#Anand Gopal, "Clean Hands," The New Yorker, December 21, 2020. - "For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which had a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed." "What is certain is that the decimation of Raqqa is unlike anything seen in an American conflict since the Second World War. But Raqqa was no Normandy. Although many Syrians fought valiantly against ISIS and lost their lives, the U.S., apart from a few hundred Special Forces on the ground, relied on overwhelming airpower. Raqqa -- a war fought from cavernous control rooms thousands of miles away, or from aircraft thousands of feet in the sky -- is the true face of modern American combat."
Neil Renic, a scholar of international relations, and author of 'Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos', suggests that when one side fully removes itself from danger -- even if it goes to considerable lengths to protect civilians -- it violates the ethos of humane warfare. " 'It's clear that risk-free combat has brought warfare into new moral territory, requiring us to interrogate our old notions of battlefield right and wrong.' "
"During the American Civil War, the Union implemented the Liber Code, which ought to restrict the imposition of unnecessary suffering -- torture or poisoning, for example -- on the enemy. The code also enshrined as legal convention the principle of 'military necessity': if violence had a strategic purpose -- that is, it could win a war -- it was allowed."
"In 1942, British policy actually banned aircraft from targeting military facilities, ordering them instead to strike working-class areas of German cities -- 'for the sake of increasing terror,' as Churchill later put it." "In all, Allied terror raids may have claimed some half a million civilian lives. The pattern continued in the Korean War; yet the end result looked no different from Raqqa: a large civilian death toll, honeycombed apartment buildings, streets choked with rubble, entire neighborhoods flattened."
"When a colleague and I visited, a year after the raids, we documented at least a hundred and twenty dead civilians, and found no evidence that any ISIS members had been present near the houses [we focused on.]"
" 'We take all measures during the targeting process...to comply with the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict,' said Marine Major J.T. Rankine. The essence of this legal code is that militaries cannot "intentionally kill civilians." "During the coalition's campaign against ISIS, it often based its bombing decisions on faulty assumptions about civilian life; much of the destruction in Raqqa followed the example of the al-Layla household: death by a thousand proportional strikes."
"The U.S. uses a much looser interpretation of intentionally and proportionality than most human rights groups do." "For Neil Renic, wars waged exclusively through drones, therefore point to the 'profound discord between what is lawful on the battlefield and what is moral. If the Afghan war continued for another twenty years, it's doubtful whether it would arouse much domestic opposition, even though the overall suffering may be as great as a wanton slaughter that ended in a decisive victory.' "
"After 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which Presidents have since invoked to justify at least thirty-seven military activities in fourteen countries, including the U.S. war in Syria, without a formal declaration or public debate."
ADDENDUMS:
*Simon Shuster, "The cost of terror hits home," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "The majority of deadly extremist incidents in the U.S. are motivated by far-right ideologies, especially white supremacy, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Yet the threat of Islamist radicalization commands a far greater share of government resources."
*Eben Shapiro, "CEOs step into the breach," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - " 'With our country in the midst of a pandemic, business leaders recognize that ongoing divisions and distrust in our political system threatens the economic recovery and job creation our country desperately needs,' says the Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs of the nation's biggest corporations."
*Belinda Luscombe, "Frayed ties," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "A postelection Pew Research Center survey found that fewer than 2% of voters felt those who voted for the other party understood them very well, and only 13% of Joe Biden's voters and 5% of Donald Trump's voters expressed any desire for future unity."
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