I'm kinda loving the shrill Ogged.

But they're very unlikely to use these powers against any white people, so we're safe. Well, not you. But most of us.

I love it when you talk dirty, Ogged.

Culture of Life, baby!

The idea of "Culture of Life" doesn't apply to the lives of babies. Or people older than babies.

They also get to file court papers with themselves, instead of, you know, filing them with the court and providing them to the other side.

God, I hate this administration.

Is the difference between the Bush administration and the previous ones that they believe and do these things, or that they're admitting it publicly and claiming they're on the side of right?

This is not to undermine the claim of 'evil', just wondering if it's a cancer that can be cut out, or if it's already metastasized.

My understanding is that all previous administrations have done this stuff, but the claim that it's legally permissible seems to me new and pernicious.

If I weren't so cynical, I'd be astonished that

a) this sort of thing still surprises a lot people
b) `this administration is evil' wasn't generally accepted years ago

There's a difference, at least for me, in knowing that they're evil and stepping back and thinking "whoa, and I mean evil in a world-historical sort of way."

Well, yeah, legal-world historical I guess. This is a kind of testament to our nation's values: I doubt Putin signed anything over Litvenko.

12: it's the hypocrisy level that US excels at, not the dirty tricks

I doubt Putin signed anything over Litvenko

Right, which in some ways is clearly worse than the US, but when you do that kind of thing and claim it's legal, you're really vitiating the law, which is )again, only in some ways) worse than just breaking it.

And, when you're the leader of the only world superpower, it's a whole other level of ugly.

Did someone mention something about the banality of evil?
Murderer 1:This Iranian, he says he's here for "religious purposes."
Murderer 2:Yeah, I know, but didn't you get that memo?
Muderer 1:Sure, of course, but that says they "disallow interdictions of foreign nationals with demonstrated religious intent"
Murderer 2:Not exactly purposes though, is it?
Murderer 1:Let me call it in...
Murderer 2:What, and get back in the Green Zone when?
Murderer 1: Fuck it. etc...

But they're very unlikely to use these powers against any white people, so we're safe.

Unless you live in California and the Big One hits before February 2009, in which case we are so Katrina'd.

it's the hypocrisy level that US excels at

I'm reminded of my 12th grade history teacher who mentioned "The sun never sets on the British Empire" quote, and then added "that's probably because God expects them to try something tricky in the dark".

Does "hypocrisy" have to be deliberate and conscious? If so, I don't think we're particularly so, it's just that our delusions have greater effects than a Tuvaluian's right now. Their moment will come.

Everyone in california is mexican anyway, or might as well be. So no problem, right?

14: Exactly, because the idea of the law is really the foundation of the entire concept of human rights and democracy. Without it, as the Bush administration is kinda showing, there's only power. What's scary is that he seems to think that this is totally okay b/c he knows he's morally right--where are the safeguards in such a world view?

18: Generally speaking, sure. Current administration? Don't fool yourself; the hypocrisy is deliberate conscious.

19: Mexican, or gay.

21: me

22: same same.

24: In terms of irrelevance to real Americans, yeah. Not to each other, you realize.

Um, yeah bitchphd. (Morrissey fandom notwithstanding)

And I, too, like the earnest, pissed-off ogged.

17. I wouldn't worry so much: they'll want to make Schartzy look good, hoping to get Cali's electoral votes.

In my mind, at ObsWi, I went way far the other day. I was trying to put myself in the position of an Iraqi or Iranian, like the woman on Halfa street in Baghdad who has had her door broken down by American solders 12 times in 6 months. Or a guy with a family living on the 12th floor of the high-rise being attacked by Apaches. I don't know how I can tell that father to wait for the stray missle to kill his kids, when he can down the Apache with a rifle or RPG.

Not that American soldiers or other agents are themselves evil, Not that I don't care about them, but they are under orders and compulsion by extraordinarily evil leadership, and not only cannot be trusted, but must be presumed dangerous.

So in Iraq, Iran, Somalia, many places around the world I have decided it is morally correct, when an immediate threat is plausible, to shoot Americans first, ask questions later. Simple self-defense. I am now on the other side in Iraq. Go Moqtada. Go Sunnis. Go Iran. These aren't good guys, as leaders, as nations. But I can't seem to blame the average Ahmed for shooting back.

George Bush has made us the "bad guys." I feel like a decent German in 1943. How do I root against the French Resistance? Does tribalism trump morality?

Maybe I am horribly, terribly wrong. Help me.

What worries me is that this decision is so public. If Bush had just wanted to take an effective measure against what he thought was real, significant Iranian intervention, then wouldn't it have been better to make this decision quietly? He's putting on a show in order to ruffle feathers, here and abroad. I'm worried about my "we're not going to attack Iran" prediction, now. It'd still be a pretty crazy move, politically speaking.

"It'd still be a pretty crazy move, politically speaking."

