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March 6, 2003 In
America’s Sights: Targeting Decisions in a War With Iraq Has there ever been a war in which the country launching it has been so happy to spell out its plan of attack in advance? Even while much of the world still hopes that a U.S. invasion of Iraq can be prevented, Pentagon officials have been busy leaking the operational details of how they intend to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. At the heart of the plans is the so-called concept of “shock and awe”. The military operation against Saddam Hussein will begin with a devastating display of high-tech firepower designed to sow confusion and panic among Iraq’s leadership elite. One group who won’t be directly targeted – if the leaks are correct – are Iraq’s foot soldiers. War planners in Washington don’t see them as the enemy: this is a war against a regime and its security apparatus, not the grunts in the field. (Instead, the hope is that they will defect en masse.) So the targets that are chosen for early, massive strikes in the administration’s “rapid dominance” war plan – in addition to the usual air defences – will be objects like command-and-control centres, electricity grids, special security forces, government ministries, and other infrastructure and communications systems. The aim is to shut down everything that Saddam and his inner circle rely on to stay in control and operate the levers of power. This is America’s new military model. It is based on overwhelming technical superiority and designed for use against a dictator who can’t count on the support of his own people. But it is also highly controversial. The charge made by some human rights groups and international lawyers is that it represents a violation of international humanitarian law, and in particular the principle of distinguishing between military and civilian targets. Defining a Military Target The ban on attacking civilian targets has been part of the laws of war since their beginning. According to the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, “the only legitimate object which states should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.” In the years following World War II, to prevent a recurrence of the indiscriminate bombing attacks of cities in Britain, Germany and Japan, the language was tightened. The law now says that you can only attack sites or objects that “make an effective contribution to military action” and whose destruction offers “a definite military advantage” in the circumstances ruling at the time. But what counts as a military target? As with the rest of the laws of war, this formula represents a hard-fought trade-off between military requirements and humanitarian concerns – and the result is a kind of calculated ambiguity. One grey area concerns political sites (like government ministries) that aren’t a direct part of the military chain of command, or the personal assets of the leadership. Another involves the many possible targets – electrical and water supplies, oil refineries, transport networks, industry, computer systems, communications – that can be used for both civilian and military purposes. It’s generally accepted that these “dual-use” targets can be attacked if necessary, as long as the harm to civilians is not disproportionate to the military advantage that you expect to gain. But judgements about proportionality are notoriously slippery. And in modern industrial societies, just about any aspect of the economic or social infrastructure could conceivably contribute to the war effort. Pentagon officials – in common with British and some other European armed forces – take a fairly permissive attitude in this area. According to Sarah Sewall, who directs a programme on national security and human rights at Harvard University, “the U.S. military can make a strong case within its interpretation of international humanitarian law that you attack pretty much anything.” A Question of Intent In such cases, the suspicion often lingers that the targets are in fact being attacked not to disrupt military operations as traditionally understood, but to undermine the morale of enemy civilians or turn the population against the regime. These questions came up with a vengeance during NATO’s war with Serbia over Kosovo. This was a classic case of what the experts call a “coercive war” – where the aim was not to defeat the Serbian army in the field, but to make Slobodan Milosevic decide that his military campaign in Kosovo was simply not worth the trouble. In other words, the objectives of the NATO campaign were political and psychological ones, as much as military. On 2 May, 1999 NATO forces disabled the electricity grid in Belgrade. A legitimate military target, you might argue – except that some NATO officials incautiously admitted that a principal aim was to disrupt life in the city and make Milosevic unpopular. Another disputed bombing attack was directed against a cigarette factory owned by a crony of Milosevic. But far and away the most controversial strike was against the studio of the state-owned broadcasting organization, RTS, in which sixteen technicians were killed. After the war, the Prosecutor of the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (which has jurisdiction over all actions committed within the old boundaries of the country) asked a committee of experts to advise whether this attack should be investigated as a war crime. No, said the committee, the military and civilian communications systems could be routed through each other’s facilities: the studio was a fair target. But many people felt that a NATO spokesman let the cat out of the bag when he said at the time of the attack that an additional incentive had been to “dismantle the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia propaganda machinery which is a vital part of President Milosevic’s control mechanism.” What Will Happen in Iraq? It’s easy to imagine similar issues coming up over the next few months in Iraq. Since invading troops will want to turn the Iraqi population against Saddam Hussein, they’re likely to see the takeover or elimination of state broadcasting as a priority. Attacking the assets of Saddam and his associates, or the apparatus of internal control, might have a greater impact on the course of the conflict than attacking Iraq’s military machine per se. Harlan Ullman, an influential American defence theorist, told CBS News that within a few days of the war starting, the Iraqi leadership would be “physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted”. Will this extend to Saddam’s clique of friends and supporters, or indeed to Baghdad as a whole? Robert Kogod Goldman, Professor of Law at American University in Washington DC, says the United States and its allies may be tempted to attack some sites in Iraq where “it is difficult to see how they would fit into a traditional definition of military targets.” He mentions particularly the possibility of attacks on the city of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s tribal base, which still remains a stronghold of his regime. But not everyone believes that American tactics present a legal problem. Christopher Greenwood, Professor of International Law at the LSE, says claims that U.S. war fighting practice is outside the law are “grossly exaggerated”. There are no grounds for thinking that U.S. tactics in Iraq will depart in any major way from generally accepted interpretations of the law, he argues. An Argument Against Change Others again take a different view – that we should embrace the aim of politically targeted warfare explicitly, and perhaps change the laws of war to reflect it. If our quarrel is only with a country’s leadership, the argument runs, what’s so bad about trying to undermine their hold on power or their level of popular support? In many cases, it’s said, this approach could be more humane, directing the impact of your firepower at those who are really culpable, and probably bringing a swifter end to the war. But once you blur the boundary between military and civilian targets, it is hard to see another clear-cut standard that could be used to minimize the barbarity of warfare. Sooner or later the result seems likely to be more civilian deaths. In the meantime, there are some reasons to hope that a war in Iraq, if it happens, might not affect civilians so badly. Firstly, according to the law of proportionality, a country must cause no more civilian deaths than can absolutely be helped. America’s sophisticated high-tech weapons thus put a greater requirement on it to make sure that its precision-guided strikes don’t kill innocent people whose deaths could have been avoided. Secondly, as Sarah Sewall of Harvard observes, the United States has a vested interest in minimizing damage to Iraq because it anticipates that it will face the job of picking up the pieces after the war is over. Adminstration officials “are aware that they will own the destruction after what they hope will be a short conflict,” she says, “and that the eyes of the world will be on them, holding them responsible for repairing the damage they’ve done.” In many cases the aim will be to suspend electrical service or communications, not destroy them – something that a new “e-bomb” may make possible. More generally, Bush and his officials are already talking of how they will provide humanitarian assistance to Iraq’s civilians even while the war continues. In areas of the country that they occupy, this is in fact a legal requirement, spelled out in the fourth Geneva Convention. An edited version of this article was first published in The Guardian. Related chapters from Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know: Carpet
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