no magic carpet bombing...

For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters.

Clotheslines were webbed between stray standing pillars, evidence that survivors were somehow living among the ruins. Nobody knows how many thousands of residents died, or how many are now homeless or confined to a wheelchair. What is certain is that the decimation of Raqqa is unlike anything seen in an American conflict since the Second World War.

As then, this battle was waged against an enemy bent on overthrowing an entire order, in an apparently nihilistic putsch against reason itself. But Raqqa was no Normandy. Although many Syrians fought valiantly against isis and lost their lives, the U.S., apart from a few hundred Special Forces on the ground, relied on overwhelming airpower, prosecuting the entire war from a safe distance. Not a single American died. The U.S. still occasionally conducts conventional ground battles, as in Falluja, Iraq, where, in 2004, troops engaged in fierce firefights with insurgents. But the battle for Raqqa—a war fought from cavernous control rooms thousands of miles away, or from aircraft thousands of feet in the sky—is the true face of modern American combat.

We have been conditioned to judge the merit of today’s wars by their conduct. The United Nations upholds norms of warfare that, among other things, prohibit such acts as torture, rape, and hostage-taking. Human-rights groups and international lawyers tend to designate a war “humane” when belligerents have avoided harming civilians as much as possible. However, in “Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos” (Oxford), Neil Renic, a scholar of international relations, challenges this standard. He argues that, when assessing the humanity of a war, we should look not only to the fate of civilians but also to whether combatants have exposed themselves to risk on the battlefield. Renic suggests that when one side fully removes itself from danger—even if it goes to considerable lengths to protect civilians—it violates the ethos of humane warfare.

The core principle of humane warfare is that fighters may kill one another at any time, excepting those who are rendered hors de combat, and must avoid targeting civilians. It’s tempting to say that civilians enjoy this protected status because they are innocent, but, as Renic points out, civilians “feed hungry armies, elect bellicose leaders, and educate future combatants.” In Syria, home to a popular revolution, entire towns were mobilized for the war effort. Civilians—even children—acted as lookouts, arms smugglers, and spies. What really matters, then, is the type of danger that someone in a battle zone presents. The moment that a person picks up a weapon, whether donning a uniform or not, he or she poses a direct and immediate danger. This is the crucial distinction between armed personnel and civilians.

But what if the belligerents themselves don’t pose a direct and immediate danger? Renic argues that in such theatres as Pakistan, where Americans deploy remote-controlled drones to kill their enemies while rarely stepping foot on the battlefield, insurgents on the ground cannot fight back—meaning that, in terms of the threat that they constitute, they are no different from civilians. It would then be just as wrong, Renic suggests, to unleash a Hellfire missile on a group of pickup-riding insurgents as it would be to annihilate a pickup-riding family en route to a picnic.

One might respond that, say, the Pakistani Taliban does pose an immediate threat to Pakistani civilians, if not to U.S. soldiers. But Renic contends that the U.S., by avoiding the battlefield, has turned civilians into attractive targets for insurgents eager for a fight. Whether this claim is correct or not, it’s clear that risk-free combat has brought warfare into new moral territory, requiring us to interrogate our old notions of battlefield right and wrong. If we can distinguish combatants from civilians only by the danger that they pose to other combatants, then the long-distance violence of modern warfare is inhumane. Renic concludes that the “increasingly sterile, bureaucratized, and detached mode of American killing” has the flavor of punishment rather than of war in any traditional sense. In Barack Obama’s recent memoir, he writes that, as President, he wanted to save “the millions of young men” in the Muslim world who were “warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings.” Yet he claims that, owing to where they lived, and the machinery at his disposal, he ended up “killing them instead.” Leaving aside Obama’s crude generalizations, Renic argues that he could indeed have saved them—by “severely restricting” remote warfare.

Renic’s book is part of a broader trend of scholars and human-rights activists contending with the wreckage caused by America’s recent conflicts abroad. Their studies share a basic quest: how can we use rules to make warfare more humane? Whereas Renic focusses on moral rules, much of this other work is concerned with legal rules. In the aftermath of the Raqqa battle, Amnesty International and other organizations sifted through the rubble, carefully documenting whether this or that bombing complied with the laws of war. This work is salutary, but a troubling question looms behind it: in our drive to subject the battlefield to rules, are we overlooking deeper moral truths about the nature of war itself?

The notion that warfare should be governed by rules is ancient, and dates at least to Augustine, who argued that a legitimate ruler can wage war when he has good intentions and a just cause. In the Middle Ages, the Church attempted to ban the crossbow, and took efforts to protect ecclesiastical property and noncombatants from wartime violence. But it was only in the nineteenth century that states attempted to fashion laws and treaties to regulate wartime conduct. During the American Civil War, the Union implemented the Lieber Code, which sought to restrict the imposition of unnecessary suffering—torture or poisoning, for example—on the enemy. The code also enshrined as legal convention the principle of “military necessity”: if violence had a strategic purpose—that is, if it could help win a war—it was allowed. In the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, world powers accepted vague limits on wartime conduct while upholding the principle of military necessity. States agreed to a moratorium on balloon-launched munitions, which had little tactical value, but were silent on the question of motorized aircraft.

Many nations ignored even these lax regulations. The Hague Conventions prohibited “asphyxiating gases,” but world powers flouted the treaties with abandon in the trenches of the First World War. The conventions effectively outlawed the intentional targeting of civilians, but by the Second World War belligerents had recognized the military advantage of bombing towns and villages. In 1942, British policy actually barred aircraft from targeting military facilities, ordering them instead to strike working-class areas of German cities—“for the sake of increasing terror,” as Churchill later put it. In 1943, the U.S. and British Air Forces of Operation Gomorrah rained down fire and steel upon Hamburg for seven nights, killing fifty-eight thousand civilians. Urban bombing campaigns left millions of homeless and shell-shocked Germans roaming a ravaged land that W. G. Sebald later described as the “necropolis of a foreign, mysterious people, torn from its civil existence and its history, thrown back to the evolutionary stage of nomadic gatherers.” Then came the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed about two hundred and fifty thousand people. In all, Allied terror raids may have claimed some half a million civilian lives. The pattern continued in the Korean War; Secretary of State Dean Rusk later recalled that the U.S. had bombed “every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.”

During the Vietnam War, a powerful antiwar movement emerged for the first time since the First World War. Through television, the news of such atrocities as the My Lai massacre reached directly into American living rooms, and conscientious objectors and antiwar activists appealed to international law to justify their opposition to the carnage. They were more successful in shaping U.S. conduct than they could have ever imagined. After the war, the Pentagon revamped its arsenal with such inventions as laser-guided munitions, which could carry out “precision strikes.” The U.S. military began to follow the principles of the Hague Conventions, as well as those found in other treaties, calling these combined regulations the Law of Armed Conflict. American terror bombings became a thing of the past. In the first Gulf War, hundreds of specialist attorneys sat alongside generals at centcomheadquarters in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, to insure that the U.S. followed legal rules of warfare. It was the largest per-capita wartime deployment of lawyers in American history.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/americas-war-on-syrian-civilians

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