What is War in the 21st Century?

The other day in my U.S. History survey class one student -- a very bright young man who is bound for the military after graduation -- argued that there should be total media censorship of war and that in war anything goes, including the killing of civilians, the beheadings of kidnapped careworkers, even the attacks on the World Trade Center. I found his comments quite disturbing as they go against not only all civilized norms of warfare, but even the U.S. military's code, as I reminded him. THe comments came on the heels of a viewing of a documentary on the Vietnam War which showed the slaughter of unarmed villagers. Many people smarter than I have written about these issues, and I want to link to a few recent articles which raise some ideas for discussion. (This will be a long post.)

Iraq's Silent Dead
Jeffrey Sachs
December 02, 2004

November 2004 has the dubious distinction of being tied with April as the bloodiest months in Iraq for American soldiers. In both months, at least 135 U.S. servicemen or women died. But it's anyone's guess as to which months were the bloodiest for Iraqi citizens. No one is counting their deaths—and the American media isn't reporting on it, either. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute goes where the mainstream media doesn't tread: deep into a war where civilians are targets as often as insurgents.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Evidence is mounting that America’s war in Iraq has killed tens of thousands of civilian Iraqis, and perhaps more than one hundred thousand. Yet this carnage is systematically ignored in the United States, where the media and government portray a war in which there are no civilian deaths because there are no Iraqi civilians—only insurgents.

American behavior and self-perceptions reveal the ease with which a civilized country can engage in large-scale killing of civilians without public discussion. In late October, the British medical journal Lancet published a study of civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion began. The sample survey documented an extra 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths compared to the death rate in the preceding year, when Saddam Hussein was still in power— and this estimate did not even count excess deaths in Fallujah, which was deemed too dangerous to include.

The study also noted that the majority of deaths resulted from violence, and that a high proportion of the violent deaths were due to U.S. aerial bombing. The epidemiologists acknowledged the uncertainties of these estimates, but presented enough data to warrant an urgent follow-up investigation and reconsideration by the Bush administration and the U.S. military of aerial bombing of Iraq’s urban areas.

America’s public reaction has been as remarkable as the Lancet study—for the reaction has been no reaction. The vaunted New York Times ran a single story of 770 words on page 8 of the paper (October 29). The Times reporter apparently did not interview a single Bush administration or U.S. military official. No follow-up stories or editorials appeared, and no New York Times reporters assessed the story on the ground. Coverage in other U.S. papers was similarly frivolous. The Washington Post (October 29) carried a single 758-word story on page 16.

Recent reporting on the bombing of Falluja has also been an exercise in self-denial. The New York Times (November 6) wrote that “warplanes pounded rebel positions” in Fallujah, without noting that “rebel positions” are actually in civilian neighborhoods. Another New York Times story (November 12), citing “military officials,” dutifully reported that, “Since the assault began on Monday, about 600 rebels have been killed, along with 18 American and 5 Iraqi soldiers.” The issue of civilian deaths was not even raised.

Violence is only one reason for the increase in civilian deaths in Iraq. Children in urban war zones die in vast numbers from diarrhea, respiratory infections and other causes owing to unsafe drinking water, lack of refrigerated foods, and acute shortages of blood and basic medicines at clinics and hospitals (that is, if civilians even dare to leave their houses for medical care). Yet the Red Crescent and other relief agencies have been unable to relieve Fallujah’s civilian population.

On November 14, the front page of The New York Times led with the following description: “Army tanks and fighting vehicles blasted their way into the last main rebel stronghold in Fallujah at sundown on Saturday after American warplanes and artillery prepared the way with a savage barrage on the district. Earlier in the afternoon, 10 separate plumes of smoke rose from Southern Fallujah, as it etched against the desert sky, and probably exclaimed catastrophe for the insurgents.”

There is, once again, virtually no mention of the catastrophe for civilians etched against that desert sky. There is a hint, though, in a brief mention in the middle of the story of a father looking over his wounded sons in a hospital and declaring that, “Now Americans are shooting randomly at anything that moves.”

A few days later, a U.S. television film crew was in a bombed-out mosque with U.S. troops. While the cameras were rolling, a U.S. Marine turned to an unarmed and wounded Iraqi lying on the ground and murdered the man with gunshots to the head. (Reportedly, there were a few other such cases of outright murder.) But the American media more or less brushed aside this shocking incident, too. The Wall Street Journal actually wrote an editorial on November 18 that criticized the critics, noting as usual that whatever the United States does, its enemies in Iraq do worse—as if this excuses American abuses.