I am still not sure. Once a real war starts, where instead of a thousand dead a year we are in tens of thousands a month, we all may have no choice but to rally around the President. I mean, we say draft=street riots, but I remember Kent State and Jackson quieted protest pretty quickly and effectively.

Or in one way or another, we will go fully into active treason in time of war.

17, 28: Don't forget that the Bushies like their border voters, because of the Catholics they feel they can win over on abortion and the other hooks they try to use on evangelicals. On the other hand, there are all the *other* California voters, and since there's zero love lost between the Bushies and Ahnuld they have little incentive to make him look good. So they may be willing to destroy the base in order to save it.

It'd still be a pretty crazy move, politically speaking.

The surge itself is a crazy move, politically speaking. George Bush hasn't been in the business of making smart political moves for years now. Remember when everyone was convinced he was going to "declare victory and go home" by the time of the '04 elections? And then do the same before the midterms? He gains nothing out of staying in Iraq forever except the satisfaction of never having to admit he was horribly, monstrously, catastrophically wrong. Why not start a war with Iran, then? He's not looking to gain anything, so he has nothing to lose.

And then do the same before the midterms?

Actually, I remember a lot of people predicting an attack on Iran as an "october surprise".

And I'm really dubious about how an attack on Iran would go over. Very few people are giving him the benefit of the doubt, anymore, and regular conservatives I meet down here (a pretty staunch group, usually) are uncomfortable supporting him.

He gains nothing out of staying in Iraq forever except the satisfaction of never having to admit he was horribly, monstrously, catastrophically wrong.

This is huge, though. If he loses, it's might be a dark cloud on the Republican Party for generations. If he wins, it's a dark cloud on the Democrats for generations.

34: Either way, it's a dark cloud on the USA for a generation, at least. Funny how that gets lost discussion of how it hurts partisan politics here.

I was dreading an October surprise Iran invasion. I didn't exactly predict it, but I thought it was a realistic possibility.

As far as it not being a rational choice for Bush:

In the first place, I'm not sure that's relevant. Religious faith isn't good for the judgement, and his stock of knowledge and experience is tiny.

In the second place, Bush isn't running for office again and in foreign policy he may be constitutionally unstoppable without impeachment. What this is about is reputation ("legacy"), and I think that Bush only has three possibilities:

1. To be one of the worst presidents the US has ever had, possibly the worst.

2. To be absolutely and unquestionably the worst President the US has ever had.

3. To completely change the ball game with a bold, bloody war which the US eventually wins at terrible long-term cost, the survivors of which will not be able to imagine any other world than the one Bush has given them.

He's at #1 right now and he really can't improve that much by any normal action. When he escalates he will get either #2 or #3. There's really not much difference between #1 and #2; he really has nothing much to lose.

OK, Ogged, I'll take the bait.

Are you arguing that Iranian operatives working in Iraq with forces that are attacking US or allied (including the govenment of Iraq) forces should be given a pass because they are Iranian?

If you link the Washington Post article linked from the screed to which you linked, it talks about what is apparently a large influx of Iran arms and other support to forces attacking our forces in Iraq. My reading of the article with respect to Iraq is that Iranian agents involved in actions against us (whether directly or indirectly) will now be treated the same as Iraqis doing the same and will no longer be given special treatment. There are those in this thread who believe that it is a good thing to kill US soldiers, and thus, apparently, we have forfeited the right of even self defense. Your apparent argument that if we come upon an Iranian arms cache where they are providing arms to insurgents we cannot attack the Iranians is not much better.

Idealist, what are the safeguards which ensure that only an Iranian arms smuggler, and not, for example, a van full of pilgrims, will be shot? Who is to say who is an arms smuggler, given that presumably not everyone is going to be caught red-handed printing a credit card receipt for Joe Insurgent? And what, precisely, is the evidence of Iranian activity in Iran? It certainly hasn't been made public.

But really, my argument is that we should take a step back and consider that the US invaded another country against the wishes of most of the rest of the world, and has now decreed that any person working against its interest in that country should be killed. In principle, America now claims that it can go anywhere and do anything, and anyone who opposes it will be eliminated. Doesn't that bother you?

"There are those in this thread who believe that it is a good thing to kill US soldiers, and thus, apparently, we have forfeited the right of even self defense."

In Iraq?

That isn't quite what I said, and I am happy to play.
But I doubt you can even imagine say President Pelosi inviting a million Chinese to America to help pacify and ethnically cleanse Dixie. After they have killed everyone on your block, the Chinese Soldiers knock down your door. You say it would be wrong, morally wrong to defend your household.

That is what you are telling the Iraqi.

It would be wrong at this point for myself to shoot Americans. Considering what we have done in four years, I can't judge Iraqis. We have not done anything good, nothing good for Iraq at all, many many horribly bad things, and are working as mercenaries for monsters.

Idealist, I'm having trouble coming up with any plausible scenario for you to come up with that comment that isn't either obtuse or a deliberate misreading. There were several substansive points raise, and you managed to avoid all of them.

