The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man 380
An anonymous reader writes "The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by Yale's Stephen L. Carter entitled 'The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man.' He provides a retrospective on the War in Iraq and discusses the ethical and legal implications of the War on Terror and 'anticipatory self-defense' in the form of drones and targeted killings going forward. He writes: 'Iraq was war under the beta version of the Bush Doctrine. The newer model is represented by the slaying of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen deemed a terror threat. The Obama Administration has ratcheted the use of remote drone attacks to unprecedented levels — the Bush Doctrine honed to rapier sharpness. The interesting question about the new model is one of ethics more than legality. Let us assume the principal ethical argument pressed in favor of drone warfare — to wit, that the reduction in civilian casualties and destruction of property means that the drone attack comports better than most other methods with the principle of discrimination. If this is so, then we might conclude that a just cause alone is sufficient to justify the attacks. ... But is what we are doing truly self-defense?'"
SlashPol? (Score:5, Insightful)
anticipatory self-defense (Score:2, Insightful)
Try using that one in court...
Your honor, I shot my next door neighbour because I knew in a week's time he would start some shit.
Of course it's not self-defense (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no way this can be considered self-defense. Defense by definition is stopping an aggressor. This is executing people suspected of terrorism without trial.
Re:targeted killing (Score:3, Insightful)
already decided, we're going to war (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No no but hell no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SlashPol? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please I have the politics section not on my frontpage for a reason. Hey if you really want to read slashdot's political stories that is fine but does anyone here really believe that this belongs under "technology" and not Politics?
Really?
the morality is irrelevant (Score:2, Insightful)
The morality is irrelevant. For the family of the "collateral damage" the US will be exactly the same as any other terrorist.
This kind of thinking will only result in MORE people thinking that terrorism is a legitimate way to combat terrorists. Guess what the result will be.
Robert E. Lee (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Robert E. Lee (Score:2, Insightful)
well, now that we have drones doing the killing for us, it is becoming less terrible
Re:SlashPol? (Score:5, Insightful)
[...] but does anyone here really believe that this belongs under "technology" and not Politics? Really?
It's "morality" as a consequence of "technolgy", the newly acquired opportunity to kill opponents without too much "political" risk. No body bags or television footage of dead soldiers from downed Blackhawk (e.g. in Mogadishu). I think it is a very relevant story.
Re:Of course it's not self-defense (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no way this can be considered self-defense. Defense by definition is stopping an aggressor.
So, when a SWAT team shoots someone who has already killed people, has said he's going to kill more people, and shows every sign of preparing to do just that, that's self defense (of the inevitable victims), or not?
How is that different than using lethal force to stop al-Awlaki, who was involved in numerous deaths (and the attempt to kill hundreds in Detroit), swore he's keep doing it, and was haning out with people training, financing, and arming along those lines? He and the guys he was in the middle of the desert (trying to stay out of the way of law enforcement) on the move with were killers, promised to do more of it, were actively engaged in recruiting, financing, and arming and coaching other killers go out and do it. And they expressly pointed out domestic US targets as some of their objectives.
There was absolutely no reason to cost more lives by sending boots on the ground into the desert where he was (deliberately, to avoid just that) running Kill Americans University. Perfect use of a drone strike, and absolutely a defensive act.
If it was one bullet, I would agree with you. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was one bullet, I would agree with you.
The problem is that we use rockets launched from drones. And those rockets take out an entire building when we are "targeting" one person.
Re:Kill those who would kill you.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, more need be said (Score:5, Insightful)
The question posed was whether it was really "self-defense." This is an important question because the UN Charter allows nation-states to take action in self-defense." Thus every tinpot dictator, power-mad army, or simply state that otherwise wants to use violence without the sanction of the security council--i.e. what would otherwise be an illegal war--claims that their attacks are motivated by self-defense.
So if the U.S. wants to be able to target people in drone strikes (or otherwise, e.g. Osama Bin Laden) in what would otherwise be illegal acts of war committed within the territory of a foreign nation with which we are not at war, we have to be able to justify it as self-defense. Otherwise, it's illegal. If it's illegal, nobody can stop it, but it still undermines the power of the United Nations to declare certain wars illegal--which makes it harder to respond to illegal wars in the future, easier for warmongers to justify aggressive wars, etc...
Of course, the flipside of that is that every time someone takes a warlike act, calls it self-defense, and gets away with it, that expands the boundaries of what "self-defense" means on the international stage.
At any rate, this whole debate is why the Security Council passed the resolution they did for the second Iraq war--it was deliberately ambiguous, so that the United States could claim the war was approved by the security council (and thus not illegal) and the other countries could claim that they had not approved the war; it was effectively a nominal nod to the power of the security council to decide which wars are legal.
Re:Of course it's not self-defense (Score:2, Insightful)
The real question is ofcourse if you would allow an other country to send drones into american soil to kill americans that they think are a threat. The answer is the same in every country. Drones is only allowed in one direction...
