“Asymmetric warfare” and ethics

By coincidence was just reading Tim Pat Coogan’s Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland, where many of these same issues arose in the 1917-1921 war of independence. Policemen, e.g. were human dual-used targets — at once keepers of the civil peace, and agents of the occupying power.

It was especially problematic for some of the Catholics in the IRA & Volunteers, who had to square their participation in a very dirty war with the jus in bello traditions of the Church.

I’m aware that there’s limited utility to posting the latest insanity from the nuttier opinion outposts but since these people are connected, it’s worth nothing the latest wisdom from Ralph Peters, via Powerline, on how to deal with this problem

This morning, Ralph Peters says out loud what many have been thinking about “our prisoner problem” in the wake of Hamdan, Abu Ghraib, etc.:

Violent Islamist extremists must be killed on the battlefield. Only in the rarest cases should they be taken prisoner. Few have serious intelligence value. And, once captured, there’s no way to dispose of them.

Right on cue!

Sop to phony “political correctness” victim-posturing:
This morning, Ralph Peters says out loud what many have been thinking …

followed hotly by entitlement to eliminationism that begs the questions of “who” and “where” and “why”:
Violent Islamist extremists must be killed on the battlefield.

All to be done/risked by someone who’s actually enlisted, i.e., not the writer nor the regurgitator. Thus we manufacture specious rationalizations for mass murder by people so unfortunate as to have to work for a living.
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chris: first post aimed at the actors, second post at the authors of the comments brought to this thread by p. o’niell.

We should hold strong to these standards in order to lessen the impact of war by restricting it to its participants. Eventually, we may see these standards applied to real life.

However, we shouldn’t fool ourselves that a) these are our actual and historical practices, and b) that the people who would dearly love to kill you and/or me can’t tell shit from shinola. You know better, I know better, and I’m guessing they know better, which is why guerillas fail to be shamed. It’s not just that they aren’t suicidal, as you have pointed out. They also fail to be completely stupid. They will not submit to a jus in bello construction that comes from an enemy whose own history shows that construction to be a joke.
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The ethical problem with the guerrillas in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the occupied territories is not that they refuse to wear uniforms and line up to be shot, but that they direct their guerrilla tactics not exclusively (or even primarily) against opposing forces but rather against civilian ‘soft targets’.

This is especially appalling in Iraq where these soft targets have included civilians whose jobs are held to be important to the functioning of society (physicians and university professors but also…garbage collectors).

There is also a problem (see in Iraq) in holding the stronger force exclusively responsible for all death and destruction (on both sides) in that it creates a strong incentive for the weaker force to generate as much mayhem, death, and destruction as possible. If every terrorist atrocity is pinned on Bush (however satisfying that might be), does it not create a perverse incentive for more of the same?

Slocum is correct. Assymetric warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan means not just “melting” into the civilian population but indiscriminate murder of the civilian population as a way to undermine the authority of elected governments. Rules that limit
attacks on “weak” groups have to be weighed against the death and injury the groups will inflict on the civilian population if left unchecked.

Marc: Guerrilla tactics problematic if “the enemy is prepared to wage retaliatory violence against non-combatants sympathetic to the insurgency.”

In my experience, they (“they” including the U.S. government and military among others) always are.

I very much appreciate this post, and Marc’s and other comments. I spent the second half of the ’90s wrestling with the questions raised during the previous fifteen years’ accompaniment of people fighting an asymmetrical war against a U.S. client government.

That wrestling made me abandon my previous support for armed struggle, and pushed me into pacifism, for moral and pragmatic reasons. The attacks of September 11 reinforced that conviction, just as they pushed many people here in the opposite direction.

Every American child learns to celebrate the valiant outnumbered militia, the Minutemen, who hid behind trees and fences and fired at the Redcoats marching in formation toward the illegal weapons caches at Lexington and Concord. If you go to Concord today you will see the Daniel Chester French statue of the Minuteman- out of uniform. The heroic poem of the Revolution, Emerson’s Concord Hymn, tells us of the little bridge over the Concord River:

“Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.”

