Frequent commenter Ziska has been drilling me on the issue of terrorism as opposed to legitimate warfare. He has drawn several parallels to wars of national liberation, and our discussion has moved from Algeria to Eire, and from India to Sri Lanka.
Others have joined him in criticizing the distinction I make, which seems very clear to me
.but obviously not to them.
So I thought Id take a stab at a broad discussion of legitimate vs. illegitimate uses for force, and what I perceive to be the tragic, if moral, consequences of legitimate warfare versus the equally tragic and immoral consequences of terrorism.
First, and foremost, let me dwell on the tragedies involved. Innocent people die, are maimed and wounded, have their lives shattered irrecoverably. Whether they are killed by a stray Allied bomb in WWII, a cannon shell in a besieged city in one of the sieges of the 30 Years War, a Palestinian bomb in Tel Aviv, or an Israeli tank shell in Gaza. Some starve because the crops have been ruined or irrigation systems destroyed or livestock killed; some die from treatable diseases because hospitals have no power or are inaccessible. Each of these tragic stories represents an individual noncombatant who did not deserve to die.
But the reality of human existence is that innocents die. The earliest human stories
for example, the ballads of of Homer
talk of the tragedies that befall humans at the capricious whim of the gods.
Our civilized society has little appetite for this, and we have erected structures that ostensibly protect the innocent, in international law and custom. Not everyone follows those laws and customs, however.
So lets talk cases.
During World War II, German and Allied forces bombed each others cities; the stated reason for Allied bombing was:
The deployment of the air forces opposing Germany was heavily influenced by the fact that victory was planned to come through invasion and land occupation. In the early years of the war, to be sure, the RAF had the independent mission of striking at German industrial centers in an effort to weaken the German economy and the morale of the German people.
source: THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY (authors J.K. Galbraith, among others)
The German justification was somewhat different:
I believe this plan [raiding RAF airfields] would have been very successful, but as a result of the Fuhrer’s speech about retribution, in which he asked that London be attacked immediately, I had to follow the other course. I wanted to attack the airfields first, thus creating a prerequisite for attacking London . . . I spoke with the Fuhrer about my plans in order to try to have him agree I should attack the first ring of RAF airfields around London, but he insisted he wanted to have London itself attacked for political reasons, and also for retribution.
I considered the attacks on London useless, and I told the Fuhrer again and again that inasmuch as I knew the English people as well as I did my own people, I could never force them to their knees by attacking London. We might be able to subdue the Dutch people by such measures but not the British.
Reichmarschall Hermann Goering, International Military Tribunal Nuremberg, 1946.
Notice two points of difference: the Allied strategy was set to a) weaken the fighting effectiveness of the German Army by collapsing the industrial economy that supported it, and secondarily weakening the morale of the German people. The German strategy was out-and-out retribution
a lashing out at the British people, and secondarily, if at all, attacking their means to wage war.
The Hague convention of 1923 states:
Bombardment from the air is legitimate only when directed at a military objective, the destruction or injury of which would constitute a distinct military disadvantage to the belligerent.
In general, we understand and support attacks which logically support weakening the ability of belligerent soldiers to fight. The allied raids on the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt may have destroyed whole neighborhoods, but they can be justified as attacking a target of military importance (precision machines need bearing); similarly the Allied attacks on steel, oil and nitrate production necessary to produce weapons gasoline and explosives, as well as the roads, waterways, and railroads necessary to transport them and the food needed to support an urban industrial economy.
The Allies did not limit themselves to militarily useful attacks, however. Dresden and Cologne certainly were not. But the other stated purpose was to attack the morale of the enemy, and realistically, satisfy the emotional need to damage the opposing state. How well did they work?
The Survey has made extensive studies of the reaction of the German people to the air attack and especially to city raids. These studies were carefully designed to cover a complete cross section of the German people in western and southern Germany and to reflect with a minimum of bias their attitude and behavior during the raids. These studies show that the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack. The night raids were feared far more than daylight raids. The people lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. They resorted increasingly to “black radio” listening, to circulation of rumor and fact in opposition to the Regime; and there was some increase in active political dissidence — in 1944 one German in every thousand was arrested for a political offense. If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. In a determined police state, however, there is a wide difference between dissatisfaction and expressed opposition. Although examination of official records and those of individual plants shows that absenteeism increased and productivity diminished somewhat in the late stages of the war, by and large workers continued to work. However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident.
