Ben Mauk wrote a good article for Granta on how bombing from the air has changed the law of war.
There is a law of ground warfare, which treats targeting of civilians as terrorism, and a law of air warfare, which treats killing of civilians at worst as a purpose and at best as unavoidable collateral damage.
The Nanking Massacre of 1937 is considered one of history’s greatest atrocities. As many as 200,000 or 300,000 Chinese civilians were bayoneted or machine-gunned by Japanese troops.
An estimated 100,000 Japanese civilians died in a single fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in 1945, which was one of many. But, aside from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. bombing of Japan is not widely considered to be a war crime. One you decide on a bombing strategy, civilian deaths are inevitable.
General William T. Sherman’s 1864 march through Georgia during the Civil War was regarded at the time as an atrocity. He ordered the indiscriminate destruction of civilian property in order to break the Confederacy’s means and will to resist. But he only destroyed property. He didn’t massacre civilians.
Now imagine a Sherman not on horseback, but in the cockpit of an aircraft. How could he have carried out his policy without large-scale killing of civilians?
My friend Hal and I were in a coffee shop the other day. Hal remarked that if somebody set off a car bomb in the parking lot and blew us all to smithereens, that would be an act of terrorism.
But, he went on to say, if somebody dropped a bomb from 15,000 feet into the parking lot and blew us all to smithereens, that also would be an act of terrorism.
And it would be an act of terrorism even if we were foreigners with brown skins and Arabic names.
This is so obviously true that I am continually amazed at how many people I know, including self-described liberals, that are unable to see this.
If killing civilian bystanders is terrorism when Muslims do it at ground level, it is terrorism when Americans and Europeans do it from the air.
The fundamental fallacy which is committed by almost everyone is this: “A and B hate each other, therefore one is good and the other is bad.”==Bertrand Russell, 1956
Hospital emergency room staff in Douma, Syria, in August
I’ve written a good many posts on why I think it is a mistake for the U.S. government to arm terrorist rebels in Syria. That doesn’t mean I should forget or ignore the crimes of Syria’s ruler, Bashar al-Assad.
Here is an account by Majed Aboali, a volunteer Syrian doctor, about the Syrian government’s systematic bombing of civilian populations, including hospitals.
Government airstrikes—barrel bombs, missiles, and vacuum explosives—are responsible for some 90 percent of the people killed over the summer. On top of that comes the collective terror of the chemical attacks—chlorine barrels in 2015 and 2014, sarin in 2013.
What did the world do to stop the killing? It sent jets to bomb the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) but did nothing to stop the far greater killing of civilians by the Syrian government’s airstrikes.
For my Syrian colleagues, IS pales as a problem next to Assad’s attacks on civilians. If the world would stop these attacks on civilians, we Syrians could stop the estimated 10 percent of the killings committed by IS.
The hospital in Douma has been targeted many times. Somehow, they have avoided a direct hit. But we do not know if they will survive the next attempt. Which is why the world must act to stop the killing.
President Obama is asking Congress for authority to bomb Syria, but he said he has no intention of invading Syria. Bombing will result in the deaths of some Syrians and some damage to Syria’s war-making capability, but it will not threaten the power of President Bashar al-Assad. In fact it will strengthen his power, by turning the Syrian people and Arab people generally more against the United States than they already are.
What then can you about President Assad? We don’t know his role, if any, in the gas attacks. Maybe he ordered them. Maybe his brother or some other element of the Syrian army ordered them. Maybe a pro-government or anti-government militia carried them out. Maybe the gas attacks were a deception operation by the Saudi or some other foreign government.
If there is proof that he ordered the nerve gas attacks, then we should bring a criminal case at the Hague. There is a precedent for trying heads of state for crimes against humanity. He could be tried in his absence. Admittedly, Assad could not be brought to justice unless he was captured outside his country or his regime was overthrown, but these limitations are not nothing. Of course all this is contingent on Assad actually being guilty of ordering the gassing of civilians, which at present is not at all certain.