It does not. The United States is killing massive numbers of Iraqi civilians, embittering the population and the Islamic world, and laying the ground for escalating violence and death. No number of slaughtered Iraqis will bring peace. The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril. Worse still, America’s public opinion, media and election results have left the world’s most powerful military without practical restraint.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, November 2004.

What Is a Just War?
By Garry Wills

Arguing About War
by Michael Walzer

Yale University Press, 208 pp., $25.00
Jus in Bello

The traditional theory of the just war covers three main topics—the cause of war, the conduct of war, and the consequences of war. Or, in the Scholastic tags: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. But most attention is given now to the middle term, the conduct of war. That is where clear offenses are most easily identified, though only occasionally reported and even more rarely punished. The two main rules of jus in bello have to do with discrimination between combatants and noncombatants, the latter to be spared as far as possible, and proportionality, so that violence is calibrated to its need for attaining the war's end. The claims of morality here are recognized with difficulty in actual combat, and disputed when recognized. Why should that be?

This is the beginning of the article; click on the link for the full piece.

From the L.A. Times:

PR Meets Psy-Ops in War on Terror
The use of misleading information as a military tool sparks debate in the Pentagon. Critics say the practice puts credibility at stake.
By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer

December 1, 2004

WASHINGTON — On the evening of Oct. 14, a young Marine spokesman near Fallouja appeared on CNN and made a dramatic announcement.

"Troops crossed the line of departure," 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. "It's going to be a long night." CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun.

In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert's carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation — or "psy-op" — intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials.

In the hours after the initial report, CNN's Pentagon reporters were able to determine that the Fallouja operation had not, in fact, begun.

"As the story developed, we quickly made it clear to our viewers exactly what was going on in and around Fallouja," CNN spokesman Matthew Furman said.

Officials at the Pentagon and other U.S. national security agencies said the CNN incident was not an isolated feint — the type used throughout history by armies to deceive their enemies — but part of a broad effort underway within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism.

The Pentagon in 2002 was forced to shutter its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which was opened shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, after reports that the office intended to plant false news stories in the international media. But officials say that much of OSI's mission — using information as a tool of war — has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government.

Although most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States.

Other specific examples were not known, although U.S. national security officials said an emphasis had been placed on influencing how foreign media depict the United States.

These efforts have set off a fight inside the Pentagon over the proper use of information in wartime. Several top officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs — disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public — and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.

Several of those officials who oppose the use of misleading information spoke out against the practice on the condition of anonymity.

"The movement of information has gone from the public affairs world to the psychological operations world," one senior defense official said. "What's at stake is the credibility of people in uniform."

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said he recognized the concern of many inside the Defense Department, but that "everybody understands that there's a very important distinction between information operations and public affairs. Nobody has offered serious proposals that would blur the distinction between these two functions."

Di Rita said he had asked his staff for more information about how the Oct. 14 incident on CNN came about.

One recent development critics point to is the decision by commanders in Iraq in mid-September to combine public affairs, psychological operations and information operations into a "strategic communications" office. An organizational chart of the newly created office was obtained by The Times. The strategic communications office, which began operations Sept. 15, is run by Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, who answers directly to Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Partly out of concern about this new office, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, distributed a letter Sept. 27 to the Joint Chiefs and U.S. combat commanders in the field warning of the dangers of having military public affairs (PA) too closely aligned with information operations (IO).

"Although both PA and IO conduct planning, message development and media analysis, the efforts differ with respect to audience, scope and intent, and must remain separate," Myers wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Times.

Pentagon officials say Myers is worried that U.S. efforts in Iraq and in the broader campaign against terrorism could suffer if world audiences begin to question the honesty of statements from U.S. commanders and spokespeople.

"While organizations may be inclined to create physically integrated PA/IO offices, such organizational constructs have the potential to compromise the commander's credibility with the media and the public," Myers wrote.

Myers' letter is not being heeded in Iraq, officials say, in part because many top civilians at the Pentagon and National Security Council support an effort that blends public affairs with psy-ops to win Iraqi support — and Arab support in general — for the U.S. fight against the insurgency.

