War

Glenn Greenwald contrasts the horror over the Newtown mass murder and the immediate political reaction with responses to the deaths of children in US drone attacks. He focuses his criticism particularly on Obama supporters.

While there are many different views, and combinations of views, my perspective (as a non-American who would have voted for Obama) is a bit different. Until Newtown my perspective on US gun violence and drone attacks was pretty much identical

* They are horrible
* I thought Obama would change things for the better, but they changed for the worse (no action on semi-automatics, spread of concealed carry and stand your ground, expansion of the drone war)
* Given the attitudes of the majority of Americans, little hope for improvement
* Repubs would be even worse

I think most of these views were shared by most participants in the “lesser evil” debate before the election. But what strikes me in retrospect is that the entire debate was focused on drones and related issues. Implicitly, I and I think, most others, regarded gun control as a cause so thoroughly lost that Obama couldn’t be blamed for abandoning it. The Trayvon Martin case changed this a bit, but not much. By contrast, Newtown showed that the apparent pro-gun consensus was if not illusory, at least fragile. In his trademark ‘lead from behind’ style, Obama captured the new consensus and seems likely to push it forward.

The hopeful reading of this is that public opinion about drones could change just as radically, if public understanding improved. At the moment, it’s hard to see that happening without some truly horrible shock, like a drone wiping out a primary school. Perhaps, however, the widespread view among those who have actually examined the drone war, that it’s both cruel and counterproductive, may start to seep into public discussion, as part of a reaction against the culture of violence that supports both drones and guns.

My friend Amy Keys alerted me to this amazing website documenting every single bomb that was dropped during the Blitz. I recommend zooming out on the main page, and then narrowing in to particular places you know well. My first trip was to Regents Park.

Apparently there’s going to be an app.

I last paid attention to the Jerusalem Post when it was running apologetics for Anders Behring Breivik. It seems to have gone one better yesterday, with an article by Gilad Sharon entitled “A Decisive Conclusion is Necessary”, a sample:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

As one person remarked to me, maybe “decisive conclusion” could be one rendering of Endlösung.

Meanwhile, the President of the United States has this to say:

… there’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.

Well then, can we expect Pakistani tanks on the White House lawn imminently?

Perhaps not.

And so the familiar litany of “justifications” goes on, most predictably about Hamas being to blame for any civilian deaths because their “operatives” “hide among the civilian population”. Those of us who have been paying attention during recent wars in Libya and Syria will note that nobody thought Gadaffi and Assad any the less responsible for the babies they killed (and in Syria, continue to kill) from the air because those resisting their tyrannies did so from populated areas such as Misrata and Aleppo. Do different principles apply when it is the IDF doing the killing? It would seem so.

And there seem to be a lot of “surgical strikes”. You know, the ones that magically discriminate between the innocent and the guilty in urban area, except when they don’t.

So it goes.

Every Armistice Day I write more or less the same post, and every time I do, I’m struck by how hard it is to draw the obvious conclusions from the evidence of war during my lifetime (the last 50 years or so). For around half that time, the US has been engaged in a large-scale war, with Australia as an ally/client. The wars have cost thousands of American, and hundreds of Australian, lives, and trillions of dollars, while wreaking death and destruction on a far more massive scale in the countries in which they have been fought. The outcomes have ranged from total defeat to unsatisfactory partial victories. In no case have there been benefits remotely commensurate with the cost, for either side (for all the millions of lives lost, is Vietnam much different now than if the war had never been fought?). In most of them, the case for war was built on blatant lies and in the remaining cases, the lies started as soon as the guns opened fire. The claims of military and foreign policy “experts” have proved to be false more often than not.

The obvious conclusion is that war is almost always a mistake as well as a crime.

Yet it seems impossible to get away from the assumption that war, or the threat of war, is a reliable method of achieving desired outcomes.

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In the interests of inter-blog peace, I’ve decided to take this post down. As with war in general, the costs of interblog war typically outweigh the benefits.

First up, I want to apologize to readers of CT and LGM for what has been (for me, and I think quite a few others) an unpleasant experience. The post I wrote about naval expenditures was provocative, but I thought it fell within the normal bounds of blogging license – that was clearly wrong. Obviously, this is a question on which a little provocation goes a long way.

Also, although I had noticed that people had different views about the “lesser evil” question in relation to the US election, I hadn’t thought of this as a “blogwar” between CT and LGM and in any case I had no idea that this post would upset Rob Farley in the way it did. Had I known these things, I would not have put the post up, certainly not written as it was. When the fight blew up, I made a series of attempts to cool things down, but with little success (in fact, probably making things worse).

