The Massacre has begun!!

no you're not, i would say. either you expect both/all sides in conflict to respect basic rights and rules even in war, or you acknowledge that 'in love and war, all's fair', and every rule becomes irrelevant once battle starts.

i tend to hold to the former - even of soldiers, you can expect, for example, that they wont torture the enemies they already caught; that they wont attack innocent civilians out of frustration over the violence of their enemies; that they refrain from choosing the most murderous weapon or strategy if another is available.

what you can not do is to demand one side to stick to the rules, while argueing that the other can do whatever it wants. or lets just say its very dangerous. what frolic says is, well, the US invaded Iraq illegally, and its superiority is so overwhelming the only ways to fight for the iraqis are the ways of guerrilla - they have to dodge the rules. but then what? next thing you know, when the US is attacked by enemy airplanes, you would have to consent, as well, when it in its turn refuses to accord any possible terrorist it catches any right to appeal to a judge or to international conventions ...
frolic doesnt consent with that, i believe, and he's right, but then it works the other way around too.

I assume, since you put quotes around it, you have a link?

We all know The Saddam regime is cruel, rude and they have no regard whatsoever to human lives.(Halabja)

But from the soldiers of the land of the free I expect something else. When you become a beast while fighting a beast you are fighting your equal. Its not because the Iraqi iregulars break the rules you can too.

Nihm, About the right of self Defense. You know just like i, how the resistance in Holland fought against the Germans in WWII. Wasn't that against the rules of engagement? Defending your homeground against a foreign invading force is not bound to any rules.

Frolic,

Did the French partisans use human shields? Did they fortify and attack German soldiers from churches, hospitals and schools? Did they torture and execute German prisoners on a regular basis? Did they use a white flag to get close enough to German tanks to blow them up with explosives strapped to their bodies? Were the French partisans as fanatically loyal to Degaul as Saddam's martyrs are to him?

The Iraqi People are being liberated from the hand of a brutal dictator whose secret police are every bit as ruthless as the Gestapo. The Iraqi's are slowly becoming confident that they will not be abandoned this time, and they will play an increasing role in restoring their country. The loyalists who continue to hold out against the inevitable, are more like die-hard Nazis who would rather see the nation destroyed than to give up the power to dominate.

So long as the fanatics persist, casualties will continue. Some portion of those casualties will remain innocent civilians who have no where safe to turn. Some will become casualties because they made a personal choice to enter a war-zone where risks are great. Volunteers for martyrdom will be killed relentlessly until they surrender. Errant ordinance will make casualties of our own troops, and journalists who are close to the fighting. All those casualties are regretible, but our forces continue to make extra ordinary efforts to minimize the costs of war.

Of course it is! What would rules of engagement, international conventions, and all the rest be for if it wasn't? Every war is about "defending one's homeground", to some party or another - often even to several of the warring parties. If that alone would be legitimisation enough to ditch upholding any conventions, we might just as well do away with all of them altogether.

Name me a war that didnt involve anyone defending his homeground. Yet still countries have decided to sign conventions on how to treat POWs, how not to torture them, how to avoid certain kinds of weapons. And so they should. Just like a family father (or mother) is generally allowed to defend him/herself against a burglar with some violence if need be - but still is forbidden by laws to aim for the head of every tresspasser with a machine gun. Once you start being selective in who needs to heed the law and who doesnt, pretty soon noone will.

I do get your other point, about expecting more "from the soldiers of the land of the free" than from the "beasts" - but not how you get from there to actively pleading for the right of the beasts to behave like beasts (if that is not taking your metaphor too far).

The tragedy is that many Iraqi, and other Arab or Muslim, fundamentalists truly believe that "defending your homeground against a foreign invading force is not bound to any rules". Or not bound to any rules other than the Sacred Qu'aran (their interpretation of it).

The troubles are far far from over.

Fbeazer, The Iraqi resistance has little to do with Islam fundamentalism. Iraq is(was?) almost the only secular state in the region.

Nihm, let me be more specific. Killing soldiers is not bound to any rules. Your comments, like these of Asherman, are based on the allegations of the US army. Are the US POWs mistreated? Executed? I, just like u, haven't seen any evidence. The Suicide attacks happened at a checkpoint by two women (and not by soldiers waving a white flag).

BTW, Asherman: martyr or Hero. what's the differrence?

(Wow, me and Asherman mentioned in the same line? <grins>)

No, they're not, because I've never talked about the who or what in Iraq. I responded to the question of principle au was asking.

You had seemed to suggest that, though the Americans had to adhere to some rules of law, the Iraqis didnt, because "When you defend your country, there are no rules of engagement. The only rule is kill as many invaders and stay alive." Thereupon au noted, basically, that if you accept no limits no your own behavior, you cant really complain if your enemy doesnt adhere to any either ...

I'd agree. Either you believe in the need for rules of engagement, rules of law, however you put it - believe in countries signing international conventions, on not doing this or not doing that even in war - or you don't, and all's fair. The "it's different when you're defending your homeland" argument is a fake - because every war involves somebody's homeland.



It is, so - it should be, and it's evidence of an incremental increase in civilisation that ever more countries do adhere to them. There's all kinds of rules. Don't shoot your POWs is one, and most countries adhere to it, even Iraq in this war thus far, as far as we know. The fact that there's so much (belated) outrage about Iraq's previous use of chemical weapons also shows that most countries don't, anymore. Rules include international conventions that any uniformed man of a signatory country is bound to, as well as various rules of choice of individual armies. Fire warning shots before you shoot a civilian, that kind of thing.

