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Immoral
and Soon to be Illegal?
It has been my pleasure in recent months to correspond extensively
with Dr. Robin Coupland, of the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC), in Geneva, and editor of the ICRC
report on "The SIrUS Project." This is an extensive
body of research involving a database of over 26,000 war-wounded
patients at Red Cross hospitals around the world since 1991.
The objective of his work has been to determine which weapons
inflict what the Geneva Convention identifies as "superfluous
injury or unnecessary suffering." The upshot of this
research is that an extensive body of data now exists to
demonstrate what we all know: small arms fire kills or injures
comparatively few non-combatants, but instruments of "distant
punishment" (land mines, aerial bombing, and artillery)
are responsible for the vast majority of the indiscriminate
slaughter of non-combatants in war.
What I am telling you is that there is a tremendously influential
force at play in the world today which is determined to
see to it that artillery and aerial bombs will follow the
land mine down the endangered species path already trod
by gas warfare. It appears that those who propose to use
"distant punishment" as national policy will soon see
the day when they are considered as immoral international
criminals, little different from Saddam Hussein.
We cannot escape the fact that, whether we like it or not,
in the eyes of an increasingly large and influential body
of individuals in this post-Cold War era, those who advocate
distant punishment are really asking for license to kill
civilians, and tax dollars to do it with.
American GIs, as combatants or peacekeepers, in the streets
of a foreign nation have always been our best ambassadors,
and American bombers dropping impersonal death and destruction
from overhead have always been our worst. To have a national
policy that relies excessively on distant punishment is
to put our very worst foot forward.
There
can be little doubt that the execution of a policy based
on strategic bombing is likely to explode in our faces.
To explode figuratively, as CNN insures that we can no longer
deny the dead and wounded women and children that in the
past we have written off as "collateral damage." And then
to explode quite literally, as enraged nationalists are
inspired to return the favor of killing innocent women and
children through terrorist attacks along the line of the
Oklahoma City bombing--or, God forbid, with chemical, biological,
or nuclear weapons.
What I have presented here has also been presented in my
book, On Killing, which was nominated for a Pulitzer
prize and has been positively reviewed in over 100 periodicals
in over 30 nations. The implications of distant punishment
outlined here have also been integral to my entry on "Aggression
and Violence" in the Oxford Companion to American Military
History, and my entries on "The Psychological Effects
of Combat" and "The Evolution of Weaponry" in the Academic
Press Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict,
all with extensive peer reviews and all without dissent.
I have lectured on this subject to 20 different colleges
and universities in the U.S. and Europe, and as the plenary
speaker to a British military historian's convention, as
well as conducting in-service training at the local, state,
and regional level to numerous psychiatric, psychological,
and mental health organizations. Again, this has all been
completely without dissent or controversy.
The bottom line is that, outside of a small cabal inside
the Air Force, and some self-serving members of the aerospace
industry, there is no intellectual, historical, or scientific
basis of support for distant punishment as national policy.
There
can be no doubt. There can be no denial. The irrefutable
truth is that, with very, very few exceptions, distant punishment
in the form of aerial bombing is: psychiatrically unsound,
psychologically impotent, strategically counterproductive,
morally bankrupt, and likely to soon be illegal.
Thus there is very little justification for basing national
policy on the effectiveness of air strikes. Or for directing
precious national resources toward conducting any air strike.
Unless it is in support of, and directed by, ground troops
who can and will psychologically exploit it. Ground troops
who will also have the moral courage to subsequently accept
direct personal and national responsibility for whatever
death and destruction results from that air strike. Nothing
else should be acceptable for a democratic nation in the
post-Cold War era.
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