RE: [WAR/IRAQ] American POW's

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 19:54:31 MST

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    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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