dresden, hiroshima, baghdad, the morality of war, and civilians

Well, allowing to define humans as creatures of natures, um, lots of killing (and innocent at that) happens in other animal societies all the time. So I disagree that murder is a symptom of the failure of humanity, when it is only a regular activity in nature.

Restorative Justice at the International Level

Restorative justice might also have an important role in responding to severe human rights violations or cases of genocide. A crucial step toward restorative justice is taken when governments tell the truth about past atrocities carried out by the state.[8] It is thought that true healing requires three steps:

1. Remembering the atrocities committed,

2. Repenting, and

3. Forgiving.

War crimes inquiries and truth commissions can aid in the process of memory and truth telling, and help to make public the extent to which victims have suffered.

Restoration often becomes a matter of restitution or war reparations. In cases where clear acts of injustice have taken place, some type of compensation can help to meet the material and emotional needs of victims and begin to remedy the injustice. Repentance can also help to re-establish relationships among the conflicting parties and help them to move toward reconciliation. In some cases, conflicts can end more peacefully when parties acknowledge their guilt and apologize than when formal war crimes adjudication or criminal proceedings are used.

In cases of civil war, because the line between offenders and victims can become blurred, a central goal of peacebuilding is to restore the community as a whole. Restoration often becomes tied to the transformation of the relationship between the conflicting parties. However, such restoration cannot take place unless it is supported by wider social conditions and unless the larger community makes restorative processes available.

Restorative justice in the international context is therefore linked to social structural changes, reconstruction programs to help communities ravaged by conflict, democratization, and the creation of institutions of civil society.

I am really curious about how the current US policies that treat civilian casualties as a "regrettable" but taken-for-granted aspect of war have evolved. Something tells me Churchill had something to do with it but I can't remember now.

I like Ed's idea that War is a symtom of the failure of global society -- but 'global society' has never existed, and probably will never exist. I don't know who high standards are being failed here except Ed's own; while I share them, time has shown again and again that global co-operation is chimerical.

I personally find the moral relativism that places all killing on the same plane abhorent: unspeakable as, say, the area bombing of Dresden and Berlin were, these acts do not compare with the absolute evil of the Holocaust and the Nazi German project.

Enrique what do you think of the idea that war is a normal functioning of the nation-state system? Ed's "global society" would - in this formulation - be the regime of international orgs and "civil society" rules that mitigate the anarchy between them (i.e. UN, World Bank, arms treaties, etc). The complexity and intensity of this framework is still pretty new and in development. I'm not quite sure it's fair to say it "always fails." The almost unanimous opposition to the American occupation of Iraq, for instance, seems predicated on the idea that it should NOT fail.

The idea of war as the default setting is probably true enough; but international organizations like the UN or League of Nations are in their main activities redundant against major power politics because they exist to maintain, in either case, the post-1919 or post-1945 settlements. The idea of the UN stopping the Iraq war, or any other major war, is beyond me, though I'd like to be disproved.

War has been a constant of every society from prehistory to the present. Why single out the nation-state?

As for the title of this thread how did Baghdad get lumped in with Dresden and Hiroshima? There is a huge difference between some civilians being killed as a side-effect of combat and deliberately targeting civilians to the tune of 10's of thousands of casualties (maybe 100,000+ in the case of Dresden).

Er, initially I thought you were saying... something else. I suppose I'm still sold on the idea of Nazi Germany's singularity. I don't think it was the nation state par excellence really, or maybe it's more that 'nation-state' covers too much ground, applies to the liberal Britain of the mid-19C *and* to the 'big state' Germany of the 30s.

Nazi Germany is also... pathological, I mean it only fought on 'rational' terms up to a point; beyond that it fought on terms that still haven't been accounted for. In that sense it marked a break with the expansionist Germany of the 19th century. I don't know, is the short answer.

As for comabatants vs noncombatants, it would be interesting to look at these cold war conflicts alongside the colonial wars, to see how much or little 'things' have changed in this respect. Little, i'd think, except for destructive capacity has changed. Or in other words, a lot has changed.

however, i) the Knightly Class in mediavel Europe essentially count as professional soldiers because fighting was their raison d'etre and the only thing they were any good at.

ii) even in mediavel armies, most of the fighters would be professionals of one sort or another, basically because any ruler who could afford to hired mercenaries because they were much better at doing the job than the rabble you'd get through the feudal levy.

If you then move on from mediavel europe to the 16th to 18th centuries you start to see armies entirely composed of professional soldiers, often people from completely different countries to those they were notionally fighting for.

Historically war was a game where armies moved around and smashed up the homes and possessions of civilians, maybe killing them while they were at it. Occasionally rival armies would meet and bash each other, but most of the violence was visited on civilians.