Farmers, not soldiers.

jr: Americans also learned to celebrate and glorify their criminals, from outlaws to gangsters, so long as they weren’t black.

There are no standards, only preferences.
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slocum

I would argue that the aggressor actor is responsible for all casualties if they initiate a war of choice based on knowingly false premises.

I realise that this just moves the ball to an arguement over what constitutes a valid war of choice. I would apply the sceptic test of extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Generally, this situation is avoided pragmatically on the assumption that no sane person (country) would willingly get involved in a quagmire. Sometimes the assumptions fail and we are left with a mess that defies logical resolution

oh well….

I would argue that the aggressor actor is responsible for all casualties if they initiate a war of choice based on knowingly false premises.

I agree.

Oldie But Goodie: Worst Crime of All, by Justice Robert H. Jackson.

Sounds kinda ironic these days:

They [Europeans] are less obsessed than Americans with ambition to reform the world and have less confidence in their ability to do so. Hence, there is more disposition to accent future wars as natural and to be expected. With this philosophy as a major premise there is much to be said, for the series of attempts, expressed in various international conventions, to make the conduct of war as humane as possible.

The outlook of most Americans, on the other hand, is not defeatist but challenging. It refuses to concede that war is either natural or inevitable. It believes that war can and should be outlawed because it is the worst crime of all, leading to and encompassing all the others. On the basis of this American philosophy it is insufficient to make criminal what are merely extreme means of waging war. If war is legally permitted at all, it must be for the purpose of winning. If the alternative is total victory or total defeat, and surely there is no longer a middle ground, it is delusive to expect a nation to use all means of battle except those which make the difference between victory and defeat.

The real crime is planning and making war, not merely in failing to be chivalrous in its conduct, and the efforts of civilization should be directed toward its complete outlawry. …

Going back to the original post, perhaps my terminology is out of date, but it seems to me what Poole is describing is irregular warfare, not asymmetric warfare. The difference is that irregular forces have loose or broken chains of command, don’t wear uniforms, etc., but do things that can be responded to in kind (“symmetrically”). Asymmetric warfare involves the commission of acts that can’t be responded to in kind.

So, a force that does not use uniforms and has no chain of command, but only strikes at military targets and does not use tactics such as suicide bombing, is employing irregular but not asymmetric warfare.

This distinction does entail that the definition of asymmetric warfare depends on the force doing the defining. Suicide bombing is an instance of asymmetric warfare for the U.S., since the current U.S. armed forces will never send troops into battle wearing bomb jackets. But it would not be asymmetric for some other force willing to countenance such tactics. On the other side, the Pearl Harbor attack was not an act of irregular warfare, since those who carried it out wore uniforms, flew their flag, etc., but was asymmetric because the rules of war at the time made it impossible to countenance a surprise attack of that nature (one could argue that by the end of the war those rules had changed). So the two are independent.

This distinction may seem pedantic but I think it is important not to conflate the two when considering the morality of guerrilla warfare and the tactics guerrillas have available to them. For example, a commenter above mentioned the practice of guerrillas of blending into the population, with the consequent increased risk to civilians. With the irregular/asymmetric distinction in mind, this is an irregular tactic, but not asymmetric unless the invading power maintains a clear, sharp distinction between its civilians and its military employees even on its home soil.

gmt

the problem they had with listening to their subordinates is that there subordinates were telling them not to do what they had already decided to do.

therefore, they found new subordinates.

It is certainly possible that a result different and less bloody than what we got was obtainable, but I would argue that a result that a different result that was less bloody was not politically saleable as there were only two non-chaotic outcomes available.

1. replace Saddam with a different Sunni strongman, or

2. defacto partition with the south allied with Iran (which is what they got anyways)

these two possible acceptable outcomes were obvious to anyone going in – in fact, Jack Straw asked who the new Sunni Strongman was going to be in the DSM.

of course, on the practical side, “The War for Bushs Mandate” was objectively a success.

ed_finnerty, we agree on the “what,” but I was adding the “why.” Entitled executive syndrome always means demanding to be confirmed in one’s previously established preferences. The chief producer has absorbed the consumer ethic, and is therefore always right.