Re:What about the soldiers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Iraq and Afghanistan wars (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just drop this [snopes.com] little gem here. It is quite clear that either most everyone in the government was lying, or it was really believed that he could be a major threat. Al Gore even said in 2002 that he knew Saddam had stores of chemical and biological weapons. Now, whether certain parts of the government deceived other parts is an open question I won't get into, but Saddam himself was doing everything in his power to make it look like he was a threat. Every reasonable examination points to the government as a whole honestly believing he was a major threat in a region that possesses massive amounts of economic resources and in some cases nuclear weapons which could lead to catastrophic disaster should he ever choose to act.
In hindsight, of course, we know better (hence all the "Bush lied and just wanted the oil"... the oil we never actually got, of course: Iraq's production has gone down since the invasion). At the time? No one did. Whether the actions were justified even given what we thought we knew at the time: well, again, I won't get into that, as it is pretty messy. I will just say that retrospect offers amazingly clear vision.
Re:Yes, more need be said (Score:4, Insightful)
Or in other words, in the end might makes right. Just as it has for the bulk of the past 10,000 years of human history.
The passing of the resolution in the Security Council was mere puppet theatre, nothing more. As you pointed out, in the end they just passed something vague so that both sides could be "right".
That's the weird part. (Score:5, Insightful)
For an example, read through some of the posts here.
There are people in the USofA who seem to WANT endless war.
As long as it is against someone far away and weak enough to never pose any real threat to them.
But send our military in? Hell yeah!
Kill people with drones? Fuck yeah!
Borrow money to do the above? Hell fucking yeah!
Do not conflate Afghanistan and Iraq (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent seven months in Kandahar City as part of ISAF. I say this so you know that I have seen the ground truth, not just whatever story comes out of whatever news outlet you care to believe.
The Taliban were providing direct aid and sanctuary to the people who carries out the 9/11 attacks, and then refused to hand them over for prosecution - or indeed, to enforce any limits on their activities in any way. This makes that regime an active accessory to international terrorism and indeed a legitimate threat.
On top of that, I cannot imagine any group of people less suited to govern a nation than the Taliban. During my tour, a couple of Taliban chose to douse a group of Afghan schoolgirls with concentrated acid, killing some, and horribly disfiguring the others - for the crime of attending school. Not a Western-funded school; an Afghan-started, Afghan-operated school teaching girls to read. This sort of despicable and flatly inhuman act was Taliban policy. There is NOTHING good about the Taliban. They are bigoted narco-thugs who actively seek to erase any sign of civilization, law, and order in the attempt to eliminate opposition to their drug farming slavery campaigns. The Afghan campaign was, is, and remains a just war.
The crying shame of the Bush administration was that, instead of applying a full-court-press to Afghanistan following the initial defeat of the Taliban and seeing the country Marshall Planned back to some form of stability, they took their eyes off the ball to go adventuring in Iraq. This allowed the Taliban to re-invent themselves as an insurgency, rebuild, and become a destabilizing force that has slowed reconstruction to a crawl.
Although the world does not morn the passing of Saddam, Iraq was completely unjustified and the diversion of resources away from Afghanistan is, as far as I'm concerned, criminal. Afghanistan is NOT Iraq.
DG
What's good for the goose... (Score:5, Insightful)
Iraq has made the world LESS safe (Score:4, Insightful)
Bush picked Iraq out of his "axis of evil" precisely because they were the country that was least able to defend itself(at least in a conventional sense). He wanted to score a cheap political victory and he did so by starting a war he thought would maybe last 6 weeks. And more recently Gadafi, who ditched his WMD program, is now dead as well. The message to dictators is clear, want to stay in power? Get weapons. THe world is a far more dangerous place because the man-child of a president decided he wanted to play army.
Re:If it was one bullet, I would agree with you. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A different interpretation. (Score:5, Insightful)
US population 307,006,550 and at 150,000 troops sent, 1 soldier sent for every 2,027 residents.
UK population 62,218,761 and at 46,000 troops sent, 1 soldier sent for every 1,353 residents.
Australia population 22,328,800 and at 2,000 troops sent, 1 soldier sent for every 11,164 residents.
Looks to me like the UK supported the war even more than the US did using your figures.
Re:targeted killing (Score:5, Insightful)
Anwar An-Awlaki was not a dictator.
He hated the USA and may or may not have had tea with Bin Laden and a few other people with Al Qaeda.
The US government has presented zero evidence that he helped terrorists commit acts of terror, or that he committed such acts himself. As far as we know, he was murdered because he didn't like the USA, had the balls to say so, and people actually listened to him and agreed with him.
As far as I'm concerned the USA became a tyranny the moment they decided to kill him.
And Americans should be ashamed of themselves for letting their government get away with this. I know most Americans will say they don't agree with their government and this assassination, but these same people pay taxes to that government, which enables it to do what it does. They're part of the problem, even if they don't like to be. For this reason, simply saying "I don't approve" is not enough - Americans should have taken action against the US government and specifically those who ordered this assassination. Try pressing charges, for one. Or if that doesn't work due to some sad legal loophole that lets the President do whatever he wants, try asking foreign nations (e.g. European countries) to put pressure on the US gov.
