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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (106686)	3/30/2005 9:55:20 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793745

I call it "fighting dirty", but in our War Colleges and the service academies, they teach proportionality... I am sure that when they talk about proportionality, they are pretty much talking about what I understand about not kicking someone when they are down. You don't behead anyone who is down just because he cursed your mother. Proportionality is taught because it is defined in the Geneva Conventions. And it is taught at the lowest as well the highest military schools. The problems with proportionality most often occur once you take it out of the classroom and to the front-lines of the battlefield. It nearly always requires split second judgements based on incomplete information. Thankfully, most of our young combat commanders err on the side of protecting our own troops. Usually any problem arises when those judgements are made in the fog of war. Again thankfully, most of our senior commanders will not second guess the junior leader as long as the senior believes the junior was making decisions that he believed were in the best interests of his mission and his men at the time...even when the decision turns out to have been the wrong decision. Once the decision has been taken to close with, kill, and destroy the enemy. I am a firm believer in the use of overwhelming force and sneaky, tricky, and dirty tactics. I was taught that way and, in turn, passed the skills on in classes I taught. I appreciate your kind words about our military personnel. Please don't believe, at the individual fighting level, war is anything other than a hellhole. If you want a good discussion about proportionality try to use it to justify not attacking the predominantly civilian targets of Nagasaki and Hiroshima or vice-versa. BTW, IMO, the use of proportionality in Iraq is more often driven by political considerations than actual battlefield conditions. CLIPS: "The principle of proportionality is embedded in almost every national legal system and underlies the international legal order." Horst Fischer, The Principle of Proportionality in The Handbook of Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts, Oxford University Press (2000). Proportionality has the same function in international law as in domestic law: It requires the agency doing the coercing-court, police, army-to allocate coercion in proportion to the wrong that is being remedied. The principle is bedrock in the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1947, to which 189 nations are parties. The Additional Protocol I of 1977 extended the requirement of proportionality to non-combatants by defining a war crime to include the military destruction of a non-military target. Military targets include munitions factories, civilian airfields, and radio broadcasting stations, but they do not include factories making consumer goods, apartment buildings, or hospitals. The proportionality question gets particularly difficult if a non-military target, such as a hospital, contains soldiers. At what point does the proportion between military and non-combatant status tip, making the hospital a legitimate target of war. What if there are two soldiers (uninjured) in the hospital? A platoon? A battalion in full battle gear? A company command post? The protocol requires a proportion between the military significance of the target and the value of protecting non-combatants that shifts solidly in favor of the military significance in order to justify the use of force.