Should there be rules in war?

No, no, and no.

War may be immoral, but it is not a criminal act unless a law is broken.

It is perfectly reasonable to expect soldiers to treat prisoners humanely. Only combatants made be ethically injured or killed deliberately (with exceptions for unavoidable collateral damage). Prisoners are no longer a direct threat.

The rules are not useless as long as they can be (and are) enforced.

Right, Terry. There's also a sort of "Do unto others" principle involved. Your captured soldiers will never receive better treatment than the enemy's.

Yeah!
If God is on your side, everything goes.
Spread terror.
Kidnap children, cut their throats and use their heads as cannonballs.
Rape women with snakes, scorpions, tarantulas and an occasional boa.
Force male prisoners to perform fellatio on each other.
Take pictures of the whole thing. Smile.

For a long time, war was simply the continuation of politics. It was just another, normal means of making your point. The greatest knight-army had 22casualties or something(could be 122 and had hundreds of knights fighting eachother. (I don't remember the actual number, but it were a lot of knights considering the few that actually got killed).
Then in 1302 when France decided to collect taxes that were way too high from the Flemisch farmers, the farmers got together and played dirty. We broke some mayor honor rules and slaughtered them all. All of a sudden, Europe had lost 1/3 of the nobles(since they're all used to fighting, which didn't involve a lot of killing up until now).

Fast forwardwind up until WOI, it had been quiet for too long. Peace was getting boring and industry and mass stuff(destruction, transport and such) needed to be shown off. So, we decided to get together and shoot each other some more. Conflict should be settled in a matter of weeks. BUT WAIT! What's this? It's really a MASS conflict where both parties are equally strong. And what's this? We have weapons now what enables us to kill MORE people in shorter periods of time. This is great, let's send as much would-be-civilians to the battleground without proper training. Oe, and look at this, not only do we have gatling guns to butcher them up and instantly kill them, we have (mustard) gass. That way, it takes a while before they die and the army has to take care of them. Swell...
I'll skip the rest of the history lesson, except to say one more thing:
Not just bush a war criminal(no offence to the americans out there, I know you didn't elect him), but at the standards of the nuremberg trails(Chompsky is with me on this) all presidents of the USA are guilty of war crimes.

That's about the top and bottom of it.
War is the ultimate form of mob rule and what the mob wants, it will get.
If that is the systematic rape and dismemberment of every female regardless of age in a country then that is what will occur.

Who is going to enforce these rules?
By saying the rules are enforceable, then there is no point to War, it is just a game and does not mean anything, because at any time a "referree" could intervene.
I guess this is sort of what America is doing now?

Re: Should there be rules in war?


A war with rules is simply a war within a war. In its ultimate form war can have no rules; none.

If you limit yourself with rules, it simply indicates that there is either something to gain, or a price you're not yet willing to pay. But if the need is great enough, you will do anything.

What amounted to war for primitive peoples was a highly ritualized display of aggression between two tribes. Once one or two individuals were seriously injured the war broke up. These wars served primitive man in much the way that aggressive behavior serves most animal species. There were "rules" hard wired by evolution which insured that war remained a beneficial behavior, rather than a source of species extinction.

There were a number of reasons why these rituals gave way to slaughter, but primary among them was the development of agriculture. For nomadic hunter/gatherer groups the outcome of a war rarely meant the end of their existence, nor were the spoils of victory all that dramatic in their benefit to the victors: a few captured women to broaden the gene pool, a wider berth from the other tribe in prime hunting areas. Agrarian societies, however, were far less suited to simply picking up and moving in the face of a war or upon defeat, and thus victory became much more of an imperative. At the same time, war could literally save a group of agrarians whose crops had failed and who faced starvation if they could not seize new land, and others' harvests.

In addition, the warriors of early agrarian societies were also farmers. They could not afford to be away from their fields for great lengths of times and so to the extent that they warred, the swifter the victory the better. It was largely this dynamic that led the Greeks to revolutionize war in their part of the world. There was no time for individual duels and the ritualistic hurling of insults and feces. They needed to get back to their harvests, and so came up with the phalanx: march in step with leveled spears and mow down the disorganized opposition. Maximize kills and minimize the length of the conflict.

In making the huge, and very successful, leap to agriculture and exerting control over the environment, mankind found itself outside and, in some ways, in conflict with the genetic programming which previously had served it so well. Our capacity for innovation and achievement has always outstripped our capacity for contemplation and synthesis.

Our greatest advantage and the reason homo sapiens is the dominant, by far, species on earth has been our ability to innovate and to rapidly build on each innovation to such a extent that our advancement has been, in the context of evolutionary time, a speeding bullet. Unfortunately, we can take mankind out of the savannahs of Africa, but we can't take the savannahs of Africa out of mankind...at least not in so short a period of time as a few thousands of years.

So this remains the human dilemma: How do we control our own genetic imperatives in a world where we can control just about everything else?

The rules of war are something of an attempt to deal in this arena. Of course, on their face, they seem obscene, but they are a collective attempt to mitigate the ill effects of a nature that won't be changed anywhere near as quickly as we are able to manufacture the means of our own species' demise.

Rules of war also can seem counterproductive. If both parties in a war were fighting a just war, it's unlikely there would be a war to begin with, and so there is always at least one bad guy who sneers at the rules of war. So if we abide by the rules, don't we make it that much more difficult to defeat the bad guys? Yes, but at the same time we preserve some momentum in the societal evolution of our species, and we make an effort to meet the demands of morality, a concept that only our species can fathom.

All wars are not immoral, unless one believes that the only moral response to violence is passivity. Whether or not that is an enlightened point of view, it doesn't do much to advance survival.

Looking from a purely selfish point of view it's better for you to take prisoners and treat them well because it still gives the enemy an incentive to surrender. Soldiers who think they're going to be butchered out of hand will fight to the death more often than not.

Good point.

Of course, you could find yourself fighting some group with a Samaurai mindset. Samaurai planned on killing themselves if they were defeated in battle, thus making them fight like beserkers.

It is my opinion that there should be a formal document outlining the "rules" of war (if war is to be continued). But is my ultimate opinion that war is unnessesary and should take place at a conference table, which is where it always ends up anyway.

There have been some wars I can understand and get behind (thinking...), and I am sure study of history and tactics and politics and law can be useful for both peace and war.

Mostly I think things can be worked out other ways, and I don't just mean by capitulation. No, I don't have easy answers on this, that is what tacticians should be about. Tactics for peace, or mutual sufferance, as well as tactics if war develops.

Most human beings just want to survive, have a family and associates, and survive some more.

That we have gotten to the place where billions and billions are spent hither and thither, by whatever side, for obliteration is a function of a longtime ratcheting up of war over other methods of settling issues. Those billions are diverted from potential sustenance of a fertile healthy earth with us on it.

Yes, there should be rules in war. But that is all after the fact of sense in peace.