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War Crimes (Follow-Up)

Megan McArdle responds to my earlier post, and clarifies her point enough that I see that we aren’t very far apart on this question.  I mistook Ms. McArdle’s description of what can happen in war, which she correctly says is often far removed from the original causes of the war, for an argument that war […]

Megan McArdle responds to my earlier post, and clarifies her point enough that I see that we aren’t very far apart on this question.  I mistook Ms. McArdle’s description of what can happen in war, which she correctly says is often far removed from the original causes of the war, for an argument that war crimes are somehow an unavoidable consequence of going to war.  The misinterpretation was mine, and I regret berating her over that, since I have evidently read too much into her remark about Dresden.  However, in the post just before it in which she is responding to Sullivan’s critique, she makes another statement that strikes me as odd:

I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an “aggressive” war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)

In fact, except for this parenthetical remark, I generally agree with Ms. McArdle in this post as well, but the remark seems unnecessary.  There are aggressors in war, and in the case of Iraq I hope we could agree that our government was that aggressor.  Since aggressive war is itself a crime and a violation of international law, it is reasonable to expect that governments that wage aggressive war will be more likely to ignore legal conventions against other kinds of crimes committed during war.  No one would deny that governments defending against invasion can commit atrocities, but because as the state of the war has been created by the aggressor there is some sense in which all atrocities that take place during the war can be traced back to the aggressor and the aggressor is responsible for them to one degree or another.  Obviously, no state wages “peaceful” or “passive” wars, but not all states wage wars of aggression and I would wager that there is a connection between launching wars of aggression and the frequency of war crimes and other violations of international law.  As the example of Dresden reminds us, though, a state that is responding to another state’s aggression can commit war crimes, which I suppose brings us back to Ms. McArdle’s more recent post.

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