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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (92945)	4/12/2003 4:36:31 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

If the last article didn't make John run for the John, this one might. Who Owns the Rules of War? >>>>> N.G.O.'s are also wedded far too much to a procedural preference for the international over the national. But that agenda increasingly amounts to internationalism for its own sake, and its specific purpose is to constrain American sovereignty. It thus promotes, embedded in an agenda of human rights and the laws of war, the ceding of sovereignty, even democratic sovereignty, as the most virtuous act that a state can perform on behalf of its citizens. This agenda of privileging internationalism, unfortunately, is even sometimes allowed to override obvious steps backward in the laws of war, like privileging guerrilla combatants over the civilians in their midst. For this reason, one consequence of the Iraq war for the future of the laws of war will have to be an understanding that the solicitude of Protocol I for irregular fighters hiding among civilians is wrong and that the United States was right to have rejected it. More broadly in recent years, the N.G.O.'s have been promoting an ever more utopian law of war, in keeping with absolutist human rights ideology. In practice, alas, this utopianism is aimed only at one side in conflicts -- the side that in fact tries to obey the law. And so a second consequence of the war in Iraq for the future of the law of war will have to be a halt to raising the standards ever higher for protecting the civilian population when that burden effectively falls only on attacking forces, unreciprocated. The status quo has the effect of rewarding defending forces for recognizing that war crimes against their own civilians are the best strategy against a powerful but scrupulous enemy. It risks in the end creating a law of war that assumes, for all practical purposes, that the burden is all on one side, the side with the more advanced technology and the less desperate military. After the last cruise missile has been launched and the last irregular fighter silenced, we will look back on the war that was wrought. What we will find is that the meaning of ''asymmetric'' warfare is not what we thought. The issue is not so much disparities in technology. Instead, a form of warfare has re-emerged that tacitly assumes, indeed permits, that the weaker side must fight by using systematic violations of the law and its method. This is unsustainable as a basis for the law of war. Reciprocity matters<<<<< REST AT:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/magazine/13RULES.html