SYRIA thread

[Montmorency]

On the first point:

Every country agrees to follow them unless there is a need not to - those countries with the greatest numbers of cluster munitions refused to sign up, and the UK added wording to ensure that their weaponry was technically OK.
These rules are enforced only when it suits and only against countries too weak to defend - Israel using phosphorous against people was of course overlooked.
Rules enforced in this way only display the rotten corruption of the whole system - trying to make "might is right" slightly more palatable. The "spirit" of international law is another phrase that is taken by the strong to do whatever they want - especially since the UN so often fails to give them the cover to do so.

To the second point:

It is how a weapon is used, not what it is: mines are a fantastic weapon of defence since it has no offensive capabilities whatsoever. You can have a border laced with mines and AA weaponry and be extremely certain it is safe with the country on the other side not worried that they are about to be attacked. A brigade of tanks and attack helicopters might make it equally safe, but they have offensive capabilities. Dropping mines in bright colours to attract children is using them as a terror weapon; randomly bombing a city is pretty terrifying - and drones are so terrifying children in Afghanistan and Pakistan have come to fear the blue sky since it makes attacks more likely.

Superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering is my personal favourite. Only such a phrase could have been created by lawyers who have never been in action. I am pretty certain that those in a war view any and all suffering sustained by their foes is necessary - to make them surrender. Or do the victors then get to take the losers to court for what they did?

Ah.

[...] but better unexpected progress than none at all.

The existence of international law of any import is after all a mitigation of the arbitrary exercise of unmitigated power*. If it exists, if it is possible, it deserves acknowledgment. In the case of extant arms restrictions you could possibly demonstrate that many of these are relatively unburdensome for great powers to implement, but "better unexpected progress than none at all". So while it's possible - as America has done since Vietnam - to co-opt the language of Law and Human Rights to serve the pretexts of power, that this is even the direction powerful countries are incentivized to take is probably a good thing.

Now, as far as how to make you care about differentiating modalities of violence - I'll have to think about it more. I'm sure we agree, for example, that sticks and stones aren't fungible with the atom bomb.

Is it really about "how" it's used? Hypothetically a nuclear device could be used to destroy bunkers or in some other limited context, but really it's unacceptable to deploy at all (though as with reprisals against civilian populations, some governments are shy about depriving themselves of the option)

The U.S. finds the provisions restricting reprisals to be “counterproductive [because] they remove a significant deterrent that protects civilians and war victims on all sides of a conflict,” according to the Law of War Manual.

'We have to destroy them to save them...'

Area bombardment is usually acceptable as far as war may be acceptable - but you can't treat a population center as a target.

Meanwhile, you have China and Russia getting ornery at the thought of US missile defense systems in place near their borders, basically because it could reduce the effectiveness of their nuclear second strike.

So what does it all matter? I would say that chipping away at the margins of war's brutality can indeed shift the paradigm over time. I can't source any direct comparison, but my impression is that even the worst excesses of aerial prosecution in the Syrian conflict (or the US drone program) are overall less deleterious to civilians and infrastructure than what was routine throughout the mid-century. We should encourage this, because the development this century of energy, hyperkinetic, and autonomous weapons systems (or that sci-fi bogeyman of "biological", but not bacteriological/virological, weapons) could moot all the elaborations of the 20th century before we know it.


*Arguably why these transient pseudo-interventions in Syria are net negatives for the world, not because of any specter of WW3 but because they undermine what international law there is - and apparently for the sake of nothing other than cheap domestic political points.