Casual warfare

Marvin Gandall marvin.gandall at sympatico.ca
Thu Feb 20 06:25:34 PST 2003


There's an interesting piece in the latest London Review of Books by Duke University international law professor Michael Byers. Byers describes how the US’s cavalier approach to starting wars and the new methods it is using to fight them are both in violation of international law and morality.

It's the result of the breakthrough in military technology, which has given the US the capacity to wage war from safe distances at much less cost in blood and treasure to itself. The new high-tech weaponry thus serves as an an incentive to launch wars for reasons other than self-defence, the only permissible grounds for doing so, and to bypass pitched battles with opposing armed forces to strike directly at power grids, water filtration plants, and other infrastructure in a bid to break the will of the civilian population and provoke internal uprisings.

This development, which first manifested itself in the Gulf War and Kosovo, has since led the Pentagon, encouraged by Donald Rumsfeld, to re-evaluate the conventions of war prohibiting the direct or indirect targeting of civilians, as well as the use of nuclear and other banned weapons against enemy troops.

You can access the LRB site directly (I think it's a non-sub article), or read it on www.supportingfacts.com . Sorry for any cross-posting.

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