Idealist, what are the safeguards which ensure that only an Iranian arms smuggler, and not, for example, a van full of pilgrims, will be shot? Who is to say who is an arms smuggler, given that presumably not everyone is going to be caught red-handed printing a credit card receipt for Joe Insurgent?

You want Iranians to have privileges no one else gets in war. Why? Of course, if you read the Washington Post article as saying that US soldiers have a license to kill Iranians with impunity, I would agree that that is crazy and wrong. Respectfully, however, I think that such a reading could at best be called disingenuous.

And what, precisely, is the evidence of Iranian activity in Iran?

The Washington Post article refers to some. But that is really beside the point. The article is about--with respect to Iraq--a decision no longer to give special treatment to Iranian operatives.

There are those in this thread who believe that it is a good thing to kill US soldiers, and thus, apparently, we have forfeited the right of even self defense.

Some would say you don't get to illegally invade someone else's country and then plead "the right of self defense" as a reason to shoot whomever you please.

Idealist, I'm having trouble coming up with any plausible scenario for you to come up with that comment that isn't either obtuse or a deliberate misreading. There were several substansive points raise, and you managed to avoid all of them.

Since I am obtuse and/or dishonest, it might not be worth your while, but what exactly are the substantive points relevant to my comment that I ignored.

"now explicitly claims that it has the authority to kill anyone on earth, for whatever reason it deems sufficient."

They do claim that, but I'm not sure the connection with this article. This article is about a claim to have the authority to kill or detain anyone suspected of nefarious activity in Iraq--a claim which is not new, at all. I mean, they're holding U.S. citizens in military custody for insurgent activities and arguing that they have no right to habeas. So now they're going to exercise the unlimited power they claim over Iraq against Iran too--that's not new, as a claim of their legal power to kill or detain anyone they please and do whatever they want to him. What's new is the decision to escalate with Iran, which we're all afraid of for obvious reasons.

That said, I agree with most of the sentimenet and substance of the post.

I think I'm mildly in agreement with Ideal on this one. I know nothing about the laws, regulations, or customs that govern war. Those that exist should be followed. But I'm not sure that I understand why we can't take action against possible Iranian agents supporting the insurgency that we can take against possible Iraqi agents doing the same. I would think that there's probably quite a lot of regulation that should be done about the behavior in either case, and I don't trust this Administration to either create the regulations or apply them in any sort of fair way. But I can't understand the distinction between Iraqis and Iranians in Iraq, as regards our treatment of them.

That said, I didn't read the linked post.

Nah, I did and do take it further, If Idealist doiesn't want to engage me, because I am an evil traitor, so be it.

But if tomorrow Americans start paracuting into Lebanon, even if on the invitation of what passes for a Lebanese government...

...it is the smart, moral, and justified action for the Lebanese to kill them.

We have not forfeited our right to self-defense, but we have forfeited all moral legitimacy. Every last ounce of it.

And it is the soldiers who will pay the price for their evil leadership.

But I'm not sure that I understand why we can't take action against possible Iranian agents supporting the insurgency that we can take against possible Iraqi agents doing the same.

"Possible" according to the people who brought you "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," "mobile bioweapons labs," "WMD programme-related activities," Abu Ghraib & pals, the overall stunning intelligence victory of Iraq, and "you forgot Poland." I can see why there might be a bit of problem with such people pushing commanders on the ground to summarily kill anyone they think might be an Iranian agent. It seems that sort of thing has kind of backfired in the recent past.

If Idealist doiesn't want to engage me, because I am an evil traitor, so be it.

I'm not sure what engagement there is to be had, Bob. You have set forth your view pretty clearly. I disagree (at least as you have stated it here). What is there to talk about?

I can see why there might be a bit of problem with such people pushing commanders on the ground to summarily kill anyone they think might be an Iranian agent.

I cretainly agree that it would be terrible if this were being done. What I do not see is any evidence that would lead a reasonable person to believe that such is the case.

"What is there to talk about?"

Question: Is an Iraqi who defends his home and family by shooting an American in Iraq a "bad guy"

Can he assume his life, health, family, property is safe and secure, will not be unjustifiably damaged or destroyed
?
Has he somehow forfeited the right to self-defense?
If so why?

SCMT, surely we need to distinguish between Iranians working cooperatively with our allies -- and there are many -- and Iranians working cooperatively with our enemies. This brings us to the fundamental problem with our whole policy: there's actually no faction in Iraq that's on our side. We're fighting for unicorns. Iran, on the other hand, is supporting Dawa and its allies the Sadrists, and SCIRI and its militia the Badrists. Someone might think, given Hakim's visit to the US and our support for Maliki, that we too are on the side of SCIRI and Dawa but no, we're only allied with the fantasy we want them to become.

Iraq is to become the central front in the war on Iran. A war the became inevitable after the debacle in Lebanon this summer. Whether it remains the central front will depend on whether Iran gives Cheney et al sufficient excuse to attack.