What then can we do to help the Syrians? Writer Charles Stross had a thought.
Nerve agents like Sarin aren’t black magic; they’re close relatives of organophosphate insecticides. Medical treatments exist. In particular there’s a gizmo called a NAAK, or Nerve Agent Antidote Kit. The drugs it relies on (neostigmine, atropine, and diazepam) are all more than fifty years old and dirt cheap; they won’t save someone who has inhaled a high lethal dose, but they’ll stabilize someone who’s been exposed, hopefully for long enough to get them decontaminated and rush them to a hospital for long-term treatment. Mass Sarin attacks are survivable with prompt first aid and hospital support.
We should be distributing gas masks, field decontamination showers, NAAK kits, and medical resources to everyone in the conflict zones. Government, civilian, rebels, it doesn’t matter. By doing so we would be providing aid that was (a) life-saving (b) cheap, and (c) put a thumb on the side of the balance in favor of whoever isn’t using nerve gas. We’d also be breaking with the traditional pattern of western involvement in the region, which is to break shit and kill people, mostly innocent civilians who were trying to keep their heads down. It wouldn’t fix our bloody-handed reputation, but it’d be a good start.
The other thing we Americans could do is to provide help and asylum for refugees, especially Christian refugees. Syria, like Egypt, was a Christian country before it was a Muslim county, and still has a large Christian minority. They will inevitably become the scapegoat for anything done by the supposedly Christian United States.
The documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras was the key figure in bringing Edward Snowden’s information before the public. Glenn Greenwald is brave enough, but she was the one with the skills to evade the surveillance state. She is like the heroine of some dystopian science fiction novel about a totalitarian state of the future. This well-written, informative article is worth reading in its entirety.
Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who at one time was so close to the Bush family that George W. Bush nicknamed him “Bandar Bush,” flew to Moscow to offer to buy huge amounts of Russian weapons if the Russian government would withdraw its support for the Assad regime in Syria. As Pepe Escobar noted, this will never happen. Vladimir Putin would never tolerate Syria being taken over by radical jihadists, whose next target undoubtedly would be Chechnia, less than 600 miles away.
Three Serbian generals were acquitted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia because they did not give orders for the atrocities committed by troops under their command.
An editorial writer said that the Theravada Buddhist clergy are governed by an autocratic system that tolerates corruption and misconduct but not dissent and reform. Accountability is needed, she wrote; one starting point would be for Thais to only contribute to temples with transparent accounting systems.
I was surprised to learn that “Messiah” is one of the 1.000 most common first names for newborn male babies in the United States. The Tennessee judge is out of line, but perhaps the parents could settle for naming their baby “Senator,” “Colonel,” “Professor” or “Doctor”.
Bradley Manning at Fort Meade. Source: Alex Wong / Getty Images
Here are some things the U.S. government has done that Bradley Manning has made known through Wikileaks.
During the Iraq War, U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, according to thousands of field reports.
There were 109,032 “violent deaths” recorded in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, including 66,081 civilians. Leaked records from the Afghan War separately revealed coalition troops’ alleged role in killing at least 195 civilians in unreported incidents, one reportedly involving U.S. service members machine-gunning a bus, wounding or killing 15 passengers.
The U.S. Embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country that opposed genetically modified crops, with U.S. diplomats effectively working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto.
British and American officials colluded in a plan to mislead the British Parliament over a proposed ban on cluster bombs.
In Baghdad in 2007, a U.S. Army helicopter gunned down a group of civilians, including two Reuters news staff.
U.S. special operations forces were conducting offensive operations inside Pakistan despite sustained public denials and statements to the contrary by U.S. officials.
A leaked diplomatic cable provided evidence that during an incident in 2006, U.S. troops in Iraq executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. The disclosure of this cable was later a significant factor in the Iraqi government’s refusal to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution beyond 2011, which led to U.S. troops withdrawing from the country.