Coming to the post itself, it contained a fair bit of hyperbole and snark (though not directed at anyone personally). This was returned in full measure, pressed down and running over. I also wrote some things in a loose and sloppy way, leaving opportunities for misinterpretation that were taken up with enthusiasm.

I’ve been duly smacked for the hyperbolic/snarky/loosely worded statements in the post. On the other hand, reflecting the nature of this kind of fight, the critics haven’t engaged at all with the main arguments of the post. So, it seems to me that the best thing to do at this point is to rewrite the post, removing the hyperbole and snark, correcting some points where I think there was a substantive error, and expanding on points where what I originally wrote was misinterpreted, or where the critics have made points that need a response.

The majority judgement is pretty clear that I’m wrong on this one. Maybe so, but as I said, I haven’t seen any real response on what I regard as the central issues, so I’m going to restate my position and leave it at that.

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So, some celebrities got married: Blake Lively, who was in the TV show Gossip Girl, and Ryan Reynolds, who was in the Green Lantern and is one of those dudes who is stipulated to be handsome but his eyes are too close together so he just looks moronic. Like a younger…thingface. Whoever. Lively herself is an off-brand Gwyneth Paltrow so it’s suitable.

They had the wedding, which was all perfect and arranged by actual Martha Stewart with color-coördinated jordan almonds (OK I made that detail up, but almost certainly yes), at Boone Hall Plantation, outside of Charleston in South Carolina. Boone Hall almost alone of the pre-Civil War plantations has its slave quarters intact. I think this is actually awesome about Boone Hall. At all the other plantations, you go, and some nice white volunteer shows you around, and you have to just use your imagination. The main house is now surrounded by vast lawns, and live oaks and azaleas, wisteria and breath of spring, tea olive, daphne odora, gardenias, and mounds of Lady Banksia roses. Mmmm, up in Charleston that Lady Banksia will get up to one-and-a-half stories high. I’m not sure why it doesn’t grow so well in Savannah. Pretty little yellow roses on a climbing vine, heaping up on itself, all up around old fenceposts. But no hovels! No wood fires, no chickens, no foundries! No crying babies, no foremen, no one making grits, no one getting beat the hell up, no black people!
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There’s “an article over at Al Jazeera”:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128710139185997.html by historian Mark LeVine about Bradley Strawser, the philosopher who has been making a stir with his arguments that drone warfare might be morally permissible, or even obligatory. There’s quite a lot in what LeVine says that’s going to grate with philosophers. I reacted to

bq. “Most philosophers today accept the argument by the seminal inter-war philosopher Walter Benjamin that violence cannot be understood or judged except “in its relation to law and justice”.

Really? Has he done a survey? And what he says about Kant, well …

But what LeVine observes about Strawser’s conditional arguments is surely disturbing. Strawser claims that IF drones reduce civilian casualties compared to other means THEN the use of drones is justified (I’m simplifying). Philosophers will typically then say that the argument is merely conditional, and that therefore, if the antecedent is false then the conclusion doesn’t follow. Clearly that’s right. But does it get us off the hook in a world of propaganda, mass media, think tanks and the like? In the paper Levine links to, the principal evidence for the truth of the antecedent is a brochure from an Israeli arms manufacturer. And then there’s the matter of counting civilian casualties accurately, in a world in which the Obama adminstration has simply decreed that the dead males killed by drones are “bad guys”. Of course this kind problem, involving the escape of the argument from the seminar room into the wider world, isn’t limited to just war theory. So, for example, I’ve heard it argued by philosophers that IF sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people in poor countries THEN they are on-balance justified: so people shouldn’t campaign against sweatshop labour. This then gets supplemented with “evidence” that the antecedent is true, but by this time the casual listener has been inclined by the rhetoric to accept the conclusion. (That’s particularly likely if the listener, be they naval academy cadet or visitor to libertarian website is already ideologically predisposed to believe that the antecedent is true.) But where’s the evidence from? From Cato? From the AEI? From some “free-market” economist? As philosophers we claim innocence. “I wasn’t saying that drone strikes (or sweatshops) are justified, I was merely saying that IF they meet condition X, THEN they’re justified. My job is to assess the arguments, someone else can supply the facts.” That leaves me feeling uneasy.

ADDENDUM: it would be an interesting psychological experiment (which, for all I know someone has done) to test whether people who are exposed to conditional arguments in the total absence of evidence for the truth of the antecedent become more inclined to believe the consequent, perhaps especially for cases where the antecedent is some morally dubious policy. So, for example, are people exposed to the conditional “IF increased inequality ends up making the poorest better off THEN increased inequality is justified” more likely to believe that increased inequality is justified, even when no evidence that increased inequality benefits the poorest is presented?