"We're fighting for unicorns."

best 4 word summary I've seen.

Idealist: If a) US intel on the ground is severely deficient, and b) in the absence of good intel US commanders are nevertheless being publicly authorized to "kill and capture" Iranian agents, it's hard for a reasonable person not to conclude that c) open season is effectively being declared on Iranians in general.

Uhh, do you need cites and examples for 50, or have you been watching or reading news for 4 years, or maybe yesterday's.

I think idealist point is ultimately that once you invade a country, you are automatically giving yourself the right to kill anyone in the country working against the invasion. That is just what war is about. Thus there is no new dramatic right being asserted in this policy. This is simply an extension of the war effort.

Put that way, I think the point is right. Ogged has consistently been saying that the Iranian actions are perfectly understandable given that they have a hostile power on their doorstep. That's right. The US's actions also are perfectly understandable, though, given that they have already done the despicable deed of being an occupying army on someone's doorstep.

Question: Is an Iraqi who defends his home and family by shooting an American in Iraq a "bad guy"

Do you mean is it a positive good for Iraqi's to kill US soldiers because they think they are defending their homes? No, I do not.

Do you mean is an Iraqi evil for fighting the US? Not as a general rule, no. We are at war. I do not have to think our opponents are evil. I am completely uninterested in the question of whether terrorists are evil. As a soldier, I do not have to think my enemy is evil to kill him, I just have to know he is the enemy.

Do you mean does an Iraqi have the right to shoot US soldiers if he is fighting them? Of course. And we have a right to kill him before he kills us. That would be one of the features of war.

If you mean something else, let me know.

55: I think idealist point is ultimately that once you invade a country, you are automatically giving yourself the right to kill anyone in the country working against the invasion.

Sure. And if you don't know who is and isn't working against the invasion, you basically wind up flailing around at anyone who looks likely. All true. Hence the peaceniks who think illegal wars of aggression are bad and US troops should be removed from Iraq.

Do you mean is an Iraqi evil for fighting the US? Not as a general rule, no. We are at war. I do not have to think our opponents are evil. I am completely uninterested in the question of whether terrorists are evil. As a soldier, I do not have to think my enemy is evil to kill him, I just have to know he is the enemy

Agree with this, too. That is, I wouldn't require a soldier to think differently than that, and I can't see how you could have a decent (meaning "good") army if they didn't think at least that.

Do you mean is it a positive good for Iraqi's to kill US soldiers because they think they are defending their homes?

"Think" is looking like a bit of weasel-word, there. How about if they are actually defending their homes?

Or shorter: the Iraqi may be well within his rights to try to bring down the Apache, but that doesn't mean the Apache has to like it.

Idealist, I think you'd be right if this were a conventional war or if there were some sense of Iran 'fighting alongside.' But this is allegedly mopping up in the middle of a civil war where everyone in the region has a stake in where Iraq falls; it's not clear to me that an Iranian operative would be in the same position as hypothetical Iranian joining up with the Republican guard, especially if were (hypothetically) at all interested in deflating the tension with Iran.

"Think" is looking like a bit of weasel-word, there. How about if they are actually defending their homes?

So how do they know that they are actually defending their homes? Can they know the intent of the US soldier who comes into their house? You cannot know the intent of your opponent. You can surmise it. And that surmise may or may not be reasonable. In such a circumstance, one would say that they think they are defending their homes. This allows both for the cases where they are correct in thnking that their opponent's intent is to attack them and for the cases where they are mistaken as to their opponent's intent.

I don't think 'self-defense' as generally understood is what's at issue here. Did the Iranians in the consulate (or proto-consulate) in Irbil present imminent danger of harm, such that shooting them would be justifiable as self-defense? Were they doing anything at all that precluded Iraqi (in this case Kurdish) authorities from dealing with them? They are said to have had 'ties' to the Pasdaran, which is itself involved in all manner of things -- wicked and not-so-wicked -- in Lebanon as well as anywhere else Iran has substantial interests.

My interpretation of the policy is that members of the Pasdaran, and anyone who can be said to have a relationship to them, can and should be eliminated. Not captured, because Iraqi politicians do not regard the Pasdaran as the source of all (or even most) wickedness in the world, and do not regard a relationship to the Pasdaran, something anyone in Iranian foreign policy is going to have, as a badge of evil. And they think they should know, nearly all of them having lived in Iran and experienced its government.

Glad that Katherine liked my formulation, I'll go (unwisely) one further level with it: only when the Pasdaran is obliterated can unicorns flourish.

it's not clear to me that an Iranian operative would be in the same position as hypothetical Iranian joining up with the Republican guard, especially if were (hypothetically) at all interested in deflating the tension with Iran

Insofar as they are training or arming people to fight us, why?