I will not pay a lot for this muffler.
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Are we at the point here where nonviolent resistance is just getting laughed out of the room by the left, as well as the right?

Nonviolent resistance is only effective against regimes that predicate their legitimacy at least partially on the notion of being civilized and humane. The nonviolent resistor is only effective because, by threatening to expose the fiction of civilization with his own injuries, the legitimacy of that regime is threatened. That regime must then choose between admitting the actual basis of its power (monopoly of coercive violence) or knuckling under to the demands of the bleeding man.

It’s a sort of extortion. One holds one’s self hostage, under threat of the extortee’s violence.

None of the various sides in Iraq would be threatened by non-violence because none of their constituents wholly buy in to the notion that they are civilized or humane. The neo-caliphate types idealize a time of extreme violence, the tribes depend on violence to demonstrate their power, the sects are caught in tit for tat (effectively the same dynamic as the tribes), and only a tiny minority of American citizens (and even fewer of the citizens of the Coalition of the [formerly] Willing) buy in to the notion that the invasion was civilized or humane in intention or effect.

Therefore, no one is “laughing” anything off. Non-violence is dynamically irrelevant to this context.
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The problem with that {i.e., the notion “that the aggressor actor is responsible for all casualties if they initiate a war of choice”] is that once such a war is underway, that position creates a political incentive for the insurgency to kill civilians (whose deaths will all be, by this logic, the responsibility of the stronger force).

Emphasis mine.

Slocum, you have assumed that the aggressor is always the non-insurgent force. If the insurgents are the aggressor then how are civilian casualties someone else’s fault? This does not follow at all.
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it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak.

Isn’t this in some sense what it means to be strong and what it means to be weak?

Anyway, I have the sense that while one goal of those devising “rules of warfare” was to limit the strong, the only way the strong were convinced to go along was to craft the rules such that they applied more or less equally to all.

The law in all it’s majesty forbids both rich and poor from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges, but just because you don’t have to rob a liquor store if you’re rich, doesn’t mean it’s unjust to forbid it to the poor.

(btw – I don’t think Pearl Harbor was particularly objectionable. Military targets are military targets, surprise or no. I do think that it lead to the decision to settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender and hence the atomic bombings, but even on the scale of bad things that happened in WW2, it’s just not that high up on the list.)

I do not understand the impulse to grant greater legitimacy to insurgent militias that appear to be nothing more than death squads bent on ethnic cleansing.

Death squads bent on ethnic cleansing don’t seem to have anything at all to do with the topic of asymmetric warfare.

There is nothing asymmetric about an ethnic militia fighting another ethnic militia of approximately equal strength.

Here we see the failure to define what exactly the words “Iraqi insurgency” mean in this context.

CB: I recognized slocum’s victim pose and while I will not help him hijack the thread and crash it into Bush’s critics I would point out that the reason why assigning blame like that can have any polemic utility bears directly on your question, as I understand it.

For instance, the Sorabji and Rodin example you introduced:

before an attack is authorised they be required to establish with a far higher degree of certainty than at present that a proposed target is indeed legitimate, and, third, that they be made to take “exceptionally rigourous” steps to ensure that civilians are not exposed to collateral harm and also to ensure that the environment in which those civilian live is not damaged and degraded

This is nearer the suggested British model for the occupation and contrasts with the US model for insurgency suppression that has so enraged and shocked British professionals in the theater (several articles over the last three years, don’t feel like looking them up). Why is this an issue? Because blame will be asessed, the only question is to whom. If you have goals beyond killing a few insurgents then you will take the entire population into account. They are the lay of the land.

As you commonsensically observe, “operational ability would be severely restricted,” but that’s like saying that the flanking maneuver that won the first Gulf War used lots of gasoline. So what? If your objective is to undercut political support for opponents of the order you are trying to install, this is operational ability well spent.

Decades more experience in occupational operations by British forces explains why this was already doctrine in Basra and laughed at everywhere else. The political nature of on occupation/insurgency necessitates that an occupier who wished to be successful will hold himself to a higher standard. The operational difference isn’t just in scale and tactics of forces, it’s also different in objectives.

