15054: EWEN: NYT Article: Do the Good Guys Finish First? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Stephen Ewen <sewe0171@fau.edu>

       March 8, 2003 - NY Times
      Ethical War? Do the Good Guys Finish First?
      By EMILY EAKIN


      President Bill Clinton sent American troops into Haiti in 1994,
declaring that his goals were "to stop the brutal atrocities" of a
dictatorial regime and to bring democracy to the Haitian people. Capt.
Lawrence P. Rockwood, an intelligence officer in the United States Army,
took the president at his word.

      After arriving in Haiti with his unit, he received reports of human
rights abuses at the local jails. Political prisoners were being starved,
tortured and - as Raoul Cedras's regime entered its desperate final days -
murdered.

      Captain Rockwood appealed to his superiors for permission to inspect
the jails. His superiors turned him down. His job, they said, was to
protect American troops, not local civilians. After nearly a week spent
futilely trying to press his case, the captain filed a formal complaint
with an army inspector general. He accused eight superiors of failing to
pursue the president's directives and of indifference to human rights
violations. Then he grabbed his flak jacket and rifle and set off to
inspect the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince alone.

      By the next day, the captain was on a plane headed back to the
United States, where he was tried by court-martial, convicted of several
charges (one, conduct unbecoming an officer, was later dismissed) and
discharged from military service.

      Pondering such morally complex incidents from the annals of modern
combat and debating the lessons they provide for the current crop of
military leaders and foot soldiers is the aim of a new scholarly
publication, the Journal of Military Ethics.

      "I think something like this could happen" in Iraq, said Stephen D.
Wrage, a professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy
in Annapolis, who presents Captain Rockwood's story as a case study in the
journal's inaugural issue. "What we were concerned about in Haiti, we're
concerned about now."

      As Mr. Wrage tells it, the captain's tale is an open-ended thought
problem about the moral dilemmas of war: do soldiers owe their commanders
unquestioned obedience at all times? Do they have a moral duty to uphold
human rights? And what happens when military orders and the demands of
conscience come into conflict?

      At his trial, Captain Rockwood quoted his father, a soldier who had
helped liberate the Nazi concentration camps and who told him such places
were the "result of cynicism and blind obedience to authority." The
captain also said he admired Count von Stauffenberg, the German Army
officer who was executed for trying to assassinate Hitler, and Hugh C.
Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who, seeing the My Lai massacre in
progress, ordered his door gunner to aim his weapon at United States
troops.

      Those facts don't excuse the captain's conduct, Mr. Wrage suggests,
but they help make his case rich fodder for ethics classes at American
military academies, where it is routinely taught.

      Determined skeptics - like Groucho Marx, who joked that "military
justice is to justice what military music is to music" - can roll their
eyes. But serious talk about the proper moral conduct of combat has been
around almost as long as war itself.

      The immediate impetus for the journal, which made its debut last
spring, was the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. Observing the ethics
controversy that the NATO bombing provoked, Bard Maeland, a chaplain in
the Norwegian army, decided that a scholarly forum for such debate was
urgently needed. "I found there was nothing like a journal of military
ethics in English," said Dr. Maeland, who became the journal's co-editor
after persuading an Oslo publisher to take on the project and the
Norwegian Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs to provide financial
support.

      The first two issues - a third has just been published - are awash
in references to ancient Greeks: Plato, Alcibiades, Thucydides, Laches,
Nicias. And when it comes to the ground rules for military uses of
deception, Hugo Grotius's 1625 treatise, "On the Law of War and Peace,"
remains a standard reference. (His view is essentially that spelled out by
the Geneva Convention more than 300 years later: " `Ruses of war,' such as
involve the use of camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation
are not prohibited because, while they may cause an adversary to act
recklessly, they do not constitute acts that an adversary should not
expect to occur as part and parcel of war.")

      Occasionally, Greek terminology gives the journal an archaic air.
"Did NATO's air strikes against Yugoslavia, undertaken without a mandate
from the Security Council, constitute a valid instance of epieikeia?" asks
Gregory Reichberg, a senior researcher at the International Peace Research
Institute in Oslo, in one essay. (Epieikeia, Greek for equity, was used by
Thomas Aquinas to designate a ruler's right to exercise moral authority in
the absence of legal imperatives.)

      "We are consciously committed to showing the moral tradition
relating to war is very old and embedded in Western culture," explained
James Turner Johnson, a professor of religion and political science at
Rutgers University and the journal's co-editor. Among armies operating
today, he said, the United States has led the way in making ethical
concerns a priority, and not just in cadet classrooms.

      "It's pretty clear if you look around at the various militaries,"
Mr. Johnson said. "People think war is mainly about the technology, but
the point is that it's not the technology that determines whether a
particular war is discriminate or indiscriminate. It's the strategy and
tactics behind that, and the training aimed at discriminating between
combatants and noncombatants. The U.S. military has always said we do not
directly target noncombatants."

      Consider, for example, the protocol surrounding target selection, a
topic covered at length in the journal's second issue. American military
policy requires legal advisers to approve combat targets in advance. As a
consequence, soldiers can find themselves within range of enemy forces but
without permission to strike. This situation occurred repeatedly during
the war in Afghanistan, where, according to American Air Force officials,
clearance delays and denials allowed important Taliban and Qaeda members
to escape unscathed.

      The problem, the officials complained at the time, was that the
military's Central Command was overly concerned about killing civilians.
"The whole issue of collateral damage pervaded every level of the
operation," The Washington Post quoted one officer saying in November
2001. "It is shocking, the degree to which collateral damage hamstrung the
campaign."

      But in the journal, scholars defended the policy, arguing that its
ethical advantages outweighed its tactical costs. As Michael N. Schmitt,
director of the Executive Program in International and Security Affairs at
the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, put it: "Legal advisers are crucial clogs
in any mature targeting system."



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