The kind of war that most of us remember, and that most history books contain, are wars against nations. Armies, navies, air forces – all are the forces of nation-states use to either conquer other nations (re: Iraq taking over Kuwait) or to protect its citizenry (e.g., America after being attacked by Japan in WW II). This is familiar and wars of these nature are “normal”.
The attack by Hamas on Israeli forces, citizens, and land (after evacuating from the Gaza strip in a failed show of trading land for Peace) and then by Hezbullah in the north shows a different type of war…one that the West is almost helpless to wage. It is not the case that the West lacks the military forces; rather, it is the lack of a legal or ethical foundation on which to wage war effectively when at least one side refuses to fight “by the rules”. We are ill equipped to handle a conflict where the other side embeds its forces and logistics within the civilian population. Why is this? There are two reasons.
Let us discuss the first. How do you wage war by rules that the other side not only ignores, but glorifies in breaking those rules? How do you fight when hamstrung by guidelines that seem to be no longer valued by both sides (for without both sides honoring them, they aren’t worth the paper on which they are written) ?
An example is this: we hear so much that we must abide by the Geneva Convention so that when our prisoners are captured, they will be well treated. Can someone tell me, with a straight face, when our folks were treated well? Seems to me that the Islamofacists seem to enjoy separating heads from necks with long knives (no matter if their captive is military or civilian). They flaunt their disregard for conventions. Our response? The Supreme Court (the Hamdan decision): makes it encumbent upon our military and legal systems to treat these non-state combantants as if they were members of a nation-state that was a signatory to the Conventions when no such agreement with that Convention exists.
Gee, do we have to continue to make it harder to effectively defend ourselves?
I have run across a number of articles lately speaking to this identifying that the practical nature of war is changing while the legal and ethical natures of war as seen by the West has not. One has shown itself to be malleable, the other static. And the current Israel / Lebanon war has brought it up to a head, especially in light of the claims of "disproportionate" retaliations of Israel against Hezbullah.
Austin Bay gives the background of how the West views legitimite warefare: the Westphalian treaty. In this, war was recognized to be between nation-states with uniformed armies and that civilians were to be left alone.
Weaknesses in the Westphalian system exist, in part because it has never been a complete system. (The Westphalian system evolved from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the series of peace settlements that ended the Thirty Years War in Europe.) Westphalia’s “nation-state system” has always faced “gaps” (anarchic regions) and “failed states” (which are often collapsing tribal empires with the trappings of modernity, not the institutions).
Add to this the Geneva convention that continues to codify how wars are to be fought, how combatants are to be treated, and what to do with civilians.
The West is still in the mind set of army vs army confrontations as we have in every war up to and including the Korean War. During the period of the 1700s to now, most conflicts in the West (putting aside for now, colonialism) were fought against other nation-states as they jockeyed for land, resources, and power. In these types conflicts, this model holds well.
It was not until Vietnam that we Americans first started to fight (with regard to long term conflicts) irregular forces that passed back and forth between acting as combatant one minute to civilian the next. We have found this hard to adapt to. Yet, even here we were dealing with nation-states: North and South Vietnam, with Thailand and Cambodia mixed in, with the war acting as yet another proxy for Soviet Russia, China, and the US.
How does one declare war, then, against forces that are not tied to a nation and its legitimate government? In the case of Afghanistan, the Taliban supported Al Queda. There was a government with which to converse (even if through third parties) to which to deliver ultimatums, and ultimately wage war. However, Mr. Bay’s post also notes failed states and anarchic regions – an example is that of Somalia – a nominal government in place but really run by warlords and now taken over by Islamofacists. A similar situation exists in Lebanon as there is a government in place. The problem is that it is very much a nascent democracy with a weak central government where one of the members of government also has its own military arm separate from the national army – Hezbullah – which unilaterally decided to attack Israel without the input of the host nation. It can be said that a nation that cannot control those within its borders is a failed state at worst, a hijacked state at best.
But how to effectively wage war legally and effectively against such a force as Hezbullah’s? How can a nation that has been attacked now go into another nation with which it has no beef but needs to go into to get at the stateless forces attacking it? How does one fight non-uniformed combatants that not only mingle with the civilians but also have no compunction about using them (or forcing them) to be human shields? That these organizations can move rather easily between established states with impunity?
