"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal
Two links:
Michael Jackson’s Death Means Little to Me
As I’ve pointed out before, one condition of any war being “just” according to traditional criteria would require a rigorous accounting for all the innocent lives lost and an equal weighing of those lives against any purported good that the war accomplishes. (And that’s assuming that all those deaths are unintended side effects of legitimate military operations.) Can we honestly say that our national war policies meet that standard?
Few, I think, would say that what we are seeing and have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan or in the Israeli attacks on Hamas or Hezbollah is or was the deliberate targeting of civilians, whether or not in order to “change hearts and minds,” by American, Israeli, allied, or coalition forces.
When there is a perception of wrong the wrong perceived, I think, is reckless disregard of human life, sometimes referred to as “wanton” killing, in which lives are taken unintentionally, neither as a means nor as an end, but are effectively set at naught in the decision and as a result are taken either too-readily avoidably or disproportionately.
The problem is complicated by the fact that the rules are quite different as between what police may do and what military forces may do.
No one seems to think, for example, that the police may legitimately call in an air strike on an ordinary, downtown hotel or apartment building because they are virtually certain an important terrorist leader is there having dinner with his chief lieutenants and will almost certainly escape if they do not.
I think a fair interpretation of the rules would, at least in some cases, allow such a strike on enemy combatants to the military in wartime.
Neither does it seem to matter, one way or the other, whether the noncombatants put at risk or killed, whether civilians or others, are part of enemy populations or those of an allied, or even one’s own, country.
Think of the horrific mess the French made of their own territory resisting the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, The Great War, and the Second World War.
Think of the fate of the people of Leningrad and Stalingrad.
Think of the mess the allies made of Nazi-occupied Europe as they drove out the Germans.
Much of the killing and destruction they wrought in Germany was indeed terrorism or even simple murderous revenge, and involved the deliberate slaughter of German civilians in huge numbers.
But that, at least, could not have been what they were up to in France, or Belgium, or even Eastern Europe, leaving aside preemptive Russian slaughter of elites who might have led post-war resistance to Communist takeovers.
Not that I mean to suggest that just any amount of slaughter and destruction is permitted the military, either of enemy civilians or of any others.
There is, after all, a rule of proportionality that applies not only globally to the entire war effort but also to particular engagements, providing an object but frightfully vague distinction between what unacceptably high civilian damage.
There is also, it seems, a flat prohibition of genocide that could come into play in case a small ethnic group in a war area might be put at risk, though otherwise the absolute number of civilians at risk would not be prohibitive.
All the same, it is undeniable that nearly everybody accepts that in war at least the unintentional killing of noncombatants, understood to include most civilians, is permitted to the military to an extent that would not be permitted to police and under circumstances in which it would not be permitted to police in their efforts to apprehend or kill criminals or prevent crimes.
And though I am confident that people do accept such a moral difference between what police may do and what may be done in war by way of “collateral damage,” I am not so confident, myself, that such a difference exists at all or that it is as great as may be generally assumed.
This could, in fact, form the core of an argument for pacifism, and may have done so in writings of some pacifists of the past, for all I know.
The claim, I mean, that war cannot be successfully conducted without “collateral damage” that is not, in fact, one whit more morally acceptable in war than it would be in policing could be made to show that war, though perhaps having just cause, cannot really be justly carried out with the least hope of victory.
And, that being so, it could be agued it cannot, therefore, be justly undertaken or continued if already under way.
If this argument has a weak point I think it can only be that it rests on a refusal to countenance unintended civilian casualties on a level that would be totally unacceptable in policing.
And, as I said, I am much inclined to doubt the moral propriety of that refusal.
Still, I suggest a reluctance, at least, to accept such a real and deadly difference in the rules could very well underlie the perception that US forces and others are being far too casual about civilian deaths in the fighting in the Jihader wars.
But it may also be that the matter is considerably complicated by the fact that the Jihaders are, divided into three groups.
There are those who are criminal terrorists, there are those who are organized military forces such as are found among the Taliban, and there are those who pass back and forth between both roles such as people involved with Al-Qaeda.
And another complicating factor is that police action is not equally practical in all locations.
If the terrorists in the example above are Al-Qaeda and the hotel is in Turin, Berlin, or Cairo police action would seem to be called for and an air strike out of the question.
But if the terrorists are Hezbollah and the hotel is in Beirut?
If the terrorists are Hamas and the hotel is in Gaza?
If the terrorists are Al-Qaeda and the hotel is in a part of Pakistan under Taliban or local warlord, not government, control?
And then there is the final complication, the question whether a fight against organized terrorists, even if never organized as military units capable of actual battle but only as terrorists for attacks generally against civilian targets can morally be on a level with war, at all.
The American Civil War, for example, is regarded as having been a war.
Various guerrilla wars – for example, against the Shining Path or the FARC in Latin America – have been regarded as morally on a footing with wars in at least some ways.
Can a struggle against organized terrorists who see themselves as fighting a war actually be one, or at least be some sort of moral hybrid in which some of the things permitted in war are allowed, and some of the things permitted in police actions and law enforcement are also allowed?
What about those attacks on hotels and apartment buildings?
And what about indefinite detentions, at least “for the duration”?
Sorry, that should be
“There is, after all, a rule of proportionality that applies not only globally to the entire war effort but also to particular engagements, providing an objective but frightfully vague distinction between acceptable and unacceptably high levels of civilian damage. “
I think you’re right that there is a generally accepted distinction between acceptable numbers of civilian casualties in police actions vs. in military actions, and that the latter is much greater. (I wonder, however, what the upper limit for the latter really is in most people’s minds.)
I also agree that the distrinction seems hard to justify, though maybe it could be done.
But my main point was that, even if you accept the distinction, you still have to give civilian deaths some weight if your actions are to be just according to the traditional criteria. That’s in part what “proportionality” is all about, right? And this requires, at a minimum, actually keeping track of the number of civilian deaths, reporting them to responsible decision makers, factoring them into the calculus when making strategic or tactical decisions, etc. I’m far from confident that this takes place in any disciplined way. (Didn’t some general during the Iraq invasion explicitly say that the U.S. doesn’t do body counts?)
I think you are right, though it could be that the numbers actually being killed is still within the limit of proportionality.
A Thinking Reed 
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