To be sure, and I have already said this a couple of times, if it actually were the case that the President had said that all Iranians in Iraq can now be killed with impunity, that would be a horribly wrong and unjustified thing to do. And it would be unjustified even with respect to Iranian intelligence operatives who have every reason to keep track of a war happening at their front door. However, I do not think that a reasonable person could even come close to drawing that conclusion from the Washington Post article that is the basis for this discussion. However, once they take sides, they should be treated the same as everyone else on the side they have taken.

You cannot know the intent of your opponent.

If someone is in your house with a gun and is your "opponent," surely you don't have to mind-read his intent to be actually defending your home. Self-defense is implicit in that your enemy has entered your home with a gun.

Insofar as they are training or arming people to fight us, why?

Are they training and arming people to fight us, or to fight the Sunni?

The problem is that they're supporting factions that are affiliated with the Iraqi government--this isn't like China supporting North Korea during the war.

To be sure, and I have already said this a couple of times, if it actually were the case that the President had said that all Iranians in Iraq can now be killed with impunity, that would be a horribly wrong and unjustified thing to do.

You have yet to answer any of those who have pointed out that in the absence of good intel, what he says functionally amounts to saying that all Iranians in Iraq can be killed or captured with impunity. Given the already-established incapacity of the US to reliably determine who is or isn't an Iraqi insurgent, you now need to give a specific reason why you think the process is likely to be any more efficient applied to Iranians.

56:"If you mean something else, let me know."

And in some sense, I do not disagree with much of what you say.

I feel engaged. As far as meaning something else, I am at this point mostly concerned about the civilians and non-combatants in Iraq, and whether after four years of this bullshit, they are now justified in taking up arms.

Which I suppose does lead into the question of "general good" or "positive good."

Let me think on this awhile. A while more since I have been contemplating the positions of Germans in 1943 for several years now.

Some of the Iranians arrested by US forces in December were on SCIRI's premises: in the compound of a man who had just recently visited the President of the United States. They've taken a side, and it's our side. (Although not the side of the unicorns, apparently . . .)

Idealist: re 43. I did have a point, but I dropped that on you and then had to run off for an unplanned meeting. Sorry, that was unfair. I don't have time to expand on it now either, so I'll drop it.

There were two Iran stories above the fold on the front page of the Post this morning. The other one is equally worth a read, imo.

64:No, I would not consider a police officer here in Dallas my "opponent", and might possibly allow a search as part of a neighborhood canvass. I would expect him to behave in a reasonable manner and have respect for my property and person and family.

This has not been the case in Iraq, not always, but often enough that the Iraqi civilian has grounds for fear.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

This is from the article. This was our old policy. This is what seems to be replaced with the new policy. It's the 'suspected Iranian agent' business that makes it sinister, in my mind, at least; it's not like we're killing Iranian insurgents, but that we seem to know enough about these guys to know that they're Iranian, possibly involved in training, so why the imminent need to just shoot them?

And to second DS's point: no, this does not apply to Iranian civilians or diplomats.... but I'm not comforted by that as I'm not anywhere near confident that we can tell an Iranian civilian from a 'suspected agent.' How hard is it to be a suspect?

The Washington Post article refers to some [evidence of Iranian activity in Iraq]

The only evidence offered by the WaPo article is a few administration officials saying so. That's it. Given this administration's abhorrent records of intelligence gathering and honest reporting of that intelligence, I'm way short of convinced.

If they had managed to get even one single thing right about Iraq, maybe I'd trust them. But this is like asking somebody to trust Jeff Dahmer with their kids.

You have yet to answer any of those who have pointed out that in the absence of good intel, what he says functionally amounts to saying that all Iranians in Iraq can be killed or captured with impunity.

Actually, I have answered this a couple of times. I believe that your conclusion--that because we do not have good intelligence we are then going to go out and kill all Iranians in Iraq--has no basis in the facts as we know them or (I will add) in common sense.

No one is saying, Idealist, that they're going to kill all the Iranians in Iraq. Rather that they're going to kill any Iranian they think might be a bad guy.

Instead of capturing them, where they might have to release them because the Iraqi government doesn't think they're bad, or otherwise has broader interests with Iran.

75: Your summary of my "conclusion" is ridiculously tendentious. One might say unreasonably so.

"Open season on Iranians" =! "go out and kill all Iranians in Iraq"

"Open season on Iranians" = "large numbers of mistaken killings and catpures of Iranians in an attempt to root out agents, as we have already seen happen with attempts to root out Iraqi insurgents"

pwned by CharleyCarp, who puts the point much more temperately.

Ideal: You know much more about military affairs than I do, so you may be right that Ogged and the linked blogger are misinterpreting the story. But I'm misinterpreting it in the same fashion. Could you walk me through your reasoning for why this is wrong?