If An-Awlaki had been killed on US soil I wouldn't care, but that happened abroad.
I strongly oppose the US government myself although I don't associate with terrorists (then again, seeing as the US government's of "terrorist" is so broad it can fit almost anybody who doesn't lick the President's boots, maybe I do). What happens if one day I open a blog that is aimed at criticizing the US government and I get a lot of supporters? Should I also worry about having my house blown up by an American drone, even though I live in Europe, because my activism may threaten the political careers of some fascists in the US government?
We hear about the threat of North Korea, Iran, China and other nations all the time (and I'm not saying these nations are not threats), yet the USA, which actually takes unjustified military action against foreign nations, always remains below the radar.
I wonder how many Canadian and European politicians and media groups the White House is paying off.
Asked and answered (Score:5, Insightful)
But is what we are doing truly self-defense?
To answer that question just ask yourself how people in this country would react if some other country started defending themselves in the U.S. the same way.
Re:Of course it's not self-defense (Score:4, Insightful)
The real question is ofcourse if you would allow an other country to send drones into american soil to kill americans that they think are a threat
No, the real question is would the US deliberately allow a group of people responsible for many terrorism deaths, and responsible for a recent attempt to kill hundreds of people in and below an approaching commercial aircraft, to continue to operate, recruit, train, and murder they way around....
It turns out that yes, the US would allow such a thing [wikipedia.org]
Posada has been convicted in absentia in Panama, of involvement in various terrorist attacks and plots in the Americas, including: involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed seventy-three people; admitted involvement in a string of bombings in 1997 targeting fashionable Cuban hotels and nightspots; involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion; and involvement in the Iran-Contra affair (...) On September 28, 2005 a U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada cannot be deported, finding that he faces the threat of torture in Venezuela.[18] Likewise, the US government has refused to send Posada to Cuba, saying he might face torture.[17] His release on bail on April 19, 2007 had elicited angry reactions from the Cuban and Venezuelan governments...
So this is an ACTIVE terrorist that the US would let walk, just because they fucking feel like. Sorry for breaking your bubble.
Re:Do not conflate Afghanistan and Iraq (Score:5, Insightful)
Because US foreign policy during the 80's was framed within an entirely different landscape. In hindsight helping the Taliban was a bad, bad idea. Our understanding of the Taliban's MO may have been wildly different back then. And at any rate, nothing trumped the perceived danger of the USSR.
Where "anticipatory self-defense" came from... (Score:5, Insightful)
For those who are historically unaware, the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense was NOT originated by the U.S. In fact, the U.S. was on the receiving end of the attack by the British known as "The Caroline incident" [wikipedia.org] that established anticipatory self defense as a part of international law. U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster eventually agreed that nations must have a right to take pre-emptive strikes in the event that "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation".
This is "the Caroline test" used to establish the validity of such strikes under international law, and it's not a trivial standard, as you suppose - simply claiming a need for self-defense is a far cry from satisfying the Caroline test. While this arguably supports actions such as an Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, it clearly would not support actions such as those Obama took in his recent attacks on Libya. Without a credible threat, it's pretty hard to reach the bar set by the Caroline test...
Re:Of course it's not self-defense (Score:4, Insightful)
Get this straight: the people being targeted are very, very bad men. They are personally responsible for the death and maiming of hundreds upon hundreds of people. And not just soldiers (who one could attempt to make the case for being, in some sense, "legitimate targets" for their actions) but mostly, in fact, innocents.
There is no doubt in my mind that killing these individuals reduces the amount of death and suffering in the world. I regard their killing with no more regret than I would the excising of a cancerous tumor.
And the fact that they can be killed without risking the lives of "the good guys" (American or not) nor innocents, is something to be celebrated.
There is no denying that soldiers have, in the heat of the moment, made terrible errors that has resulted in the deaths of innocents. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy. I reject the notion of "acceptable collateral damage" as do many of my peers. These strikes are a way to do that. I never once saw a UAV strike that hit an innocent. That does not mean that it never happened (although I have no firsthand knowledge of any, nor, for that mater, rumours) and Murphy's Law being what it is, it is unrealistic to expect that there will never be a mistake. But I CAN state that the time a UAV buys you for careful analysis and consideration of the target before committing has, at the very least, enormously reduced the number of errors.
Until bad men stop doing bad things, I call this "progress".
It is true that we stand on a slippery slope. There is a risk that the political body that provides the authority for strikes may expand the selection of targets beyond those of the very bad men who are currently targeted, to targets for whom the targeting criteria are more nebulous. It is right and good that we as a society question the who, when, where, and why of these strikes, and it is the duty of every citizen to ensure that they participate in the political process and keep a grip on those who are, quite literally, calling the shots. And I assure you that those making the final "shoot/no shoot" call take their responsibilities very seriously and do not treat it as "a video game". I expect this will continue.
DG