As it is, we seem trapped between an effort that understands this and a mode more familiar to Mesopotamian history (which would involve near total massacre). Our supposed goals are incompatible with the need to smash and to revenge fallen comrades by killing Hadjis. THAT is the operative asymmetry and it lies between the occupiers’ ears.
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I do not understand the impulse to grant greater legitimacy to insurgent militias that appear to be nothing more than death squads bent on ethnic cleansing.

I do not understand the amnesty granted to certain dictators, aside from the fact that it’s the only way to get them to leave their victim nations. The legitimacy of those death squads lies in the fact that they are effective, and therefore relevant. Until there is a consensus mode for political action that does not involve violence (Bush tried to conjure one by merely holding elections, which is like building a steeple in midair), lethality is the measure of political significance, regardless of its symmetry or regularity.
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Death squads bent on ethnic cleansing don’t seem to have anything at all to do with the topic of asymmetric warfare.

Exactly, because their violence is directed at non-combatants, not different combatants. There’s nothing asymmetrical, bwoc, in getting drunk on banana-beer each morning and heeding the radio’s call to butcher more Tutsis. Asymmetrical would be wading into the Congo to stop it.

In Iraq, there are several tiers of violence.
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“Faced with a professional army equipped with powerful weaponry, people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics. If those tactics are morally impermissible because of the risks they impose on non-combatants, then it looks as if armed resistance to severe injustice perpetrated by the well-equipped and powerful is also prohibited. And that looks crazy.”

Is it really that crazy that armed resistance against more powerful foe is suicidal unless the rules dramatically favor the underdog? The relative strength of the forces doesn’t say anything about jus ad bellum issues, where we presumably would want to tilt the outcome to the side which is justified in fighting, but it matters much more in jus in bello since prohibitions on certain tactics have widely disparate impacts based on the size and composition of the force in question.

Both sides will presumably be convinced that they have sound justifications for fighting, and will accordingly view jus in bello restrictions that hinder them as at least partially unjust, since they pervent them from achieving a just goal. The incentives to adhere to jus in bello restrictions are strongest when they are neutral with respect to the outcome. Thus, a restriction that does not directly protect non-combatants may be necessary to protect them by balancing a restriction that does protect non-combatants. Since the victorious force will presumably end up with political control afterwards, restrictions on the force that is likely to be victorious are voluntarily enforced, and such enforcement cannot be expected if the force would be risking defeat by it. Jus in bello restrictions are best viewed as negotiated agreements with the overall objective of preventing harm that is unnecessary to the resolution of the conflict, and accordingly should it be expected that the overall set of restrictions are neutral regarding changing the likelyhood of a force’s victory and do result in those protections, but that not every particular restriction directly serves that end and individual restrictions may have an uneven impact.

GMT: This is nearer the suggested British model for the occupation and contrasts with the US model for insurgency suppression that has so enraged and shocked British professionals in the theater (several articles over the last three years, don’t feel like looking them up).

This is as good a place to start as any.

A sampling:

Few Afghans see any difference between ISAF activities and America’s Operation Enduring Freedom. The result is that even in the mosques of Kabul, mullahs have started preaching that ISAF are “infidels here to destroy Islam”.

Against such a backdrop, it seems hopelessly naive for the British to hope that locals in Helmand will differentiate between them and the Americans. At every meeting I attended, para commanders started off by telling local elders, “we’re British, not Americans”, an odd comment for such close allies.

At a shura or traditional meeting in Gereshk, elders complained about soldiers bursting into their women’s quarters.

“It’s not us, we’ve had endless cultural training about this,” said Major Paul Blair, the local British commander. “But of course they don’t see the difference.”

“You don’t even differentiate between Pashtuns and Tajiks, let alone different Pashtun tribes,” replied a local teacher. “Why should we?”

Back at the camp after this discussion we found that a convoy of Americans had arrived. They were laughing about running over some goats on the way in. “Now I’m going to have to make another phone call to the district chief to sort it out,” grumbled Blair.

