's not less of a crime because nobody's strong enough to stop us.
Yet *another* post explaining how Megan's critics have missed her point, or misunderstood her words, or are responding to an argument she never made, or whatever.
This seems to happen to you a lot, Megan. It appears that nobody is able, on a consistent basis, to understand what you write. I wonder what it all means.
That's untrue, Brooksfoe. The US lost several Pacific territories to Japan in WWII including Attu and Kiska, Alaskan islands. I'm pretty sure Americans of a certain age in Hawaii, Alaska, and Guam would give you a thump if you told them they'd never faced a territorial military threat. Particularly the Aleutians in Alaska and folks in Guam who watched loved ones die in Japanese internment camps.
And no, 9/11 was not a military threat to the US. It was a terrorist threat, which is different, and should not in general be contested through war.
That's a perfectly reasonable position, and it was the policy carried out by the United States all through the '90s.
The results of that policy were a steady stream of attacks on the US interests (1st World Trade Center bombing, US Embassy bombings, USS Cole, Khobar Towers, the millennium bombing plot and finally 9/11). By broad, general consensus, that policy was rejected after 9/11.
I however don't see a particularly meaningful distinction between a foreign terrorist threat versus a conventional military threat. Coordinated attacks on our military, commercial and political sites in our two leading cities is a military action. Two of the attacks were successful, one succeeded far beyond expectations. That's a military threat, and a serious one to boot.
Intent and capabilities are what matters. We have an enemy who is intent on harm but whose capabilities are (currently) limited to asymmetric warfare. This certainly impacts our counter-strategy, but the fact that the enemy disregards the rules of war doesn't inherently render it not a war. If the enemy's capability is sufficiently limited (and at this point I seriously consider that possibility) then war may not be the best response, but it isn't automatically an inappropriate response either.
As far as Iraq goes, I supported the war but for reasons that time has shown to be different from the reasons the Bush administration holds. FWIW, I'm actually in agreement with you as far as Iraq having shown "the abject failure of the neoconservative project". This is unfortunate, because it would have been better for all if they had been successful.
The war crime was invasion. You have been told this repeatedly. The "special moral awfulness of the Iraq war" was invading another country without the permission of the UN. White House Chief of Staff Andy Card lied and said we "don't need [the UN's] permission," and in fact they did not get it to invade.
We know the kind of choices that lead to war crimes. You made them.
"Saddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them. I will never again be so confident in the future....
But at the time of making the decision, the game was random to the observer, with no way to know the true state until you open the box and poke the cat....That doesn't mean that my decisionmaking wasn't faulty. It was, in all sorts of ways, and I am trying to learn from them with proper humility."
Susan of Texas:
Invading Iraq may have been be a war crime, but I reject any claim that getting Chinese and Russian approval would have made it legitimate. In fact, I can't comprehend the reasoning that says that it would.
I could even be convinced that Chinese and Russia disapproval makes it more legitimate...
While it sounds plausible that offensive wars of choice would be more likely to produce atrocities, I don't think that's been so for the US in practice. Afghanistan and World War II, two of the most defensive wars we fought, led to waterboarding and Dresden. The Mexican-American War, probably the least justifiable war we've fought on the basis of current international law, didn't have a lot of atrocities.
If another mere terrorist attack ever hits this country, and produces a considerably higher death toll than was produced on 9/11, millions and millions of people who ultimately control the most powerful tool of violence in human history are going to decide that there are still other millions upon millions who are alive that they would prefer to be dead, and they are going to pick up that tool and see to their deaths. Those who speak of proportional responses or law enforcement on that day will be as significant and influential as dust motes in a hurricane.
To say other wise is to reveal a profound ignorance of human nature and history.
Susan of Texas,
The war crime was invasion. You have been told this repeatedly. The "special moral awfulness of the Iraq war" was invading another country without the permission of the UN.
Good luck pursuing this alleged war crime. Who, exactly, do you seek to prosecute, and on what specific charges? Does it include Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and all the other Democrats who voted to authorize the use of military force against Iraq (with no requirement for UN approval)? And are Bill Clinton and the other commanders in chief of NATO nations also war criminals, in your opinion? After all, they bombed Yugoslavia without UN approval.