First, I'm taking the story in the WP at face value -- I don't understand you to be saying that you have reason to believe that it's untrue, just that its being misinterpreted. Then, look at the description of what's going on:

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

The most basic claim made in the story is that there has been a change in policy toward Iranians. Now, while I don't have a citation establishing that this is the case, I'd be awfully surprised if prior policy didn't authorize soldiers to attack, including lethally, anyone currently using violence against them regardless of their country of origin. I simply can't believe that our prior policy was "Shoot back against Iraqi insurgents, but if you have reason to believe the guy with the gun is Iranian, drop your gun and let him go." (Maybe that was the policy, but it sounds really really unlikely.)

So if the baseline policy was that the military may use force against, including killing, anyone currently engaging in combat, a change in policy must mean that the military is now allowed to kill Iranian 'agents' not currently engaged in combat. Which does sound, to me, like exactly what Ogged characterizes it as -- a license to kill Iranians for their prior bad actions (as we define bad actions) without any standard of evidence or procedure.

63

I read the article as saying designated Iranians in Iraq can now be assassinated (like Israel assassinates people in the occupied territories). How do you read it?

Idealist.

You are talking about the actions of soldiers, on the ground.

Others are talking about the decisions of the President, safe and sound.

If a soldier, in a war, is facing someone he thinks is dangerous, then he will most likely shoot that person. That is the way war is.

If a president, in a war, issues a statement that from here on out identifiable foreign nationals from a country with which we are not currently at war are to be shot, not captured, if the person holding the gun thinks--not that they are an immediate threat--but that they are a "foreign operative" doing something we might not like, then that is not self-defense, nor is it good strategy. It is a blank check issued to cover the shooting of foreigners, and there's a guarantee implicit in the order that all one has to do is say "I thought he was a foreign operative" to get off scot free.

It doesn't *matter* if anyone is willfully killing Iranians yet. No one is saying that soldiers are bad people. What matters is that the president has effectively made it *possible* for people to kill Iranian civilians merely because they *suspect* them of being bad guys.

The decision may not play out the way you're envisioning it, as letting soldiers in the middle of a dangerous situation shoot people whether they're Iranian or Iraqi. I don't know if that's the way the president intends it to play out; it seems clear that that's what you think he means by it.

But that is not what he actually said, according to the article. You're a lawyer. Think about it in terms of consequences.

I think there are two issues that are getting conflated:

(1) Is this bad and immoral policy?
(2) Is GWB and his Administration so incompetent that we do not trust them to properly administer policy that would be, even if still disheartening, otherwise unobjectionable?

I'm not sure about #1, but it's not clear to be that the policy is immoral, insofar as it's restricted to Iraq, and subrestricted within that area. As for #2: I don't trust this Administration to do anything appropriately. But it's the Administration we're stuck with.

well, I'm convinced.

Gotta go: I do not wish any more American soldiers to die. Not would I like Jane Fonda go hug Moqtada. He is not a "general good guy"

1)An immediate change in American leadership, by any means necessary. War crimes trials, at the Hague under the ICC, with no American involvement save for defense representation. Include propagandists and desseminators of disinformation.

2) A full withdrawal from Iraq, and probably a very large scale deployment of American forces back to within our borders. A medium-term avoidance of overseas deployments, and only with allied supervision.

3) A committment to extensive retraining, and probably a purge of the junior officers and non-coms. Bad habits of violating or skirting the edge of the Hague and Geneva Conventions must be removed from the military. Similar purges at the Pentagon and Intelligence agencies. A universal draft to rebuild and motivate officer enlistments.

4) As far as Iran goes, they should watch the deployment of forces. I do not yet think they have grounds for a preventative strike, but it is very close. When air assets get moved into Kuwait or Turkey, or tensions rise further...

5) A Constitutional Amendment dissolving and banning the Republican Party. No further consequences not covered in 1), and they may form new Conservative and/or Libertarian Parties as they like, on simple re-registration. But the Republican Party should become history.

6) Two ponies.

re: 79

Start with these three paragraphs:

"There were no costs for the Iranians," said one senior administration official. "They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back."

Three officials said that about 150 Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq at any given time. There is no evidence the Iranians have directly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, intelligence officials said.

But, for three years, the Iranians have operated an embedding program there, offering operational training, intelligence and weaponry to several Shiite militias connected to the Iraqi government, to the insurgency and to the violence against Sunni factions. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, told the Senate recently that the amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops in Iraq "has been quite striking."

Iranian forces have been offering operational training, intelligence and weaponry to several Shiite militias including those connected to . . . the insurgency and to the violence against Sunni factions; the amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops in Iraq "has been quite striking. Yet, according to the article, we have been bending over backwards not to fight back.

I read the article as an announcement that there will be no more bending over backwards in order to avoid a confrontation with Iran. If they support forces attacking us, we will attack them, just like we would anyone else.

This may or may not be a good policy, but it does not seem that unreasonable, and certaily seems perfectly within the laws of war. I certainly do not see how it supports what appears to be the majority opinion here that the Preseident is evil, much less the claim that it is now a morally correct thing to kill US soldiers.

without any standard of evidence or procedure

This is war. You see the enemy, you attack them. Are you proposing that if we seen an Iranian agent handing off a truckload of explosives to a group of insurgents that our response is to get a search warrant? That might be a strategy to adopt. It would not be crazy to do. But to argue that it is evil to treat a war like a war is a bit much.

