Another violation of the international laws of war, another ringing silence from the 'international community.' Why not chlorine bombs? Why not land mines -- I mean 'IEDs'? Why not beheadings, kidnappings, attacks out of uniform -- have I missed anything? Repeated attacks on civilians? Deliberate attacks exclusively on civilians? Deliberate attacks exclusively on civilians tricked into gathering around their secretly imminent death? Someone -- more than one person, preferably -- has got to repeat an important truth: the complete degeneration of Iraq's murderers into people who, substantively and procedurally, kill without regard to any of the most basic and fundamental standards of the civilized world is not the 'fault' of the United States. There is no justification, no legitimation, and no cover for these acts.
Neither two nor n + 2 wrongs make a right, of course, but in an even more despairing vein the haunting sensation persists that somehow 'we' have 'brought this' upon ourselves and Iraq's innocents. We've brought a lot onto Iraq's innocents, it's true. Under the circumstances, the casualty rate is woeful and disproportionate, even though circumstances have shifted standards so profoundly since Korea, where some 1 million civilians died every year. Were chlorine attacks like this to be expected? Foreseen by intelligent statesmen? If so (and maybe they were), then what else, what other horrors? What debasement of warfighting into unholy slaughter should we have seen coming? What weird onus compels policymakers to presume the decay of their enemies into outright monsters? Isn't that presumption exactly what critics of the civilizational caricature of our enemies criticize? The old suicide-bombing justification returns: well, they're driven to the extremity of doing these awful things. We -- that is, you -- have deprived them of the means to fight fair.
And again the crazy old civilian/combatant distinction cooked up by the silly old laws of war returns. Among other rules. Times in the history of the earth when wars were fought with anything adhering to the principles of just war have been shockingly rare. But how tenable of an excuse can this ever be? What wretched world awaits us if Iraq's illegal combatants succeed in shaking our faith in our own essential decency -- as a function of the practicability, the plausibility, and the legitimacy of our own 'little' notion of essential decency? Ruling ourselves without standing on account of dirty hands is to leave no witness for the defense. Yet the prosecution will not rest.
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