Advocates of these programs said that the advent of a 24-hour news cycle and the powerful influence of Arabic satellite television made it essential that U.S. military commanders and civilian officials made the control of information a key part of their battle plans.

"Information is part of the battlefield in a way that it's never been before," one senior Bush administration official said. "We'd be foolish not to try to use it to our advantage."

And, supporters argue, it is necessary to fill a vacuum left when the budgets for the State Department's public diplomacy programs were slashed and the U.S. Information Agency — a bulwark of the nation's anticommunist efforts during the Cold War — was gutted in the 1990s.

"The worst outcome would be to lose this war by default. If the smart folks in the psy-op and civil affairs tents can cast a truthful, persuasive message that resonates with the average Iraqi, why not use the public affairs vehicles to transmit it?" asked Charles A. Krohn, a professor at the University of Michigan and former deputy chief of public affairs for the Army. "What harm is done, compared to what is gained? For the first year of the war, we did virtually nothing to tell the Iraqis why we invaded their country and ejected their government. It's about time we got our act together."

Advocates also cite a September report by the Defense Science Board, a panel of outside experts that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, which concluded that a "crisis" in U.S. "strategic communications" had undermined American efforts to fight Islamic extremism worldwide.

The study cited polling in the Arab world that revealed widespread hatred of the United States throughout the Middle East. A poll taken in June by Zogby International revealed that 94% of Saudi Arabians had an "unfavorable" view of the United States, compared with 87% in April 2002. In Egypt, the second largest recipient of U.S. aid, 98% of respondents held an unfavorable view of the United States.

The Defense Science Board recommended a presidential directive to "coordinate all components of strategic communication including public diplomacy, public affairs, international broadcasting and military information operations."

Di Rita said there was general agreement inside the Bush administration that the U.S. government was ill-equipped to communicate its policies and messages abroad in the current media climate.

"As a government, we're not very well organized to do that," he said.

Yet some in the military argue that the efforts at better "strategic communication" sometimes cross the line into propaganda, citing some recent media briefings held in Iraq. During a Nov. 10 briefing by Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, reporters were shown a video of Iraqi troops saluting their flag and singing the Iraqi national anthem.

"Pretty soon, we're going to have the 5 o'clock follies all over again, and it will take us another 30 years to restore our credibility," said a second senior Defense official, referring to the much-ridiculed daily media briefings in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

According to several Pentagon officials, the strategic communications programs at the Defense Department are being coordinated by the office of the undersecretary of Defense for policy, Douglas J. Feith.

Peter Steinfels writes the "Beliefs" column in the Saturday NY Times, and he always has something interesting and important to say. Here are a couple of his latest thoughtful articles:

December 4, 2004
BELIEFS
The Truth About Torture
By PETER STEINFELS

The coming week's celebration of Hanukkah revolves around the delightful story of a tiny amount of consecrated oil that miraculously burned for eight days in December 164 B.C. when the Maccabees recaptured and rededicated the Temple after it had been desecrated by the Syrian ruler Antiochus Epiphanes.

There is another celebrated story, however, this one grim rather than delightful, connected with the persecution by Antiochus and the saga of the Maccabean revolt. The story of Hannah and her seven sons appears in various sources but most extensively in the Second Book of Maccabees, a Greek translation of a Hebrew text eventually incorporated into the Christian Bible and found in Roman Catholic Bibles today although not included in Hebrew scriptures or, later, in Protestant Bibles.

As part of Antiochus's campaign to break the fidelity of the Jews to their way of life, Hannah and her sons are ordered to eat swine. When they refuse, each of them, one by one and in view of the others, is successively subjected to gruesome mutilations, scalding in oil, and death. All modern English translations feature, in these passages, one of the ugliest words in the language: "torture."

It is a reminder that torture opens one of the greatest chasms in morality. In even the most morally unsophisticated forms of popular storytelling, it is certainly not violence in itself, not even killing, that unmistakably separates good guys from evil ones. It is torture. Heroes may kill; villains torture - Nazi commanders, soulless drug dealers, despots on this planet or in outer space.