Just as economies have had to adjust from national scales to a global one with the rise of trans-national corporations, the legality of fighting enemies that span national boundaries that has fallen apart needs to be reviewed and updated. At the same time, the view of the world concerning this needs to change. Nation-states such as Israel that try to defend its citizens are held to standards that can not be kept. How does one apply the Geneva Convention stricture of not attacking or harming civilians when one cannot tell who is who? It seems that nations that do try only get shafted in the public relation and opinion wars while the shadowy groups like Hezbullah get a pass. All one has to do is watch whom Amnesty International or Human Rights or any other like minded NGO blames and castigates.
Austin Bay notes:
Israel is being fired upon from a Lebanon that “is not quite Lebanon” in a truly sovereign sense. The rockets, of course, come from “somewhere,” but Hezbollah’s “somewhere” is a political limbo in terms of maps with definitive geo-political boundaries. Lebanon is a “failed state”– a peculiar failed state (its not Somalia), but nevertheless failed. It will continue to fail so long as the Lebanese government cannot control Hezbollah–and control means disarm.
So Hezbollah attacks Israel with ever more-powerful, longer-range rockets, then hides behind the diplomatic facade of the greater Lebanese nation state.
Thus terrorists and terror-empowering nations, like Iran and Syria, abuse the nation-state system– or exploit a “dangerous hole” in the system.
Iran and Syria then appeal to the United Nations (a product of the Westphalian “nation state” system) to condemn Israel for attacking Lebanon– when Israel is attacking Hezbollah, which “is and is not Lebanon.”
The key point here is that Israel, a true nation-state, has been under attack by Al Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbullah – all are organizations able to inflict pain and death upon the citizenry of Israel, but what is Israel to do? How does one legally declare war, in terms of the Westphalian system and in terms of Geneva Conventions (which were not drafted with kind of conflict in mind)?
Alan Dershowitz (H/T: Betsy’s Page) now points out the difficulties of hewing to this "ideal" when the current actions are, what I would call "not behaving according to this model". What’s a civilized nation to do? The options range from full outright, Sherman’s march to the sea onslaught to a series of covert special ops scenarios to simply treating it as one law enforcement action to another. He has a column in the Wall Street Journal on how warfare today has changed the definition of who is a civilian and what a civilian casualty means.
This is all well and good for democratic nations that deliberately locate their military bases away from civilian population centers. Israel has its air force, nuclear facilities and large army bases in locations as remote as anything can be in that country. It is possible for an enemy to attack Israeli military targets without inflicting "collateral damage" on its civilian population. Hezbollah and Hamas, by contrast, deliberately operate military wings out of densely populated areas. They launch antipersonnel missiles with ball-bearing shrapnel, designed by Syria and Iran to maximize civilian casualties, and then hide from retaliation by living among civilians. If Israel decides not to go after them for fear of harming civilians, the terrorists win by continuing to have free rein in attacking civilians with rockets. If Israel does attack, and
causes civilian casualties, the terrorists win a propaganda victory: The international community pounces on Israel for its "disproportionate" response. This chorus of condemnation actually encourages the terrorists to operate from civilian areas.While Israel does everything reasonable to minimize civilian casualties — not always with success — Hezbollah and Hamas want to maximize civilian casualties on both sides. Islamic terrorists, a diplomat commented years ago, "have mastered the harsh arithmetic of pain. . . . Palestinian casualties play in their favor and Israeli casualties play in their favor." These are groups that send children to die as suicide bombers, sometimes without the child knowing that he is being sacrificed. Two years ago, an 11-year-old was paid to take a parcel through Israeli security. Unbeknownst to him, it contained a bomb that was to be detonated remotely. (Fortunately the plot was foiled.)
This misuse of civilians as shields and swords requires a reassessment of the laws of war. The distinction between combatants and civilians — easy when combatants were uniformed members of armies that fought on battlefields distant from civilian centers — is more difficult in the present context. Now, there is a continuum of "civilianality": Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents — babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.
The laws of war and the rules of morality must adapt to these realities. An analogy to domestic criminal law is instructive: A bank robber who takes a teller hostage and fires at police from behind his human shield is guilty of murder if they, in an effort to stop the robber from shooting, accidentally kill the hostage. The same should be true of terrorists who use civilians as shields from behind whom they fire their rockets. The terrorists must be held legally and morally responsible for the deaths of the civilians, even if the direct physical cause was an Israeli rocket aimed at those targeting Israeli citizens.
If we allow terrorists to succeed in their terrible arithmetic of terrorism where they effectively neutralize moral nations by increasing the risk of civilian casualties, we will just be endangering future generations of civilians. If we make it clear that that is not a winning tactic, in the long run, future civilians will not become hostage shiels for these terrorist fighters.
This has been a long explanation of the first reason of why the West is failing. The second, the sissy-fication of war and the results of the mind set of the West, will be forthcoming.
