Educated Guesswork

More on the rules of war

Inspired by Mark A. R. Kleiman, I've been doing some thinking about the morality of the various violations of the rules of war that Iraq is alleged to have committed. As noted before, Mark correctly identifies the two really objectionable practices:

• Soldiers fighting dressed as civilians.
• Raising a phony white flag in order to create an ambush.

I totally agree with him about the second practice, and my gut agrees with him about the first, but I'm not sure that the rest of me does. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to puzzle it out and I can't seem to put my finger on exactly what the problem is. I'm hoping writing it up will help me figure it out, or perhaps some reader will have an insightful opinion.

My usual practice when I'm thrashing about like this is to attempt to create a set of alternatives that seem to lie between what's acceptable and what's not acceptable and try to figure out where the bright line lies. So, bring on the hypotheticals.

First, let's stipulate that we believe that conscription isn't a violation of the rules of war. We may not approve of it on moral grounds (I'm not sure I do) but it's certainly conventional behavior so I don't think it can reasonably be considered a violation of the rules of war, at least not at the present time.

Case 1: It's not the uniforms
I think we can all agree that Iraq is being invaded and its resources are low. It's not unreasonable that the Iraqis might want to conscript all the usual suspects into the armed forces. As they're doing now, they send out the brute squads to impress all males old enough to hold a rifle--remember, old AK-47s are a drug on the market.

It's also quite plausible that, due to sanctions and whatever, they don't have enough uniforms for all these new soldiers. Conveniently, they don't really need them, because the Americans and the Brits are wearing such nice distinctive uniforms. So, Saddam Hussein issues a statement on national television.

Dear Americans. In order to resist your Imperialist Invasion, we have had to conscript all able-bodied Iraqi males. Due to a materials shortage, we have relaxed our uniform rules. Any man you see not in a US or UK uniform is an Iraqi soldier and hence a viable target.

Remember that the purpose of uniforms is to distinguish our soldiers from their soldiers and from civilians. This seems to accomplish that goal pretty effectively. One could argue that it doesn't accurately distinguish men from boys and women, but children are pretty easy to distinguish based on size and in Muslim countries women tend to dress sufficiently differently from men that this isn't a source of confusion. In any case, it doesn't seem reasonable to require that clothing manufacture be intact in order for people to defend their homeland.

So, I'm forced to say that this set of actions by Iraq would be fine. Moreover, I would argue that under these circumstances the Iraqi soldiers out of uniform would be entitled to treatment as prisoners of war. They've been announced as soldiers and they're not easily confused with civilians. They just happen to be wearing rather informal and ad hoc uniforms.

Case 2: Just a declaration
Assuming that I've sold you that the previous hypothetical is ok, let's try taking it a step further. Imagine that the government is so disorganized that they can't send the brute squad out to conscript. Instead, they just issue a proclamation that all able bodied males are now in the army and are expected to take up arms and repel the invaders. If, as is rumored, rates of personal firearm possession in Iraq are quite high, this is a pretty feasible proposition.

So, is this a problem? I don't think so so. Considering all the complaining in the blogosphere about how the Iraqis are being forced to fight at gunpoint, it doesn't seem reasonable to argue that someone is less a soldier because he doesn't have a gun to his head.

So, in this case as well, I argue that nothing wrong has been done. The "conscripts" in this case are soldiers and deserve treatment as such.

Case 3: This uniform sure is uncomfortable
Assuming that you were with me as far as Case 2, it's only a short step to Case 3. Once we've decided that any adult male is a soldier, it doesn't much matter whether he's wearing the regulation uniform or the irregular one, aka civilian clothes. So, if regular soldiers decide that their issued uniforms are uncomfortable and decide to change back into the irregular uniform, who's to complain?

Case 4: What we have now
As far as I can tell, Case 3 is different from what we have now in only one respect: No announcement has been made. Instead, Iraqi soldiers have just changed into civilian clothes and kept fighting. But does that mean that all Saddam has to do is go on Al Jazeera and announce that all Iraqis were now soldiers and everything is hunky dory? Somehow I don't think so.

Hmmm.....
This is pretty puzzling, since I seem to have gone in small steps from something that is intuitively acceptable to something that is intuitively unacceptable. That's generally a sign that one of these steps is bogus. At this point I went back through the preceding cases until I found one that activated my yuck reflex. That seems to be Case 2.

I think the problem is that Case 1 and Case 2 are similar on the surface, but in fact are quite different. In Case 1, the fact that the government is actively conscripting means that when can believe them when they say that adult males are soldiers. They may be unwilling soldiers with guns to their heads, but they are soldiers and are presumably making some attempt to kill our soldiers. In Case 2, however, the reason that the government is just making an announcement is that they can't actually force people to fight. Thus, we can't trust them when they say that such and such a group are actually soldiers--they don't have enough control over them to reliably make that assertion.

Note that I'm not claiming that the difference has anything to do with legitimate authority, only with the actual power to force people to fight. So, apparently having a gun to the soldier's heads does make a difference.

That's my tentative conclusion. If one of my readers wanted to wants to write in with their views, I'd love to hear them. Posted by ekr at March 31, 2003 10:23 PM | TrackBack