I think I’ve mentioned it before, but this ambitious, mostly soldier-driven journalistic project is already going some unexpected places. (Full disclosure: I hope to write for them sometime on a freelance basis. I can take NO credit for the thorough, startling work they’ve already produced.) Talk about testing what new ways nonfiction storytelling can go.
And checking in there today, I was blown away by this piece, whose authors take on “the ambiguity of war” – from a front-line NCO’s split-second decisions, especially after “it’s your friend that yxploeou were just talking to that morning and you have to fight birds for the pieces of his body”- to legal analysis of what’s behind the question, Did X constitute a war crime?
The “principle of distinction” is a foundation of humanitarian law that obligates all parties in conflict to distinguish between combatants and civilians, according to the Georgetown Law Review. But while it would greatly reduce civilian casualties if fighters adhered to that principle, but they don’t, which is why the IBC is so staggeringly high. What complicates that for fighters is that the Protocol of the Geneva Convention, which is intended to prevent non-combatant casualties, states that “Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities” constitutes a war crime.
Read the whole piece. I find myself wanting to send it to half the people I know, and 75% of the veterans. As our understanding of those complexities deepens, it makes questions of war and peace even more perplexing, I think.
I Ain't Marching Anymore 