In debates among contemporary ethicists about the notion of acts that qualify as "intrinsically evil," torture has always been a prime candidate. Within Roman Catholicism, the discussion of intrinsic evils has recently focused on abortion and euthanasia. But when Pope John Paul II weighed in on the question in his 1993 encyclical "The Splendor of Truth," the list of other actions he described as evil "in themselves, independently of circumstances" included, along with genocide and slavery, "physical and mental torture."

But, really, is this a topic to bring up on the eve of a season of sparkling candles, childlike exuberance and family gift-giving?

One could reply that the issue is posed by the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales, who as White House counsel helped frame the administration's policies about treatment of prisoners of war. Or that it is posed, more recently, by the International Committee of the Red Cross's newly reported findings that practices "tantamount to torture" have continued at the United States' prison at Guanatánamo Bay.

But is this a topic that anyone wants to examine ever? Last April, the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shocked the world and put the treatment of prisoners in the headlines for several weeks. Then, Congressional hearings faded, military investigations were begun in all directions, a few individuals were tried without great publicity - and attention shifted to the presidential campaign, where no one was going to touch the issue.

As Mark Danner points out in his book "Torture and Truth" (New York Review Books), in the end the lurid photos may have deflected the central question of what role torture may have played, or yet be playing, in American policy for waging a war on terror into the question of individual indiscipline and sadism - "Animal House on the night shift," as former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger called the Abu Ghraib atrocities.

Mr. Danner's book is valuable because to the 50 pages of articles he originally wrote for The New York Review of Books, the volume adds hundreds of pages of the relevant Justice and Defense Department memorandums, the photos, prisoners' depositions, Red Cross reports and the military's own major investigations of Abu Ghraib. Motivated readers can judge for themselves.

Although the question of torture has justly become part of the debate about the war in Iraq, the question cannot be reduced to differences over that war. The Guantánamo prisoners, after all, were captured in Afghanistan, in a military action that had overwhelming support from the citizenry.

Gathering intelligence is clearly crucial to the entire war on terror. Long before the invasion of Iraq, voices here and there began to ask about the legitimacy of torture, sometimes treading a fine line where it is hard to tell whether the aim is to uphold a moral precept or undermine it. It became imperative to define what constituted, in government talk, "aggressive interrogation" or "exceptional techniques" and what was, in blunt talk, torture.

In this regard, the documents in "Torture and Truth" seem to operate on three levels. At the highest level, the thrust of the Justice Department memorandums seems entirely toward giving interrogators maximum leeway rather than worrying about setting limits. At the middle level, the Defense Department spells out permissible methods of increasingly aggressive interrogation with a degree of detail, benign examples and insistence on safeguards that mostly suggest approaches definitely this side of torture.

At the lowest level, however, the appalling reports from the field give an entirely different picture of what "sleep adjustment," "stress positions," "environmental manipulation," "removal of clothing" and "increasing anxiety by use of aversions" can mean in practice.

In an analysis of the torture question written this week for Religion News Service, David Anderson notes that "nearly absent from the three major administration reports on the abuse at Abu Ghraib is any discussion of the ethical issues involved."

The report from Mr. Schlesinger's panel has eight appendices, the last of them rightly described by Mr. Anderson as "a cursory 2 1/3 pages on ethical issues." The panel calls for more "ethics education programs" without suggesting what their substance might be.

Mr. Danner notes how much of the 9/11 commission's much-admired reconstruction of the World Trade Center plot depended on information from high-level Qaeda conspirators held in places and interrogated in ways that no one, apparently even top officials of the government, wants to know more about.

The most disturbing aspect of "Torture and Truth" is not anything it reveals that has been hidden but how much it reveals that is not hidden - but that the nation chooses not to look at.

And this one, from a couple of weeks ago, available through Lexis-Nexis:

SECTION: Section B; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Beliefs; Pg. 6

LENGTH: 1069 words

HEADLINE: In the brutality of war, the innocents have become lost in the crossfire.

BYLINE: By Peter Steinfels
BODY:

Warfare is so brutal that it is easy to understand the cynicism that doubts whether the words war and morality even belong in the same sentence.

That is not the way that the military looks at it, however. In the years since the war in Vietnam and revulsion at events like the My Lai massacre, leadership of the armed forces has probably been way ahead of civilian policy makers in giving heed to traditional standards of ethical conduct in battle. No one imagines that these standards will be perfectly observed in the heat of combat, but they provide precious barriers against the descent into utter inhumanity.