Dan Kervick,
you first say:
…[if] you have no means of resisting that will not produce a fate for your city that is worse than the consequences of submission, then I would think you are morally bound to submit

and then later:
…This is not to say that you could never be morally justified in toppling a government and unleashing anarchy in this way. You may have strong assurance of accomplishing some great good or preventing some great evil…

Don’t you think that there could be a good case for hopeless desperate resistance as well? Isn’t this kind of a situation, in fact, easier to imagine? The “better to die standing, than live on your knees” kinda thing – certainy there is some logic in it, right?

Steven, good quote. I would argue that “the difference in essence between their assets and liabilities” more or less captures the idea that asymmetry depends on the ability of both sides to respond to one another in kind. Certainly by the definition in the quote you give, Hiroshima *was* asymmetric warfare (or the culmination of an asymmetric conflict, since there was a vast disproportion of strength between Imperial Japan and the U.S. in 1941).

Of course, WWII was not a low-intensity conflict, and the paper you link seems (I didn’t read it in its entirety) to be talking exclusively about low-intensity conflicts (although he does not define that term — indeed he approvingly quotes someone saying that “all combat is intense.”).

[i]Don’t you think that there could be a good case for hopeless desperate resistance as well? Isn’t this kind of a situation, in fact, easier to imagine? The “better to die standing, than live on your knees” kinda thing – certainy there is some logic in it, right?[/i]

Sure. But if you’re going to die hopelessly and gloriously, surely it’s better to do so attacking the enemy than blowing up your neighbor who insulted two years ago because he’s cooperating with the occupiers by not breaking the law.

Or something.

But Jake, you’re again mixing together resistance with sectarian violence with score settling. I haven’t seen any evidence that those who massacred 4 dozen Sunnis in Baghdad yesterday meant it as an act of resistance to the US occupation. I suspect they might actually like the occupation at the moment.

Steven, I think we agree. The point of the distinction is just to clarify some of the issues. It’s clear that the Geneva Conventions protect people engaging in asymmetric tactics under my definition, but they explicitly do not protect irregular forces. Subsuming one term into the other might have the effect of obscuring this.

Chris, why do you think it is necessarily a problem for just war theory if “an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak”?

#69 – I think that makes “asymmetric warfare” so broad of a term as to be useless. The Japanese couldn’t respond in kind to the SAC bombing from Tinian, they couldn’t respond in kind to the large battle groups the US Navy put together at the end of the war, they couldn’t respond in kind to the massive submarine anti-shipping efforts.

What was the last war that was not asymmetric?

Montesquieu observed in his “Persian Letters” through the person of Usbek, a Persian traveler to Europe, that the English idea of treason was that it was a crime committed by a weaker party against a stronger one.

This reasoning seems to persist. A stronger party is logically incapable of violating the laws of war- only a weaker one.

OK, all you philosophers of war. Consider what we would do were the U.S. invaded by an outside enemy. Pretty much the same thing the Iraqi’s are doing, right? You confuse the tactics of war versus those of occupation. A war is to achieve a (limited) objective. An occupation is to achieve a political (unlimited) objective. Wars can be won, occupations cannot (so far).

All this blather about “asymetrical warfare” is cover for what used to be refered to as colonialism. I think it still is.

By “the same thing the Iraqis are doing” do you mean that the residents of rural South Carolina would start killing black people again to avenge The War Of Northern Aggression? Or do you mean we’d set a bunch of IEDs and blow up various supply convoys? Or do you mean we’d drive cars full of explosives at checkpoints?

Chris Bertram,
My just war theory is exceedingly rusty, but as I learned it, while guerilla warfare is generally unjust, as it is likely to lead to retaliations on innocent civilians, exemptions are made for small populations with no viable alternative means of waging war and if it’s likely that without any resistance, the population will be wiped out.

Asymmetry thus becomes an important factor. If the U.S. were fighting the UK, guerilla attacks on the civilian populations would be out of line; both of us have the means to oppose each other without resorting to those tactics. U.S. declares war on Togo? Guerilla fighting is probably okay.

Even with that, though, targeting civilians is out-of-bounds.

