you may have heard it said that, to a man with a hammer every problem resembles a nail.
yes; to a signatory of international humanitarian instruments with a terrifically expensive advanced arsenal of remote-controlled munitions and delivery systems at hand, it appears that every problem resembles the undefended industrial base of a belligerent nation, or, at least, a hospital behind which some jihadi might once have passed. same same, right? morale bombing for victory.
aside => in a Letter to Norm reporting suspicious activities in 2012, this tipster drew on a twenty-or-so-year-old-memory of marketing materials read once to characterize a so called smart bomb as one detonating "at or within fifty meters of its target, one try out of two," and assuming that over the intervening years -- during which we've seen the ascendancy of public GPS and a proliferation of other appliances characterized as "smart," while we, ourselves, collectively, have remained just as dumb if we didn't lose ground -- the targeting precision and reliability of such systems would have improved. that assumption was more or less built into the whole premise of the piece. so i was really surprised to hear -- in i don't remember which episode of DemocracyNow!'s coverage of the recent bombardment of gaza (nor can i, with some but not too much patience, find it now) -- the guest talking-head assert just that same metric of precision while crowing about the belligerent state's unprecedented precise targeting of schools, hospitals and united nations bomb shelters. i was surprised that bar has not been raised over the interval.<=
not too long ago, mr. greenwald wrote a fun blog post over at The Intercept lampooning the "redundant presidential ritual" of bombing iraq for "humanitarian" reasons (ironic quotation marks in original) and reflecting on humanitarian military interventions accomplished remotely, with bombs, and the consistent practice of at least the last five american administrations, spanning 25 years, in characterizing the enemy of the fiscal quarter/polling cycle (and iraq, in the event iraq isn't already the enemy of the fiscal quarter/polling cycle) as morally and geopolitically akin to nazis (because his focus was iraq, he did not reminisce about that serbian hitler whom we all remember), and i had to go find a favorite paper on the development of the international treaty framework codifying humanitarian restrictions on the behavior of bellicose states and contrasting ever-increasing civilian death tolls over the corresponding period.
i was not sure i still had it. do you, dear reader, have a folder, bag, portfolio, box, suitcase or bureau where you amass documents-which-you-expect-you'll-want-to-refer-to-later, as i have? my folders have exceeded their capacities, graduated to boxes and filing cabinets. the document i remembered i remembered as likely having been retained in one of those boxes. of course, that was a long time ago and there have been several episodes of triage since then, as well as some furious collage, to maximize information density. the long and short of it is that, i found it:
The Legitimation of Violence: A Critical History of the Laws of War, by Jochnick and Normand,
challenges the notion that the laws of war serve to restrain or 'humanize' war. . . . [D]espite noble rhetoric to the contrary, the laws of war have been formulated deliberately to privilege military necessity at the cost of humanitarian values. As a result, the laws of war have facilitated rather than restrained wartime violence. Through law, violence has been legitimated.published in two parts in 1994 (35 harv. int’l l.j. 49 and 387) the article features a thorough critical review of the historical development of international humanitarian law together with an examination of the behavior of states in wars during that period, and an argument that the 1991 "gulf war" supports the thesis “that powerful nations deliberately formulated the laws of war to advance the primacy of military violence over humanitarian concerns, despite noble rhetoric to the contrary.”
i found the first part posted on a blog; here it is. i did not find the second part, which, anyway, is a little dated. there have been so many more new humanitarian interventions since 1994 to study, contemplate and compare with the proposed heuristic! i think the thesis stands, and that states would rather wage elective war over and over than wield the subject international instruments as tools to restrain criminals.
while i struggle to keep up with yesterweek, check out the facelift and daily content over at The Intercept: it is really looking like a news organization now, and the content refresh rate has picked up significantly. alas, that gives me that much more to read and consider (and cross reference and ruminate upon).
how time flies. more again anon.