Justice is a matter of perception. If you can sell the war to the public as just, so it will be. If not... well, you get the picture. So the best book to read on the supposed "justice" of war would be a good marketing text. But that, for obvious reasons, would be a very boring reading for a twelve-year-old...

I read Walzer's book again recently. It is a good book but not an easy one to read. I must tell you that I want to meet a twelve year old that can read that book! I only hope my son will be as inquisitive as yours is.

... but we surely wouldn't want to confuse the subjective character of justice with the moral acceptability of self-serving war propaganda. From a domestic perspective, I doubt any of our advanced societies would be sutainable if there wasn't agreement on a core set of "universal" (or at least national) moral ethos.

That justice is subjective calls for a deep understanding for the cultural roots of our moral values. Self-serving propaganda calls for forceful critical thinking. These two sound similar but lead to very different attitudes.

For example: the recent media campain advertising the views of carefully chosen American Muslims in the Arab world. There is nothing wrong with advocating democracy and religious tolerance. In fact, I believe there is still a strong majority of Muslims longing for a lot more of that. This doesn't mean, nevertheless, that Arabs will not perceive it as an attempt at cultural proselitism on our part; and yet, I don't think most of them would resent it. It's just fair game if done with respect for their culture.

But, this administration's war propaganda in the Arab world is so obviously self-serving in the context of Irak and the lack of US enthusiasm in its involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In this context, Arabs conclude that this administration think they're dumb enough not to see through this...

It's too bad, because in other times and if it were done by more credible parties (and followed by consistent policy in favor of democracy and religious tolerance towards Arab nations), this would probably be a very good thing to do.

Cute 4 year old query dejour: "Dad? Is there a Yes-vember?"

It's worth asking, I suppose, whether there's a 'common law' of war, as well as the statute law encoded by the Geneva Conventions and other multilateral agreements. Of course, international law is primarily statutory -- that's the only credible enforcement framework -- but I remember Michael Byers talking about 'customary arrangements' as a significant part. One could argue, perhaps, that the Russians were simply working within the precedent set during the Napoleonic wars.

I suppose there's a slender parallel, in that the occupying Nazi regime imposed somewhat similar economic restrictions on those occupied as the British government did on its citizens. It's a question of the extent to which conquest imposes sovereignty, which, since Westphalia, appears to be essentially 'never'.

Yet there are people who say that once a war is started, both sides--both the good guys and the bad guys--are under the same moral obligation to fight according to the "rules of war." I've never understood this.

It's a very old idea, the idea of the "warrior's honor" (Michael Ignatieff): if you're a warrior, as opposed to just an armed bandit, there's certain things that are considered dishonorable, that soldiers fighting for a civilized country just don't do, even during wartime. Killing people who can't fight back, for example. It doesn't matter what the enemy (the "bad guys") are doing; the moral obligation is to ourselves.

The modern formulation is due to Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross after seeing the Battle of Solferino and its aftermath (wounded soldiers were left on the battlefield to die).

The modern laws of war are pretty simple: they protect non-combatants, including both civilians and prisoners of war. They can't be tortured, raped, summarily executed, starved, or worked to death.

According to John Lewis Gaddis, the contrasting behavior of Western troops and Russian troops in occupied Germany played a significant role in the early Cold War.

The incidence of rape and brutality was so much greater on the Soviet than on the Western side that it played a major role in determining which way the Germans would tilt in the Cold War that was to come. It ensured a pro-Western orientation among all Germans from the very beginning of that
conflict, which surely helps to explain why the West German regime was able to establish itself as a legitimate government and the East German regime never could. This pattern, in turn, replicated itself on a larger scale when the West Europeans invited the United States to organize the NATO alliance and include them within it. The Warsaw Pact, a Soviet creation imposed on Eastern Europe in reaction to NATO, operated on quite a different basis.

What happened here was not so much a matter of deliberate policy as it was one of occupying
armies reflecting their own domestic institutions, cultures, and standards of acceptable behavior. The rules of civil society implicit in democratic politics made the humanitarian treatment of defeated enemies seem natural to the Western allies. They didn't have to be ordered to do this - they just did
it, and it didn't occur to them to do otherwise. Much the same thing happened, with equally
important long-term results, in occupied Japan. But the Russian troops came out of a culture of
brutality unparalleled in modern history. Given this background, it did not occur to many of them that there was anything wrong with brutalizing others. And it did not occur to their leaders to put a stop to the process, despite the fact that it lost them Germany.

In this instance, then, the existence of moral standards on one side and their absence on the other played a huge role in determining the course of events. Idealistic behavior turned out to have very realistic consequences.

I included some discussion of the laws of war in the alt.politics.international FAQ.

hrmmmm ... you used to hear a lot more about "just war" theories back when the USA was carrying out a limited war of self-defence rather than an imperialist war of aggression.

Yes, Daniel, I can't think of a war that was so obviously about oil than this one is... With perhaps the exception of the Kuwait war, but then again the same oil industry representative were in power. They're at least highly consistent.

Oh, I almost forgot, the Afganistan war is also about oil...

I think there's a difference between Nazis burning someone else's property and the Russians burning their own.

As for war crimes by the "good guys" and the "bad guys", the idea is that some actions are so bad that the cause doesn't justify them, I think. Once you start making allowances for yourself as a "good guy", your behavior is likely to slide very close to that of a "bad guy", which in fact is often how bad guys become bad guys. The Bolsheviks probably thought they were bringing utopia to earth.

I'd be curious to know if there are some war crimes that Brad would like to see the US have the freedom to commit. (We do have that freedom, btw, and have used it--war crimes trials are for losers.)