The Devil Though Paid Always Cheats

Wretchard from The Belmont Club has a thoughtful essay describing the disconnect between technological advances and the rules of war. The trouble with the Geneva Conventions is that they really were not written to cover the type of situation that exists today in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The irony is that the US invasion of Afghanistan to topple the governing Taliban is not an international conflict, while efforts by Israel — not to topple the Lebanese government — but to destroy a subnational group called Hezbollah is an international conflict suggests that our notions of warfare are seriously out of date. Very few countries in the world today possess sophisticated antiship missiles, military drones or ballistic rockets. Certainly Kofi Annan's Ghana does not. Yet nonstate Hezbollah does. And in a while, though it is pooh-poohed, nonstate entities like al-Qaeda, LET, or the Hezbollah itself could acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

That is the problem isn't it? Non-states having weapons that many nations do not possess. Yet the Geneva accords were written to govern war between nations. Common article 3 was written to cover civil wars. We have here a completely new situation. It gets worse, though, when the rules are arbitrarily applied to only one side in a conflict.

….It was not until Desert Storm in 1990 that the public became widely aware that the USAF, once the world's premier leveler of cities, had now become capable of putting a 2,000 lb bomb through a hangar door. Then, as Budiansky notes, the devil cheated again. The advent of precision munitions created the public expectation that in future American wars, all targeting would be perfect. The press would be there to film every errant missile, bomb or shell. Ironically, the very existence of precision weapons implied to the Press, that all observed hits on nonmilitary targets were therefore deliberate. War Crimes. The possibility of error, even in an era of precision weapons, was not accepted. Ironically, the moral justification shifted from the precision bomber to the area bomber. Terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, lacking sophisticated weapons, were now forgiven, even romanticized by the press for firing on civilian targets. 'What other weapon do poor men have?', they rhetorically asked, as if organizations funded by petro-dollars were somehow indigent, and men, having nothing to eat somehow found the spare change to buy billions in antiship missiles, drones, explosives and rockets. Nongovernment entitites with powers exceeding nations now attack women and children and we sing them sweetly on.

I get that sort of reasoning right here in my own comment section. It's astonishing to me that people can even argue some of the positions they hold. It's a failed moral compass that applies these double standards and only criticizes the US and Israel while giving a complete pass to the terrorists.

Read all of Wretchard's essay. It has a lot of good history in it that shows how we got to this pass.