The suffering child in the basement of our civility—on the illusion of jus in bello
“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas…They all know that it has to be there . . . they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers . . . depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”(Le Guin, 1993, p. 3)
Introduction
While we may have rules of war, conventions, international treaties, and training in ethics, we can never make fighting a war clean, surgical, or romantic. At least not for those who have stared into the eyes of the ones they killed. No soldier leaves the war unchanged or remains untouched by its horrors and inhumanity. Although we may have codes of conduct, we can never make something so inhumane, humane.
Alas, in modern society, we are asking our soldiers to become immune to killing, to put aside their humanity or love of man, albeit temporarily, and to then return to what Le Guin (1993) describes in the opening quote above as the bliss and ignorance of Omelas—a city that exchanges its happiness for the suffering of a single child confined to a life of misery in a basement. But what we ask of our soldiers is impossible. They know that their humanity is the price paid for imperfect decisions made in the face of ethically insoluble dilemmas of war. They know that these dilemmas are the metaphorical child suffering in the basement of our civility. And they pay this price so that we may rejoice in our bliss and ignorance. But at least they have jus in bello—the rules of war—to guide and protect them, right? Or is this just an illusion of modern civility?
Illusion of jus in bello
While jus in bello seeks to regulate the use of force in war, it does so up to a point. It gives guidelines and ‘codes’ of behaviour during conflict that most cultures have long ago recognised as important to uphold (French, 2017; Walzer, 2006, p. 93). Thus, it is merely a revised summary that, using a lingua franca, reflects our recently interconnected and globalised world. Ultimately, it does not say anything new but rather repackages old wisdom evolved through various religious and philosophical frameworks (Bellamy, 2012). These frameworks are inherent within all of us—that killing another human is an unnatural act, especially those who have surrendered, are helpless or those we know to be innocent, children, women, or the elderly. These are inculcated into the fabric of humanity and it takes effort and conditioning to overcome their effect, as Grossman (2009) and Smith (2011) have explored in more detail than I ever could. Although there are advantages to packaging this age-old wisdom into easily digestible formats such as the Geneva Conventions, Rules of Engagement or even resilience-building ‘Warrior Codes’ (eg. French, 2017), they merely give an illusion of constraining what is ultimately turbulent, unpredictable, untameable: war.
This, then, leaves us with a dilemma worth exploring. How useful are rules of war inspired by jus in bello to soldiers on the front line? How useful are they when you have just lost several of your ‘brothers-in-arms’ in combat? How useful are they when your family has been ‘ethnically cleansed’ by those surrendering in your crosshairs? How useful are they when you have been so desensitized to killing and war that another civilian death is merely waved off as collateral damage? When your higher commander wants ‘victory’ at all costs? When your culture faces total annihilation? Worst of all, how useful are they when the life of your child is at risk?
Dehumanisation, environmental factors, and personality
We know that we are innately tribal and that bias in favour of our perceived in-group and against our perceived out-group contributes to dehumanisation (Smith, 2011). In fact, I would argue that the simple act of defining a social out-group as ‘the enemy’ starts the steady decline towards dehumanisation. This is particularly so for the ongoing War on Terror, where our soldiers are fighting an enemy who uses despicable asymmetric methods—suicide attacks, rape, mutilations, targeting women and children, etc—as justified means of combat. Often metaphorically depicted as evil, vermin, cockroaches, and monsters, many have come to view the ‘terrorist’ as sub-human (Steuter & Wills, 2010). Given such dehumanisation, coupled with the established impact on ethical decision making by issues such as the use of asymmetric methods (eg. Shay, 1994), the ‘fog of war’ (eg. Schulzke, 2013; Shay, 1994), fatigue (eg. Olsen et al., 2010; Shay, 1994), personality traits (eg. Lindén et al., 2019), as well as the progressive desensitisation to human suffering experienced in war (eg. Holowka et al., 2012; Shay, 1994), should we really be surprised when soldiers commit ‘war crimes’? Can we ask them to blur the line between right and wrong by killing in our name, and then hold them to account for their inability to balance on its amorphous edge? Even the perpetually quoted father of Western military strategy—the renowned Carl von Clausewitz—recognised that war cannot be constrained by some universal moral limits. Rather, any limits that might exist would only be set by domestic political consideration (Bellamy, 2012). While some will disregard this as merely a realist perspective, carpet bombing of Dresden or the nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki affirm its inescapable truth.