So I suspect the people tossing about the jus in bellum (bello?) distinction don’t quite understand it, but I also suspect that there’s already accepted exemptions for little guys fighting big guys.

The term “asymmetric warfare” is a bit of a misnomer. In many instances, it’s not warfare proper, even in an unconventional sense (if we are inferring anything approximating combat). How exactly is bombing a mosque and killing unemployed youth, “warfare” with the occupiers. It’s an effort to destabilize and generate a climate of terror yes – but then even thugs attempt to generate similar conditions in their hoods.

The opposition offered to a standing army is certainly a form of resistance, but the tactics frequently involve soft targets and intimidation of neighborhoods rather than any kind of head-on warfare with the occupying army. Head on exchanges between provisional IRA gunmen and British infantry in N.Ireland were the exception rather than the rule. Provo snipers generally got off a few hasty shots before scarpering.

While the moral justification for insurrection may be clear, I still don’t think that grants insurgents the right to behave like babarians. It was precisely the grotesque atrocities directed against Muslims that led to the eventual betrayal and assassination of al Zarqawi. Bombing kids who are receiving candies from marines and targeting worshippers en route to mosque can only be regarded as “warfare” by people completely bereft of any humanitarian constraint, or even a rudimentary grasp of military ethics.

By the same token American atrocities directed at civilians are even more objectionable, given the immense power of the U.S. military and the legal/moral problems attending its occupation of Iraq in the first place.

The only way to slow the increasing incidence of such war crimes is to put together an international force with clout, capable of policing warzones. Given the track record of the U.N., it won’t be any time soon.

I wouldn’t base too much on the example of Zarqawi as there’s seem to be a lot of evidence now that the whole Zarqawi thing was managed by the US, at least to some extent. You don’t really know who and why targeted kids receiving candies and so on.

“[…] it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak.”

This is a problem with violence in general, not just warfare. It’s not more effective in just hands than in unjust, quite the opposite. Which is why relying on violence to achieve justice is pointless and immoral.

Slocum says:

The ethical problem with the guerrillas in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the occupied territories is not that they refuse to wear uniforms and line up to be shot, but that they direct their guerrilla tactics not exclusively (or even primarily) against opposing forces but rather against civilian ‘soft targets’.

Not true, as the US’ own GAO reveals.

Uri Avnery writes about one instance of asymmetric warfare and ethics involved.

In fact a little thought and some rudimentary knowledge of biology leads to the spooky prospect of those who would be true to that motto being selected out of the population by attrition, provided they’re all confronted at some point with the choice – to live free, or to die.

It would seem likely that selection would be towards those that say such things loudly (decreasing the chances of them being attacked, like say the effect of a puffer fish making itself look more dangerous to potential attackers), but not actually follow through (i.e. fight against vastly superior odds and therefore most likely get killed).

Sistani used something very like non-violent methods on Sadr in najaf, with his people’s march. That had a large degree of success: I would say it was fundamental in establishing the underlying basis for the elections and the current government.

I don’t know to what extent he was referencing an existing Islamic tradition versus making stuff up.

Not to bet too much into semantics, but this isn’t a war at all. Bush has orchestrated a mugging. That’s it. And like anyone who’s been mugged, the victim(s) will do whatever it takes to stay alive, including guerilla warfare and murders of soft targets to destroy the credibility of the new government.

Really and honestly, this was largely very predictable.

The great bulk of the activity of resistance movements in Western Europe in WW II against uncivilised German occupiers was non-violent ….

The examples you provide show that you and I are not talking about the same thing.
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Chris’s problem regarding assymetrical warfare is a bit artificial . JIB does not rule out unconventional tactics such as not wearing of uniforms or melting into civilian population so it does *not* rule out 2nd WW partisan activity and it does not rule ANC action in South Africa in 70s and 80s.( true there was a case or two of targetting civilians in Cape Town but the ANC leadership quickly put a stop to it .)

JIB does rule out deliberate targetting of non combatants , mistreatment of POWs and it prohibits using of ‘evil means ‘ such as genocide or mass rape. But it is not clear how restricting this sort of combat, the weak are disadvantaged ( people have no chance unless they rape and torture ? this is absurd surely ) . What is the problem once this is spelled out ?

