Vietnam: War crimes as policy

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Tue May 1 18:04:30 PDT 2001


Carrol Cox:
> The Kerrey story was almost certainly repeated many times in Vietnam, as
> "...all those who have been trying for decades to stop this war" know.
> (Bruce Franklin's dedication of _M.I.A._) But a focus on the war crimes
> on the ground leads to a blurred focus, and in every incident revealed
> there will be a fog of (alleged) extenuating circumstances. The focus
> might more profitably (in the long run) be on the air war. The B-51 has
> one purpose and one purpose alone: terroist slaughter of civilian
> populations. A lot (perhaps even in part correctly) can be said in
> extenuation for what men in the midst of ground combat may do -- nothing
> can be said in extenuation for the deliberate slaughter of civilians at
> a distance, a slaughter carried out for the most part by commissioned
> officers (officers & gentlemen by act of congress as they used to say).
> By all the rules of international law the North Vietnamese would have
> been quite justified in trying and executing the crew of every B-51 they
> shot down.

An elementary moral arithmetic would seem to indicate that those who suffer great sacrifices and run great risks to do evil are worse characters than those who do evil easily or offhandedly, even though the former might be more aesthetically satisfying: they are willing to buy their evil at a higher price. However, if one wants to get rid of the evil instead of the evildoer, one must turn one's attention to _it_ and note that war crimes are made possible only by war and war is made possible by the State and such popular doctrines as Just War and Humanitarian Imperialism. (The capitals serve to warn of oxymora.) We are back at the issue of the effectiveness of punishment.

But -- if one must do evil in the form of war -- the wise combatant will treat all prisoners of war as well as possible, since they are often useful sources of information, and can be traded to the enemy for one's own, or for other benefits, or kept as hostages. (One of the American government's complaints during the War in Vietnam was that prisoners of war were being kept near desirable targets, but given they were carpet-bombing the whole country, it is difficult to know what the Vietnamese could have done with them.)



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