Abstract
Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, perhaps 40,000 people, have died since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and many more thousands have been wounded by U.S. forces.2 No one knows for sure how many Iraqis, whether civilian or military, have died as a direct result of U.S. action. “We don’t do body counts,” U.S. General Tommy Franks said early in the war.3 Or, more precisely, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in November 2003, “We don’t do body counts on other people.”4 Since the Iraq war became a civil conflict, many more thousands have died in tit-for-tat violence. Thus, if it is unclear how many Iraqi civilians have died or been seriously wounded, it is even more difficult to know how Iraqi casualties occurred.
War is not a series of case studies that can be scrutinized with objectivity. It is a series of stark confrontations that must be faced under the most emotionally wrenching conditions. War is the suffering and death of people you know, set against the suffering and death of people you do not.1
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Notes
Lieutenant James McDonough, quoted in Anthony E. Hartle. Moral Issues in Military Decision Making. 2nd revised ed. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 3–4.
Derrick Z. Jackson. “US Stays Blind to Iraqi Casualties,” The Boston Globe (November 14, 2003): A.19.
Michael Walzer. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books, 1977. 314.
Carl Von Clausewitz. On War. Ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. 605.
By collective, I mean an organized group with an identity and a decision making structure. As such, the collective can be said to have moral agency. See Toni Erskine. “Assigning Responsibility to Institutional Moral Agents: The Case of States and ‘Quasi-States,’” in Toni Erskine (ed.). Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 19–40.
My notion of systemic atrocity is different from Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, where evil is intended but it nevertheless becomes normal and routine. It also differs from what the British used to call “administrative massacres” where good men conducted massacres as state policy. Both administrative massacre and the banality of evil describe intentional killing by actors who are not necessarily evil, but who are certainly, to some degree, numbed and acting as if killing innocents were routine. Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Revised and enlarged ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. 288–291;
Mark J. Osiel. “Ever Again: Legal Remembrance of Administrative Massacre,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144 (2) (1995): 463–704.
Ellen Knickmeyer. “In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre,” The Washington Post (May 27, 2006): A1.
Eric Schmidt and David S. Cloud. “General Faults Marine Response to Iraq Killings: Calls Officers Negligent,” The New York Times (July 8, 2006.): A1.
Robert F. Worth. “U.S. Military Braces for Flurry of Criminal Cases in Iraq,” The New York Times (July 9, 2006.): 10.
Thomas Nagel. “War and Massacre,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (2) (1972): 123–144 and 140.
Semple Kirk. “Iraqi Says Immunity for Soldiers Fosters Crime,” The New York Times (July 6, 2006): A8.
Mark Mazzetti. “Military Memo: War’s Risks Include Toll on Training Values,” The New York Times (June 4, 2006): A10.
Kurt Baier. “Guilt and Responsibility,” in Larry May and Stacey Hoffman (eds.). Collective Responsibility. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. 197–218 and 216–217.
Stanley Hoffman. Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1981. 87.
Indeed, for thousands of years, war was considered a legitimate way to acquire slaves while “man-stealing” was considered illegitimate. See Orlando Patterson. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Richard Wasserstrom. “Conduct and Responsibility in War,” in Larry May and Stacey Hoffman (eds.). Collective Responsibility. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. 179–195.
On how norms change, see Neta C. Crawford. Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
See Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams. Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy, Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 89–90; “The Uniform Code of Military Justice.” Preamble on the sources of military jurisdiction: A21–3.
Jamie Wilson. “US Lowers Standards in Army Numbers Crisis,” The Guardian (June 4, 2005): 15.
Benedict Carey. “When the Personality Disorder Wears Camouflage,” The New York Times (July 9, 2006): 3.
Putting the young in the front lines, works against having the best moral decision makers at the pointy end of the spear. The prefrontal cortex, the locus of moral decision making and self-control is not fully developed until people are in their early twenties. Moreover, young people may not have the experiences necessary to make use of their potential moral development. See, Norman A. Krasnegor, G. Reid Lyon, and Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic (eds.). Development of the Prefrontal Cortex: Evolution, Neurobiology, and Behavior. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing, 1997.
Nancy Youssef. “Commander: Fewer Civilians Dying,” Philadelphia Inquirer (June 22, 2006).
Sarah Sewell. “Blinded by Haditha,” The New York Times (June 13, 2006): 23.
See Marco Sassoli. “Targeting: The Scope and Utility of the Concept of ‘Military Objectives’ for the Protection of Civilians in Contemporary Armed Conflicts,” in David Wippman and Matthew Evangelista (eds.). New Wars, New Laws? Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2005. 181–210.
Andrew J. Bacevich. “What’s an Iraqi Life Worth?” The Washington Post (July 9, 2006): B1.
David S. Cloud. “Compensation Payments Rising, Especially by Marines,” The New York Times (June 10, 2006): 6.
John Dower. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. 73.
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© 2008 Samy Cohen
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Crawford, N.C. (2008). Democracy and Norms of War: Locating Moral Responsibility for Atrocity in Iraq. In: Cohen, S. (eds) Democracies at War against Terrorism. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614727_6
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