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04/08/10(Thu)16:00 No.571441You're
not allowed to kill civilians.
That's not just a rule or a
guideline or a rule of thumb, for God's sake, it's the law. It's U.S.
law and it's international law and also, just for good measure, it's
international law that has been signed and ratified and appended again
onto U.S. law. You're not allowed to kill civilians.
But this is
also more than a law. It gets at the matter of definition. The
distinction between a soldier and a murderer comes down to just exactly
this and only this. Rank and uniform and the giving and receiving of
orders ultimately are of no consequence apart from this. You're not
allowed to kill civilians.
This is how we distinguish, say, Sen.
Daniel Inouye from Ted Bundy. This is why the former is rightly revered
and the latter rightly reviled. Inouye was awarded the medal of honor
and that word, "honor," is yet another term whose meaning hinges on this
one thing. You're not allowed to kill civilians.
I gradually
tired of restating this due to the hair-splitting pedants and apologists
for the vicarious titillation of indiscriminate death who insisted that
stating the principle this bluntly was recklessly irresponsible.
"Harrumph, harrumph," they harrumphed, "double effect harrumph."*
And
of course it's true that the real world complicates every simple
principle and that any meaningful or lasting principle has to account
for those complications. But when someone's first impulse is to cavil
and dilute and disqualify by qualification, I'm not convinced that their
objections are raised in good faith.
For those who are, in fact,
harrumphing in good faith, I'm perfectly willing to calibrate the
principle more precisely, something like: You're not allowed to target
noncombatants primarily and intentionally.
What that means, of
course, is neither more nor less than this: You're not allowed to kill
civilians. |