Most of this growing ethical concern has centered on sparing civilians. The principles are simple, even if observing them is not. First, civilian casualties must be an unavoidable side effect of military action, not an intended and purposeful part of it. Second, there must be some proportionality, however hard to define precisely, between the military objectives and the extent of civilian death and suffering.

World War II saw a breakdown of this kind of traditional distinction between enemy forces and civilian populations. The civilians were finally judged to be as liable to direct attack as the former. The bombings of Germany and Japan were extended not only to hit traditional military targets, but also to wreak widespread death and destruction on civilians in hopes of breaking the enemy's morale.

That wartime collapse of an ancient moral distinction carried over into cold war military planning, which often contemplated civilian deaths in the millions as a consequence of direct nuclear attacks or even biological warfare against population centers.

Attitudes have changed. One reason, admittedly, is the existence of more discriminating weaponry. Another reason is the sense that much of what distinguishes the legitimate uses of military power from terrorism hangs on the special moral consideration given civilians. It is true that in the 1991 Persian Gulf war or the intervention to block ethnic cleansing in Kosovo the destruction of dual-use public works like power plants and communications and transportation systems raised a new category of moral questions. But the postwar suffering of civilians that resulted would scarcely have gnawed at Western consciences to the extent it did had not the goal of sparing civilians become so vigorously affirmed.

This evolution in attitude appears all to the good. Unfortunately, the recent debate about tallying civilian casualties in Iraq has raised questions about its seriousness.

Three weeks ago, The Lancet, the British medical journal, released a research team's findings that 100,000 or more civilians had probably died as a result of the war in Iraq. The study, formulated and conducted by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University and the College of Medicine at Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, involved a complex process of sampling households across Iraq to compare the numbers and causes of deaths before and after the invasion in March 2003.

The 100,000 estimate immediately came under attack. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain questioned the methodology of the study and compared it with an Iraq Health Ministry figure that put civilian fatalities at less than 4,000. Other critics referred to the findings of the Iraq Body Count project, which has constructed a database of war-related civilian deaths from verified news media reports or official sources like hospitals and morgues.

That database recently placed civilian deaths somewhere between 14,429 and 16,579, the range arising largely from uncertainty about whether some victims were civilians or insurgents. But because of its stringent conditions for including deaths in the database, the project has quite explicitly said, ''Our own total is certain to be an underestimate.''

It has refrained from commenting on the 100,000 figure, except for noting that such a number ''is on the scale of the death toll from Hiroshima'' and, if accurate, has ''serious implications.''

Certainly, the Johns Hopkins study is rife with assumptions necessitated by the lack of basic census and mortality data in Iraq. The sampling also required numerous adjustments because of wartime dangers -- and courage in carrying out the interviews. Accordingly, the results are presented with a good many qualifications.

Ultimately, the researchers are saying that these are the best estimates available and that better ones could be obtained if the occupying forces and the Iraqi authorities wanted them.

''This survey shows that with modest funds, four weeks and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained,'' the researchers wrote in The Lancet. ''There seems to be little excuse for occupying forces to not be able to provide more precise tallies'' that could be confirmed by independent bodies like the International Red Cross or the World Health Organization.

What is Washington's response to this argument? The dismissive statement by the head of the United States Central Command, Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, that ''we don't do body counts'' has been repeatedly quoted as more or less the final word on American policy. (An official at the Defense Department confirmed this week that American casualties were ''as far as I know the only casualty information we track.'') General Franks's dictum implies that the method, often disparaged as a measure of progress in Vietnam, is equally irrelevant or unreliable for measuring tragedy elsewhere.

Can this position withstand scrutiny? To a lot of ears, it sounds like a pharmaceutical company that swears it doesn't want to market drugs with dangerous side effects but then avoids the studies that might determine just how dangerous those side effects might be. What would one think of doctors who stressed the importance of combating fever but refused to take anyone's temperature?

To be sure, the morality of waging war in Iraq is not automatically resolved by establishing whether 4,000 civilians have died as a consequence or 17,000 or 100,000. But whether one figure or another is closer to the truth is surely relevant. Doesn't it mock any otherwise admirable moral concern for civilian losses not to want to find out?

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: November 20, 2004

I am reading a few more articles on these issues right now and will have more to say in the near future; right now I would love to hear what readers think about all this.