82: Well, the policy is basically a subset of policy dating back to 2001 in which assassinations were authorized by Executive order (someone less charitable, like me, might say "whim" or "fiat"). I think the case for that whole policy being bad and immoral is, to put it mildly, pretty strong.

Since the war in Iraq is an illegal war of aggression, and this already (arguably) bad and immoral policy is now being evoked specifically in that context, then yes, I'd say the policy remains bad and immoral. The fact that it's being administered by proven incompetents makes it even worse, but it wouldn't be okay if, say, a Kerry Administration were doing it.

85: This is war. You see the enemy, you attack them.

And when you don't know who the enemy is, then what? The whole problem with the policy is that it sort of skips that step -- you understand that's the criticism, right?

I also don't know why, at this stage of the game, you're citing White House statements in the Post about Iran's influence in Iraq, as though you think they're convincing. This is the same White House -- and its now crony-staffed CIA -- that has delivered nothing but intel disasters for the last six years, right?

82: Well, the policy is basically a subset of policy dating back to 2001 in which assassinations were authorized by Executive order (someone less charitable, like me, might say "whim" or "fiat"). I think the case for that whole policy being bad and immoral is, to put it mildly, pretty strong.

At the end of the day, I'm pretty utilitarian. If we could have tapped Hussein and his kids and avoided this mess, I would have been fine with that. I'm not particularly comfortable with this being done by Executive fiat, but given that the Reds controlled Congress (or the House, I think), I'm not sure what process would have addressed my worries.

You see the enemy, you attack them.

The problem is we are not at war with Iran. They are not our declared enemies. This is part of the larger problem of being in the middle of a civil war that we refuse to recognize is happening.

Are you proposing that if we seen an Iranian agent handing off a truckload of explosives to a group of insurgents that our response is to get a search warrant? That might be a strategy to adopt. It would not be crazy to do. But to argue that it is evil to treat a war like a war is a bit much.

Well, to stick with your hypothetical for a minute, I don't see what's wrong with arresting him, or taking him prisoner. OTOH, as people are saying, I don't see how "we" (soldiers on the ground) are to know who's an agent and who are insurgents, as opposed to civilians. To depart from your hypothetical, my father-in-law was a spy for the allies after WWII, and was taken prisoner by the Russians when he was discovered recording the materiel they were bringing into Berlin while preparing to blockade it. That, and taking POWs and treating them as POWs, are the actual rules of war. Declaring that one may legally shoot suspected agents is not. Remember My Lai?

If we could have tapped Hussein and his kids and avoided this mess, I would have been fine with that.

Well, yeah, but bad and immoral as in there being no way to know that it would just be used against someone like Hussein.

90: Exactly. Which is why laws matter. B/c you can't have any kind of justifiable system based on "but I *know* he's a bad guy!"

I don't think this policy shows the President to be "evil." We already have that. My position, rather, is that it's a huge mistake. If whatever the Iranians are doing isn't serious enough to trouble our Kurdish allies, then either we have to continue to get past it, or we need to find ourselves someone else's country to 'liberate.' Even if we could tell who's an enemy, it'd be a bad idea. that our ability to do so is seriously open to question makes it all the worse.

Idealist wants to set the conditions for his approval. Fine, I say: if US forces happen upon an Iranian giving weaponry or training to insurgents, but all means they should take the Iranian (and the insurgents) into custody. If doing so requires the use of force, I'm ok with force. What I'm not ok with is US forces going around grabbing Iranians, over the objections of the Iraqi authorities, based on suspicion. That's what we've been doing of late, and that's what this policy is about.

taking POWs and treating them as POWs, are the actual rules of war

Respectfully, B.Ph.D., this comment illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of war and its rules. In war, you also can kill your enemy. War is not a game, nor is it a TV show. Combatants who have surrendered are taken prisoner. But your supposed belief that if I see an enemy force I have to ask them please to put their guns down and arrest them rather than drop a bomb on them and kill them reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what its going on.

To be sure, in a counterinsurgency there are myriad reasons why it is bad tactics and strategy (as well as bad from a humanitarian viewpoint) to be reluctant to attack, but if I have reliable information that there is an insurgent force holed up in a abandoned village in the mountains, I am not sending in Joe Friday with a search warrant, I'm sending a B-52. That is the nature of war. And its rule are consistent with that nature.

Might this be less about when people get shot and more about when they get bombed? I'm having a hard time seeing how a policy change is going to affect whether or not American soldiers shoot at people who are attacking them or refrain from shooting at people who aren't attacking them, but it's easy to imagine that a policy change might lead to an Iranian not-quite-consulate being bombed next time instead of raided.

The problem is we are not at war with Iran.

