From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 19:54:31 MST
Cory writes
> > Is this in accordance with the rules of war?
> >
> > EvMick
>
> the what now??!! War affords the civility the
> participants can reasonably relinquish. This seems to
> me to relate to Thomas More's musing during times of
> capital punishment over theft, in England that if a
> thief was to be killed for his crime, then why should
> he not kill to escape?
I think that you've touched on a very deep point here.
> So, here, most Iraqis must know that they cannot win
> against any one of the coalition nations in an all out
> war, let alone all of them. If to them, being overrun
> by the infidels or western imperialists, or whatever
> association the may rightly or wrongly have, is the
> worst fate, then they logically must do anything they
> can to circumvent this.
"Anything"? You are putting forth the interesting
thesis that any act is justified in order to avoid
losing a war. There are pluses to this view, and
minuses.
On the plus side, should the U.S. have subverted
allegedly democratically elected governments in
order to thwart the U.S.S.R.'s plans, should the
British have killed a number of innocent people
in a number of wars just to prevent an fleet of
ships from falling into enemy hands? Should a
nation torture a captive if it's the only way
that appears to hold out any hope of averting a
holocaust?
I would make a tentative "yes" to the above questions.
Context must always be considered. I will take the
usually dangerous route of expressing an allegiance
to complete utilitarianism now, and say that a course
is "justified" if it will lead to the best results in
the long run. Perhaps you don't find that maxim too
unobjectionable in the present discussion.
Therefore, I would suggest that if the U.S., for example,
captures an Al Qaeda terrorist who knows where an atom
bomb in New York city is hidden, then torture the hell
out of him, I say, in order to learn where. But if the
U.S. captures an Iraqi soldier who knows where the
concentrations of chemical weapons are stored, then
torturing the information out of him is not justified.
The reason, approximately, is that soldier are supposed
(these days) to be prepared to meet chemical weapons.
The proximate reason is that there are conventions of
war (so called "rules of war", I gather, about which
I know very little), and I believe that torturing enemy
soldiers is always against those rules.
Here also is another governing principle: "What is going
to happen anyway?" I know that that doesn't sound like
a principle ;-) but it is! Suppose that I'm an American
captain, and the U.S. is being overrun by the Germans and
Japanese in the final days of World War II. I am one of
the few commanders left in the Ozarks, our last refuge.
In a daring move, we take over a Japanese supply train,
and my Colonel orders me to kill all the truck drivers
because we cannot afford to leave them behind us. But
if I can now tell with utter moral *certainty* that our
cause is lost, and it really won't do any good anyway,
then by God I'm going to take all those truck drivers
behind the hill and put some bullets in some legs---I
will not kill them. Because what good would it do anyway?
* * *
Now here are the acid questions: (1) would you or would
you not have any moral outrage against the U.S. were the
Americans to do to enemy captives what is apparently
being done to theirs?
(2) Is there any act of perpetrated by the Iraqis against
enemy combatants (or enemy nations, e.g., an A-bomb in
New York's harbor) that would elicit moral outrage on
your part?
Lee
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