This is a very ineresting thread. I think this issue is confusing because we are trying to create ethics and rules for a situation that 1. is unethical (and illegal) by our civilian standards, and 2. is subject to all kinds of improvisation. It is ungovernable.

i think an interesting tack to take would be to look at warfare as if it were a dynamic system and see how it self-regulates and why.

For instance, you can do a lot of evil in small countries (Rawanda, Cambodia, the Sundan) the large powers are not interested in. This is possible, I think, because it would cost too much, both in terms of domestic politics and actual resources to the large powers to do anything about it. But, on the other hand, evil acts commited by a large power or commited in a area the large powers have interest in is immediately noticed and pressure of various types is brought to bear. The former yugoslavia is a good example of this.

I know these are obvious points, but these are off the top of the head examples of war regulation that is not based in codified ethics or rules, but rather collective instincts and self-interest.

If you could really figure this stuff out, then you might be abel to find ways to leverage your understanding to more effective war regulation

I’m as fond as anybody of bring up the irregular/asymmetric nature of the American Revolution – minutemen out of uniform, not fighting in the same manner as European professional soldiers (early in the war – there’s a lot of history swept under the rug), and lots of civil war/neighbor-against-neighbor/farm burning/cross-border raiding with Canada.

But it’s worth remembering also British rules of engagement. As I understand it, any civilian found with any of the accoutrements of a rifleman – rifle, powder horn, loading block, or in some cases just hunting clothes – could be summarily hung as a murderer.

There is something odd about this concern:

“people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics. If those tactics are morally impermissible because of the risks they impose on non-combatants, then it looks as if armed resistance to severe injustice perpetrated by the well-equipped and powerful is also prohibited.”

My perusal of this thread suggests that zdenek comes closest to identifying it. In short, Chris seems to assume that there can be or is such a thing as the “justice” of a side in a conflict, which somehow exists prior to and independently of the tactics that side uses in the conflict. To wit, side A is (we somehow measure) “just”, in some ideal, Platonic sense, and side B “unjust”, and now that we’ve made that a priori intrinsic calculation, the problem that worries Chris (and, I realize, many on the left) is how to work out rules that can get side A to win.

But, question: if (as we are assuming) side A must use immoral means to win, and is prepared and willing to do so, in what meaningful sense is side A the “just” side? Is being “just” an intrinsic, permanent state? Surely not. Surely if Chris identifies some group in some conflict that he deems “just”, by whatever reasoning, and then that group announces “By the way we just want everyone to know, we’ve thought about it and figured out that our only chance of winning is to kidnap all the toddlers we can find and torture them and then wring their necks” – surely Chris reserves the right to change his mind about the “justice” of that side?

But how can he? We’ve already decided they’re the “just” side. The other side got labeled “unjust” and therefore, the neck-wringers must be allowed to win one way or another. In the name of “justice”. The supposed moral dilemma being, “But if the just side isn’t allowed to be immoral, they might not win, and then justice will not prevail.” That’s not a moral dilemma at all, it’s an absurdity. The mentality seems to be that Who Wins is the most important factor in morality and justice, rather than What Happens. This is a mentality for folks who are, themselves, power-hungry (if only vicariously).

In reality, there is no such thing as the intrinsic “justness” of a party to a conflict that exists prior to and independently of the actions taken by that party. If your primary concern is that a party to a conflict (because you deem them “just” or for whatever other reason) must be made to win by any means, then your concern is something other than justice.

If recourse to war is sometimes just—and just war theory says it is—but it may only be justly fought within the jus in bello restrictions, then it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak.

Well, yes. This is an explicit part of Just War theory, though, not something implicit that has to be reasoned out.

The Probability of Success criterion for the jus ad bellum portion of Just War theory says arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success. If it’s futile to fight a war under jus in bello restrictions, you aren’t eligible to engage in a Just War at all, but must pursue justice by other means.