Moreover, is it truly the ‘last resort’, to bring in one of the pillars of the jus ad bellum component of Just War Theory we hold so dear, when the enemy we fight is so much weaker than us? Is it really moral and ‘Warrior-like’ to fight someone so outside of your own technological capacities, that the fight morphs into a ‘hunt’? Can such a fight ever be morally justifiable, given that, by definition, it cannot be our ‘last resort’, yet the only response left to an ‘enemy’ is asymmetric warfare that inevitably leads to ‘terrorism’ and therefore our further dehumanisation of them? We have ourselves experienced the fluid nature of jus in bello in a war of survival. Akin to what Waltzer (paraphrasing Churchill) refers to as a ‘Supreme Emergency’, when you’re fighting against total annihilation of your culture, values, or nationhood, suspending morality in the way one fights is essentially inevitable (Walzer, 2006, p. 251). Thus, even our much-loved doctrine accounts for the adjustment of our moral compass when survival is on the line. It is interesting, however, that we don’t afford the same logic to the asymmetric methods used by our ‘enemies’, whose circumstances call for the employment of the only option they perceive as remaining—terrorism.
A façade of ignorance
Ultimately, the strength of a doctrine or commitment to jus in bello is only as certain as the circumstances they seek to serve. Our individual understanding of a conflict, our perception of its gravity, confidence in ‘victory’ (whatever that may mean), emotional states, chance and yes, level of training, will all dictate how we perform in combat. And this is something jus in bello cannot account for. Intuitively, I get the sense that we are merely masking the reality of war through a seemingly rational model that is at-best aspirational and reasoned by those of us on the side-lines of war, immune from its horrors. We have the luxury of distance from its smells, sights, and sounds, from its fears, profound sadness, and abject inhumanity. This changes for those engulfed by its rawness, reality, and vividness. The best jus in bello can do is to allow us, polite society, to feel good about ourselves as we single out a few atrocities made public and parade the ‘bad apples’ who shall pay the price for our comfort[1]. We shun them from our own Omelas, so that we may go on dancing and singing into the night, knowing we’ve upheld the moral standards of ‘civilization’.
Finally—and where I want this ‘though bubble’ to land—is on the fact that an Australian prime minster ‘reserves to him- or herself ‘crown prerogative’ on the decision to go to war’ (Leahy, 2020, p. 307), without the need for parliamentary debate. In this, we stand alone among our allies and major powers of the world. Even President Putin had to ask the Russian parliament for authority to bomb Syria in 2015 (Leahy, 2020). It is unacceptable that our leaders, who send our men and women to war, are not held accountable to the same umbrella of rules they expect those in combat to uphold. While we demand that our soldiers respect the Geneva Conventions and Rules of Engagement, they retain their impunity to wage war with little or no ‘skin in the game’. Ultimately, our goal must be to disincentivise war, by making those who declare it on ‘our’ behalf accountable. But first, we must peel back the façade of ignorance within our social discourse of war. Yes, war is ‘hell’, but as a society we must face the fact that we cannot fight a war without also accepting the inevitability of ‘war crimes’. We must face the suffering ‘child’ in our basement—the price of bliss in Omelas.
Bibliography
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[1] I certainly do not argue against prosecuting war crimes as they may have a deterrent function. Rather, I argue that war crimes are inevitable in war—it’s just our appetite for acknowledging this fact that is indetermined.
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