Necessary Roughness

Latif Haki G writes in his blog, Latif’s Memoir:

…I wanted to make the point that there is such thing as war crime, no matter on which side of the war the culprits may be. Too often when such a topic is brought up, “conservatives” reply with the knee jerk accusation, or implication, that the one raising the issue must be on the other side. Certain things, such as the intentional targeting of civilian populations, are uncalled for. The fire bombing of Dresden was just one example, among many we could raise. I was reminded of this issue, though, most recently, in the August 2006 issue of Vanity Fair, wherein Christopher Hitchens writes of the devastating effects in the lives of so many Vietnamese of the defoliation by Agent Orange, still evident two generations later.

War is by its nature sinful and uncivilized. There will always be noncombatants that are killed. I think, though, we are getting better at reducing the number of nonparticipants killed. The West uses precision-guided conventional weapons. We’ve had a Cold War that was won without firing a shot. Countries have even signed agreements that state they will only make war with uniformed troops, in the hope that people out of uniform will be treated as nonthreatening.

Unfortunately these days we are fighting enemies without uniforms and without overt bases. They hide munitions under hospitals and launch missiles out of homes. They use “neutral” facilities and assets to their direct advantage. When an enemy chooses to conduct its operations amidst civilians and doesn’t distinguish itself, the blood of those civilians killed in the crossfire is on their hands. If there is a war crime, it is on those who portray themselves as noncombatants.

If you’ve seen the movie The Patriot there is a terrible scene where the British lock up a village population in a church and then burn the church down. A war crime? Absolutely, but who bears the guilt? The British Col. Tavington may have been a sick man for doing such a thing, but he was fighting the out-of-uniform Benjamin Martin and his militiamen. There are risks in looking like a noncombatant when you aren’t. It forces the other side to abandon the moral principle of going after uniformed combatants.

The people who would do us harm in this country aren’t regularly uniformed, either. Absent the ability to read minds, we use profiling in determining who may be a threat. If those who would harm us would wear a headband or some other indication that said, “We wish to kill you, the enemy,” we would not need metal detectors and pat-downs at airports. We would not have the President authorizing warrantless searches. We wouldn’t have Supreme Court decisions like Hamdan where the Constitution restricts the President, and yet doesn’t. We would not have legislation dictating what kind of web sites a library computer can visit. This is the nature of uncivilized warfare, and we are punishing noncombatants along with those who would do us harm, because they are hiding themselves among us and do not pursue only uniformed personnel.