One can respond by saying Just War theory is unjust, because it discriminates based on power. Its advocates will reply that it’s merely the nature of reality; sometimes the real world is such that war to correct an injustice can only make things worse, and so war must be prohibited. At that point it becomes a philosophical debate over the nature of morality, and everybody can futilely rehash the last five centuries (at least) of moral philosophy without coming to a consensus.

To wit, side A is (we somehow measure) “just”, in some ideal, Platonic sense, and side B “unjust”

Xmath, side A may very well be unjust and immoral and hideous, yet this side may be fighting for a just cause – self-defense, for example.

“…by any means at their disposal“. This seem to indicate that in 1970 a majority of the GA members felt that no jib rules should apply at least to this particular kind of struggle.

Six words in a GA statement exempt “liberation movements” from Geneva and Hague convention rules of war? What if nuclear weapons are at their disposal?

Resistance/insurgency requires support of the local population or else it’ll be immediately defeated.

The Khmer Rouge persisted for 20-odd years after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. FARC is deeply unpopular in Colombia yet has persisted for over 40 years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1998304.stm

” In national surveys the FARC never poll more than 5% of public support”

A special case, why not.

Because the use of nuclear weapons is vastly more inhumane, indiscriminate and lethal than any colonial administration in history. The use of nuclear weapons hasn’t been authorised by UN 2649 any more than the abandonment of Geneva/Hague rules of war.

And because “national liberation movements” can be seen in just about any civil war (as unfalsifiable a premise as ‘colonialism’) Alien domination is in the eye of the beholder, as any ZOG-hating redneck will attest.

Because the use of nuclear weapons is vastly more inhumane, indiscriminate and lethal than any colonial administration in history.

They just don’t want any colonial administrations any more, lethal or non-lethal. They want to emphasise it and create strong incentive against colonialism. It doesn’t mean they want anyone to be nuked.

And I don’t think they are talking about civil wars or any internal conflicts here.

You still seem to be operating from some Platonic, ether-bound conception of “justice”

Well, to the extend that “just-war theory” aspires to be normative, it must operate with some such elevated and/or vague conception. It can’t be, in the view of a “just-war theorist”, that justice is simply what is in accordance with the law, since he or she will presumably disagree in many cases with the statutes as they are currently written.

sorry I forgot to mention another non platonic option : reflective equilibrium which aims at coherence between moral and non moral beliefs and invoves revision and correction until an equilibrium is reached ; again this can provide the required justification without questionable metaphysics.

re 124– coherence for moral beliefs but corespondence for claims like ‘ I have just deposited $10000 into an account A ‘ .

Chris/Steven criticism of jwt/jib : because Chris is complaining about the weak being disadvantaged by jib and Steven is anxious about lack of justification for these rules their position reminds me of Hard & Negri view which says that these rules promote ideology of the ruling elite and not much more. So no wonder the jib rules are biased or without moral justification.
I think this is silly ( if this is indeed their view ) because jwt can be effectively used to criticise US war in Vietnam and in Iraq. Ie. it can be shown that US has not met the jwt requrements ( Walzer )and so it cannot be just a set of principles designed to rationalize the hegemon’s foreign policy.

before I forget Chris in his #130 is confusing two seperate questions :

1) what grounds normativity ?

is different from

2) what grounds specific moral judgements or specific moral theory ?

The first question is not the one we have been looking at and has nothing to do with reflective equilibrium. Offering an acount of normativity is a problem whether normativity can be naturalised ( at least in modern philosophy ). RE on the other hand comes in in narrow form when we try to justify specific moral judgements and in a broad form when we try to offer justification for a specific moral theory.

Now its possible to see that to say as Chris does that RE ” doesnt explain where the compellingness( of moral judgements comes from) is a red herring ( a muddle actually ) because this is an issue involving ( in modern philosophy anyway ) naturalizing of morality where what underwrites such a project is Darwinism ( Alan Gibbard’s project in his work is an example ).
PS this is a good undergraduate stuff so Chris supprises me.

So it is simple. A weak party can’t use immoral warfare until they have attempted non-violent resistance. But non-violent resistance only works if the weak party is obviously in the right.

So it looks like the Palestinians have no right to their immoral warfare and probably won’t find non-violent resistance that useful.