This topic has been declard OT, by our moderator
No, it has not. See last revision of the topic header and the references to what's OT.
Furthermore, it's very apposite to present FA discussion with respect to Iraq and how that war was carried on and how it's being carried on now.
In connection with killing the leaders of enemy powers, and I include leaders of terrorist organizations, see post #99928
This is particularly relevant:
Our most recent campaign in the desert also highlighted another ethical disconnect: while it was acceptable to bomb those divisions of hapless conscripts, it was unthinkable to announce and carry out a threat to kill Saddam Hussein, although he bore overwhelming guilt for the entire war and its atrocities. We justify this moral and practical muddle by stating that we do not sanction assassination in general, and certainly not the assassination of foreign heads of state. Yet where is the ethical logic in this? Why is it acceptable to slaughter--and I use that word advisedly--the commanded masses but not to mortally punish the guiltiest individual, the commander, a man stained with the blood of his own people as well as that of his neighbors?
Legalists--and reflexive moralists--will warn that a policy that sponsors assassinations or supremely-focused military strikes could degenerate into a license to murder that would corrupt our institutions and our being. First, that is symptomatic of our Western tendency to view all things in black and white, as either-or. Killing a Saddam, and doing it very publicly, does not mean that we would then wipe out the cabinets of every foreign government that ran late on its debt repayments. We are capable of judicious selectivity.
Also:
Until we change the rules, until we stop attacking foreign masses to punish by proxy protected-status murderers, we will continue to lose. And even as we lose, our cherished ethics do not stand up to hardheaded examination. We have become not only losers, but random murderers, willing to kill several hundred Somalis in a single day, but unwilling to kill the chief assassin, willing to uproot the coca fields of struggling peasants, but without the stomach to retaliate meaningfully against the druglords who savage our children and our society.
We must reexamine our concepts of the ethical and the legal. The oft-lauded Revolution in Military Affairs is consistently associated with technological capability, but a genuine revolution in military affairs, one that would upset the trend of history and shift the nature of war, would be a military doctrine, recognized by government, that stated that the primary goal of any US war or intervention would be to eliminate the offending leadership, its supporting cliques, and their enabling infrastructure. If our technological capabilities enjoy such great potential, why not focus research and development on means we can use against enemy leaders and their paladins? Why continue to grind within the antique paradigm that insists that the leader is identical with his (or her) people, and, therefore, punishing the people or its military representation is a just response to the leader's offenses?
Message 18995865
I think it's relevant here to remember most Iraqis think that if we don't shoot Hussein out of hand if we catch him, they should have the mother of all trials and then string him up.
In the case of Arafat, he directs the campaign in which very young people are sent to blow up themselves and others, including palestinians. I've got no problem with it if someone kills him. I expect this would have a favourable outcome for both Palestinians and Israelis.
As for your historic systems argument:
The social, political, economic structure of the time, made the Napoleanic wars, and all the dead in those wars, inevitable. You'd have to change those underlying conditions (imperialism, nationalism, the Enlightenment) or, one way or another, those wars would still have happened. Maybe not at that exact time, in that exact way, but the overall result, and the number of dead in those wars, wouldn't have decreased. Killing one man would not have changed history that much, even a man like Napolean.
With Napoleon's defeat, the threat of French dirigisme did fall away from Europe and it's budding democracies but did not end until his death. History is contingent. Even the beginning and end of the "systems" beloved of some historians is contingent: one small event can have great effect a while later.
I do believe the Bush administration is starting to act in some way similar to the views outlined by Peters. |