— Strategic Bombing Survey
So it appears that the goal of demoralizing the enemy seems to have had some effect. The interesting thing is that the bombings in England seemed to have the opposite effect, of infuriating the population and strengthening their will to fight. I might suggest that part of the difference lay in the magnitude of the attacks, meaning that while the attacks on Britain were damaging, they did not represent a force overwhelming enough to call victory into question (there were certainly other issues
of national character, political leadership, the perceived legitimacy of the government, etc.), while the devastating attacks by the RAF and then the Americans certainly would have had to make the average German question the viability of the war enterprise.
Finally, you cannot talk about aerial bombardment without talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are three broad questions: 1) were the attacks on nonstrategic targets legitimate at all? 2) should we have demonstrated the bomb first? and 3) to what extent was racism toward the Japanese people an element in making us more willing to bomb them?
Serious books have been written on these subjects, and will be for the foreseeable future. Ive read a few of them. My father was also a cryptographer in Army Intelligence in WW II, stationed in India and Burma, and then Japan after the war, and he and I had some extensive talks about it. Heres my (personal, inconclusive) take on these three questions:
1) were these attacks legitimate?
Yes, to the extent that the attacks on Cologne, Dresden and Tokyo were also legitimate. Part of the enterprise in national war is to both destroy the fighting ability of the enemy, which can be done both by destroying the men and equipment in their armed forces, and in a modern industrial society, by destroying the economy that supports them. In addition, the effects on morale both of the enemy and of the attacker must be considered. Fights are won, in no small part, on emotion. My personal judgment, is that in the context of a global war like WW II, strikes against enemy population centers were not unjustifiable. By hastening the collapse of the enemy as an effective fighting force, they may have saved combatent lives on both sides lives in offset to those non-combatant lives the bombing cost.
Ill address the combatant vs. non-combatant issue later.
2) should we have demonstrated the bomb first?
There has been a lot written and discussed about this; about the effect of an announced demonstration over Tokyo Bay or an unoccupied islet. It strikes me as a nice idea, but we are far removed from two things: a) the uncertainty that was widely present at the time about whether the bomb would actually work, or would simply produce a conventional explosion and shards of U238; and b) the genuine emotional hatred in effect at the time, which feeds into:
3) was racism the key to using the Bomb in Japan?
Yes, but. But we would have used the Bomb in Germany if it had been ready in time. But it was racism that cut both ways. The level of cultural misunderstanding between the Japanese and Western politicians and military is probably matched by the level of misunderstanding between the militant Native American tribes and the European immigrants. The Japanese military was to the American view, insanely no, suicidally brave, and equally insanely cruel. The Western military was to the Japanese view cowardly and weak. From talking to my father and to other men of his age who fought the Japanese (and my fathers battles were quite cushy and non-life-threatening), the real differences in the warfighting styles, amplified by the propaganda machines, led to real and deep feelings of fear and hate. Had this picture of the Japanese not been pervasive and again, Ill state that it had its roots in real cultural differences, amplified and played up by propaganda I wonder what we would have done.
The Germans were, on the other hand, perceived as fellow Westerners, and even the knowledge of the extermination camps did not drive them out of that place. But according to contemporary documents, the fear that the Germans were close to a bomb, and the certainty that they would use it if they had it, I believe would certainly have led to the use of the A-bomb in Europe if VE day had been sufficiently far away.
So, in summary, Im trying to justify the collateral death and destruction on civilian, nonmilitary targets in WW II as a part of a larger war plan, and in the context of those intentions, legitimate.
Remember that criminality (and hence morality) depends in large part on intentions. The dead are just as dead. But when we judge the living, we have to judge them in large part by what they meant to do.
Next, nuclear war and Homeric war.