A NATO coalition in Afghanistan was using an undisclosed “black” unit of special operations forces to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. The unit was revealed to have had a kill-or-capture list featuring details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida, but it had in some cases mistakenly killed men, women, children, and Afghan police officers.
The U.S. threatened the Italian government in an attempt to influence a court case involving the indictment of CIA agents over the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric. Separately, U.S. officials were revealed to have pressured Spanish prosecutors to dissuade them from investigating U.S. torture allegations, secret “extraordinary rendition” flights, and the killing of a Spanish journalist by U.S. troops in Iraq.
In apparent violation of a 1946 U.N. convention, Washington initiated a spying campaign in 2009 that targeted the leadership of the U.N. by seeking to gather top officials’ private encryption keys, credit card details, and biometric data.
We Americans talk of the Iranian leaders as madmen, but it is our leaders, not theirs, who are talking about launching an unprovoked military attack that could cost thousands of lives of people who have just as much right to live as the people working in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
In an Orwellian use of language, we said that for the Iranians to acquire the means to retaliate against an attack is an act of aggression. Recently I came across an article by Marcia B. Cohen on Alternet about just what an attack on Iran might mean. She quoted from a 114-page study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which devoted just two pages to the human and environmental consequences for Iran.
Bushehr nuclear plant
Any strike on the Bushehr Nuclear Reactor will cause the immediate death of thousands of people living in or adjacent to the site, and thousands of subsequent cancer deaths or even up to hundreds of thousands depending on the population density along the contamination plume.
The bombs and missiles used against Iran would use depleted uranium, which is much heavier than lead, to give it greater penetrating power. She went on to say:
No one is talking about the harm that “surgical air strikes” against “suspected Iranian nuclear facilities” with GBU-28 “bunker-buster” bombs, which derive their ability to penetrate concrete and earth from depleted uranium, would inflict on 74 million Iranians, nearly a quarter of whom are under the age of 14 and under and half of whom are under the age of 30. … …
No worries are being expressed about the release of radioactive materials into the biosphere of Central Asia (and by eventual extension, the entire earth). If the depleted uranium in the bombs comes into contact with radioactive nuclear materials present in the targeted nuclear research sites–nearly all of which operate under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision–the potential for disaster would be magnified exponentially.
Israeli F-16
Israeli Military Intelligence Chief Major General Aviv Kochavi grimly told the hawkish Herziliya Conference recently that Iran possesses more than 4 tons of low-grade enriched uranium as well as almost 100 kilograms of uranium enriched at 20%. If true, is it really a good idea to send these radioactive materials spewing into the air and water of Central Asia and beyond? Is it any wonder that Russia, China and India–all whom are much closer geographically to Iran, as well as downwind of the direction in which radiation and toxin-tainted winds would initially blow–are the UN Security Council members most opposed to attacking Iran?
Nor is anyone questioning the wisdom of dropping unprecedented numbers of 5000 lb. “bunker busters” capable of penetrating 100 feet of earth or 20 feet of concrete into the bowels of an already earthquake-prone region. No one seems to care about the irreparable and uncontainable environmental damage that could be done to miles of Iranian coastline: the adjacent Caspian Sea to the north, the Arabian Sea to the south, and the Persian Gulf to the west. What about the permanent damage to the underground aquifers of Central Asia, where water is already scarce? If fracking for natural gas can render US drinking water flammable, imagine what pounding some of the most plentiful natural gas fields with bombs could do.
President Obama is holding back on attacking Iran, but at the same time he says that it is unacceptable for Iran to develop nuclear weapons and that all options, including an attack on Iran, are on the table. The U.S. already is waging economic war against Iran, and Israeli intelligence agents are believed to be murdering Iranian scientists. Since it would be illogical for Iran’s leaders to stop trying to acquire the means to defend themselves when they are threatened by two nuclear powers, the United States and Israel, there doesn’t seem to be any way out.
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