We now have the notion of "war crimes" - with war crimes tribunals judging over regular army commanders as well as paramilitaries. "War crimes" - the very notion implies that "killing soldiers" is bound to rules, in whatever situation. I don't care much about defending the US in this war to you, but are you really proposing that the notion of war crimes can be applied selectively, depending on your estimation of which party is in the right or wrong to what extent?

Your claim seems to be that Iraq is now justified in using literally any means possible, since they are "defending their homeland against an invading army"and I find that an alarming premise. Should some desparate commander set off some kind of biological weapon, for example, he has done something indefensable. Indefensible per se; as well as indefensible in terms of ends and means, because one can also argue the opposite of what you say: since the Iraqi army can never win anymore, faced with overwhelming force as it is, it wrecking any kind of mass destruction now would be akin to taking as many people down with you when you know you're going down.

Finishing the Job...


Really?

Do you imagine for a moment, that these Alabama resistance fighters would be using American citizens, as human shields? Would you imagine that these American resistance fighters would be turning their own guns and mortars on these same innocent civilians.

Rules of conduct "The Geneva Convention" were adapted to protect innocent civilian lives. If you state that all is fair in combat to defend your country from invasion, then you have no complaint how the other side wages their war.

Open hostilities are in effect, in Iraq. Are you are now saying that no one can be held accountable for their action? Or, are you only saying that the invading army must fight by the rules.

If that is the case, we could always argue that the Iraqi's are the invaders, and this war is nothing more than a continuation of the war they started, when they invaded Kuwait.

frolic,

Perhaps it was the commas. I said Iraqi, Arab or Muslim fundamentalists (or, if you want: Muslim fundamentalists, Iraqis or Arabs) OK?

The Geneva Convention is "Western", human rights stuff.
I don't think that our concept of human rights is rooted in the culture of big parts of the Arab and Muslim world.

To go to Blatham's hypothetic example. While I think that Alabamans would brake some Geneva rules while fighting the Chinese invaders, I truly don't believe any Alabama kid would be willing to become a human bomb, and expect a one way ticket to Paradise in return.

Ferrous,



That IS the legal foundation on which this campaign is built. The Gulf War hostilities were suspended conditional upon Saddam's promise to dispose of certain weapons systems. For a decade he managed to pull the wool over the eyes of a large number of UN Inspection Teams while increasing his stocks of prohibited weapons and developing a nuclear weapon. Caught, he kicked the UN out of country, and the UN did nothing. The American government insisted that Saddam must be disarmed, and began to build up military forces in the region. Saddam looked out at that growing army, and permitted a few UN Inspectors back inside Iraq. He lied repeatedly about his obligation to disarm, he obstructed and delayed timely compliance with the conditions imposed upon him by the UN. Despite American and British efforts to get the UN to act, France and Russia frustrated every effort to bring Saddam to heel. Acting on UN 1441, and other resolutions going back to the early 90's, America, Britain and a coalition of smaller countries, many of whom only won their freedom from the USSR a decade ago, determined to act finally to bring Saddam down.

This was a legal action taken by members of the UN to enforce it's resolutions intended to "de-fang" one of the worlds most brutal dictatorships. The Iraqi People don't seem to be questioning the legal basis for our sacrifices in liberating them, once they no longer must fear the secret police.

Asherman

"and a coalition of smaller countries"....please. Has ever the word coalition been more misused than here. It's for appearance and is more correctly seen as a lie than a truth, as it implies that which wasn't - multi-party agreement. Heck, even Andy Rooney almost upchucked on that one Sunday night.

quite so blatham, quite so.

quite so blatham, quite so.

For the sake of precision, it IS a coalition. The Anglo-American Coalition.

Bi-Polar Bear
Folic on post after post kept repeating the Al Jazeera line and insisting that everything shown on it was the gospel truth. At the same time said everything reported in the American press was a lie.
You seem to be a day late and a dollar short.

There's the rub. You are proposing the UN resolutions as the legal basis for this war. I dont think that individual members of the UN can ever be said to have the legal authority to decide what actions and puniushments those resolutions prescribe.

In this case, two members of the UN SC - the US and Britain - said the resolutions meant they could legally start a war, and the other UN SC members - as well as UN chief Kofi Annan and the implementing UN organisations (the inspectors) - explicitly said they did not agree with that interpretation.

Since you are deriving the war's legality from the UN resolutions, let us compare those resolutions with national laws. The US has adopted various laws, laws confirmed, in the end, by Supreme Court verdicts. Now someone says that a person should be sentenced to death on the basis of those laws; the person himself disagrees, obviously. The case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court would be the equivalent of the Security Council, then - you can't go up higher for getting your legitimisation. (Both consist of political appointees, anyway .

Two individual judges on the Supreme Court say that, yes, according to them the man can be sentenced to death on the basis of earlier Supreme Court verdicts. But all the other judges say they don't agree, and at least three of them announce that they would be voting against if the question came up. If at this point in time the two judges who are for sentencing the man actually have the man executed - will the execution be legal? Of course not. But this is exactly what you propose: "It's a legal action taken by members of the Supreme Court to enforce the Court's verdicts".

The massacre of Baghdad is horrible to see. All those Anglos and Americans, ruthlessly killing Iraqis. It is sickening.

I'm not trying to pick a fight au1929 old thing, but on THIS thread, the first snide bullet was fired by you. Can you give me an example? I don't spend as much time on this website as I used to on Abuzz.