This post is really a bleg, aimed at the international lawyers out there. I’ve been looking into the legal basis for US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, strikes that on some estimates have caused over a thousand civilian deaths. As far as I can see, the strikes need to pass the regular tests of discriminating between combatants and non-combatants and not causing disproportionate “collateral damage”. They also need to get past the UN Charter’s ban on using force against the territorial integrity of other states. This article by Jack Goldsmith claims there are two ways to do this (1) by getting consent from the “victim state” and (2) by properly invoking the right of self-defence re the non-state actors concerned and claiming truly that the victim state is “unwilling or unable” to deal with the threat posed.

The United States in its drone campaign appears to be relying on self-defence and this “unwilling or unable” test. This strikes me as deeply problematic on two grounds. The first is that the _Caroline_ test, that necessity of self-defence be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation” seems not to be met. But I suppose the United States could claim that it is simply continuing a campaign of self-defence that began after September 11th 2001 and has continued since. (Could that really justify extending “self-defence” to take in new sovereign territories?) The second reason is that it looks to me as if the doctrine the United States is relying upon would also have justified “targeted assassinations” by other states on US soil at various times against individuals or groups planning or engaged in actions against those states, whom the US was unwilling to suporess. So, for example, both Cuba and Nicaragua in the past and maybe Iran today could invoke a similar doctrine with as much justification. Say it ain’t so?

I’ve been reading some of Glenn Greenwald’s recent posts with increasing horror as he details the apparent willingness of the US drone campaign to attack events where non-combatants will certainly be present, such as funerals and to try to evade moral and legal responsibility by redefining “combatant” to include any military-age male in a strike zone. I’ve also been monitoring various liberal sites and blogs for signs of a reaction and not seeing much (please correct that impression in comments). Sites that obsess about non-combatant immunity if the people firing the rockets are from Hamas are silent. Blogs that take attitudes to historic human rights violations as a litmus-test of political acceptability, have nothing to say as a liberal American President bombs civilians on the territory of nominally friendly states. Fortunately, I’m not an American citizen, so I don’t have a moral decision to take about whether to vote for Obama or not this year. If I were, I don’t think it would be an easy decision to take. Romney is clearly remarkably close in political belief to Obama, but will be beholden to the crazy Republican right, as Obama is not. That provides people with a reason to vote for Obama. But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner doesn’t _deserve_ the vote of anyone who cares about human rights, even if, pragmatically they might feel they have to give it to him.

Today’s Guardian has a series of articles today concerning Britain’s colonial past and evidence of the “widespread destruction of documents”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes with evidence of crimes against humanity by British forces. Other pieces include material on “planned poison gas tests in Botswana”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-poison-gas-tests-botswana , on the “coverup of the deportation of the Chagos islanders from Diego Garcia”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/archives-diego-garcia (now used by the United States to bomb various countries), and of “serious war crimes during the Malayan emergency”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/18/colonial-office-eliminations-malayan-insurgency?intcmp=239 . And then there are “eighteen striking photographs”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/gallery/2012/apr/18/colonial-archives-kenya-malaya-aden of the British at work in Kenya, Malaya and Aden . The Aden photographs in particular call to mind similar later ones of British troops in Northern Ireland, where of course, torture was also employed: the techniques used on colonial populations being brought to bear against Irish republicans. And, of course, the look on the faces of the soldiers as they manhandle and abuse “natives” is really no different from what we see in pictures of the French in Algeria, of American troops in Iraq and, indeed, in footage of the Israeli Defense Force in the occupied territories. A timely reminder of the evils of imperialism and colonialism.

It’s not at all surprising that most US media have yawned at “today’s news”:http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-inhuman/ that a UN rapporteur has found that the US has treated Bradley Manning in a cruel and inhuman fashion. But it does highlight a rather interesting inequity.

On the one side of the balance sheet, we have Richard B. Cheney. This gentleman, now in private life, is a self-admitted and unrepentant perpetrator of war crimes – specifically, of ordering the torture of Al Qaeda detainees. Along with other senior members of the Bush regime, he is also guilty of the outsourcing of even viler forms of torture through the extraordinary rendition of individuals to regimes notorious for torturing prisoners (including the dispatch of Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, to the torturers of Syria). The Obama administration has shown no enthusiasm whatsoever for prosecuting Cheney, or other Bush senior officials, for their crimes. While Obama has effectively admitted that they were torturers, he has indicated, both through public statements and continued inaction, that he would prefer to let bygones be bygones.

