Warren Kozak: The Real Rules of War

Some Navy Seals are being court-martialed over allegedly mistreating a prisoner. The prisoner in question is the person who was the mastermind of an attack on four U.S. civilian contractors. They were killed, their bodies burned and dragged through the streets of Fallujah, and two of the bodies were hung from the Euphrates bridge.

The mastermind of this operation, Ahmed Hashim Abed, claims to have been mistreated, and has a fat lip to prove it.

In his article, The Real Rules of War, Warren Kozak recalls similar examples from World War II, as related by his father.

Were these violations of the Geneva Conventions? Definitely. Were they war crimes? Most likely. Were they wrong, given the times and the context?

In his book, Mr. Fussell probably sums up the feelings of many soldiers when he quotes a British captain, John Tonkin, who experienced a great deal of the war. "I have always felt," Capt. Tonkin said, "that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can't."

While I'm all for civilized behavior, I think it's worth asking if such behavior, and the requirements for such behavior, have limits.

I'm recalling an old Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise becomes involved in a war between two planets. The planets have been at war for 500 years. The reason the war has lasted so long is that war has been civilized and sanitized. Attacks are mounted in computer simulations by one side, countered in computer simulations by the other side, and the results adjudicated by computer. Casualties report to distintegraton chambers where they are quickly, neatly, and painlessly killed.

Compliance is endured by the threat of returning to real war, with real property destruction, and real war casualties. In addition to the people disappearing in the main strike, there would be people with grave but non-lethal injuries (no apparent attempt was made to simulate these). There would be radiation resulting in any number of secondary deaths and injuries (again, I gather these were not factored in). There would be disruption of services, mass starvation, and all the horrors of a real war using real weapons against real people.

When Kirk destroyed the disintegration chamber and the computer that controlled the battle from one side, the leaders of that planet discovered they had a powerful incentive to make peace. War, no longer civilized, had become an effective deterrent to more war.