On the other, we have Bradley Manning. He appears to be a confused individual – but his initial motivation for leaking information, if the transcripts are correct, were perfectly clear. He was appalled at what he saw as major abuses of authority by the US, including incidents that he witnessed directly in Iraq. There is no evidence that his leaking of information has caused anything worse than embarrassment for the US. Yet he is being pursued by the Obama administration with the vengefulness of Greek Furies. While Manning was being kept in solitary confinement, and treated in an inhuman fashion, Richard Cheney was enjoying the manifold pleasures of a well-compensated private life, being subjected to no more than the occasional impertinent question on a Sunday talk show, and the inconveniences of being unable to travel to jurisdictions where he might be arrested.

It would appear then that the administration is rather more prepared to let bygones be bygones in some cases than in others. High officials, who ordered that torture be carried out and dragged the US into international disrepute, are given an _ex post_ carte blanche for their crimes, while a low-ranking soldier who is at most guilty of leaking minor secrets at the lowest levels of classification, is treated inhumanely and likely, should he be convicted, to face life imprisonment.

So here’s my proposal. It’s perfectly clear that Richard B. Cheney will never be prosecuted because a prosecution would be politically inconvenient. If that’s the Obama administration’s decision (and it’s pretty clear that it _is_ the Obama administration’s decision), then the administration should own it. The president should grant Richard Cheney a pardon for his crimes. Simultaneously, as an acknowledgement that the high crimes of state officials should not go unpunished while the lesser crimes of those who opposed the Iraq war are exposed to the vengefulness of the military tribunal system, Bradley Manning should receive a complete pardon too.

I can’t imagine that Richard B. Cheney would _like_ getting a presidential pardon. Indeed, I rather imagine that he’d vigorously protest it. It would serve as the best formal acknowledgment that we’re likely to get that he is, indeed, a criminal. Obviously, it would also be an unhappy compromise for those who think that he should be exposed to the full rigors of the law. But I personally think that it would be an acceptable compromise (others may reasonably disagree), if it were applied to both sides rather than just one.

I’m asking the question, because I don’t know, but the signs are extremely worrying. When NATO intervention was first mooted, I wrote a piece here expressing concern that, if the successor government came about thanks to NATO intervention it would lack legitimacy in the eyes of the Libyan people. I’m not sure that I was right about the reasons for that, but the conclusion about the lack of legitimacy itself (much mocked in some quarters) looks to be increasingly vindicated by events. One reason to intervene was to prevent severe human rights violations, including the possibility of massacre in Benghazi. Well a cruel and vicious regime with a dreadful human-rights record has gone, but seems to have been replaced by a squabbling coalition of militias, little inclined to submit to the authority of a central government, with Ghaddafi-loyalists making a comeback. Moreover, said militias seem to be engaged in serious human rights violations themselves, abuses that have been going on pretty much since “victory”. Those who were most enthusiastic for intervention don’t seem to be saying much about these worrying recent developments. An intervention predicated on defending human rights certainly won’t have been justified if the successor regime ends up presiding over similar persecutings, detainings, torturings and killings itself.

The position of the last British detainee at Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer, is in the UK news today. He’s never been charged with anything and was “cleared for release” under the Bush administration. He is in failing health. For protesting about his own treatment and that of others, he is confined to the punishment block. It seems the reason the Aamer can’t be released today is that the US Congress has imposed absurd certification requirements on the US Secretary of Defense, such that Panetta would be personally reponsible for any future criminal actions by the released inmate. One of the reasons why the US Congress has put these obstacles up is because of claims made by the US military about “recidivism”, claims that also get some scrutiny in the report. It would seem that subsequent protests about conditions in the camp, writing a book about it or making a film, are counted as instances of “recidivism”. Astonishing. You can listen to a BBC radio report here (start at 7′ 40″) (I’d been thinking about Guantanamo anyway, because of the “superb and moving article by Lakhdar Boumediene in the New York Times, “:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/my-guantanamo-nightmare.html which you should also read.)

Whilst it is good to see this issue getting more coverage in the mainstream media in the UK and the US, it is depressing how little uptake there has been among politicians and, indeed, the online community. The long-term detention, mistreatment and probable torture of people who have never been convicted of anything, ought to be a matter uniting people across the political spectrum who care about human rights. Unfortunately, outside of a small coterie of activists, the best you get is indifference or even active hostility. Indeed, those who campaign on behalf of the inmates have themselves been villified (by conservatives or the “decent left”) for such “crimes” as comparing the Guantanamo regime to past totalitarian governments (as if such comparison is more offensive than the acual treatment of the detainees). Depressing.