Yet. Although if you look at how certain US officials talk about the Pasdaran, and how many different stories of Pasdaran collusion with AQ have been put out there, I'm not sure George Bush and Dick Cheney actually agree with this statement.

Sending someone in to arrest a known insurgent force is not what we're talking about here. You're being pretty disingenous, I think; I made it clear upthread that the issue is that soldiers on the ground are not the same as presidential directives.

God, I hate war.

This is war. You see the enemy, you attack them. Are you proposing that if we seen an Iranian agent handing off a truckload of explosives to a group of insurgents that our response is to get a search warrant? That might be a strategy to adopt. It would not be crazy to do. But to argue that it is evil to treat a war like a war is a bit much.

Seriously, I'm asking a question here that I don't have an offhand law-of-war cite for, just a sense. But are you really generally allowed to kill people, even 'the enemy' (say, for the sake of argument, a uniformed soldier holding a weapon) when it's not practically necessary? Say, you find an armed soldier asleep, and you have the practical capacity to capture him (enough people to guard him, someplace to take him to). Wouldn't it be a violation of the law of war to kill him rather than capturing him, despite the fact that he is indubitably 'an enemy' who's going right back to trying to kill you when he wakes up?

Because that seems to be the least of what we're talking about here. The prior policy must have allowed killing people who were engaged in combat, and I'd again be incredibly surprised if it barred killing people who were doing things like making weapons deliveries where killing them was necessary to disrupt the delivery and capture was impractical, regardless of their nationality. If this policy is a change at all, it has to include permitting the killing of people where there is no immediate practical necessity for it.

War is not a game, nor is it a TV show

Sorry, did you type that with a straight face? "War is not a TV show," you say, while acting as an apologist for an invasion sold on a series of photo ops?

93: Respectfully, Idealist, I think your comment illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the topic at hand.

We are not talking about Patton's drive to Berlin, but a policy that directs the US military to capture and kill Iranian agents in a chaotic warzone in which the allegiance of various parties is at best unclear. Are you really imagining these guys as groups of "the enemy" in formations that soldiers will have to choose between arresting and dropping a bomb on? Does that seem to you to have been the nature of most of the war in Iraq to this point? If you are not imagining that, then why do you keep trying to talk like that, or pretending that's what anyone else is talking about?

93

You didn't answer the question I asked in 80. If we aren't talking about targeted assassinations, what are we talking about?

What it's likely to look like, anyway, is a bunch of people in civilian clothes taking boxes out of the back of a truck. Can you tell it's explosives and not cooking oil? That they're insurgents and not hungry cooks? Even if they have armed guards, that still doesn't answer the question -- ordinary people in Iraq can be armed, and prudently so.

But are you really generally allowed to kill people, even 'the enemy' (say, for the sake of argument, a uniformed soldier holding a weapon) when it's not practically necessary?

Of course and absolutely. Indeed, often the most vlauable and high value targets are not soldiers running at you weapons blazing, but rather (particularly in a conventional war) headquarters, ammunition dumps, supply depots, troop concentrations etc. The only reason we do not attack such targets in Iraq is that they are rare.

103: You're dodging the real question. LB isn't asking about collateral damage. She's asking about *targeting non-soldiers* who are not an immediate threat.

And of course, how do you know they're Iranian? If we're talking specifically about killing Iranians, that means killing identified people with known identities or we wouldn't know their nationalities. The 'shooting at people at the moment you see them doing bad stuff' way of looking at it really doesn't seem to apply.

103: 'Practically necessary' wasn't intended to mean 'in immediate self defense' -- it was meant to mean 'militarily necessary'. I'll accept that if you know (and leaving to one side the question of how you know -- for the sake of argument say he's in uniform) someone is an 'enemy', you are allowed to kill them if it's necessary to neutralize them -- to prevent them from being an effective force against you (and this covers people at headquarters and ammunition dumps). I'm asking whether you're allowed to kill them when it's not necessary to neutralize them -- when you have the practical capacity to capture them instead.

104:(Actually, in that hypo, I was talking about soldiers.)

93:Umm, since the Warsaw uprising, using air power to pacify occupied territory has been frowned upon.

You really are not supposed to establish bases and then wage war within a country indefinitely. Especially not air war. Bad for children, pilgrims and other living things.

I am usually a strong supporter of Israel, but they have done this bad thing for years. And it is wrong.

See 84: c) Bush really did break the Army.

And of course, how do you know they're Iranian? If we're talking specifically about killing Iranians, that means killing identified people with known identities or we wouldn't know their nationalities.

Well here I think we have a sharp disagreement over the facts as reported. I read the article as saying that the US will no longer follow its policy of treating people it identifies as Iranians differently in an effort not to escalate things with Iran. You apparently read it that they are now going to go look for people they can identify as Iranians to kill. I do not think your reading reasonably folows from the article.

are you allowed to kill people you can safely capture instead? that wasn't my understanding. In a conventional battle you usually *can't* safely capture instead, of course--dropping bombs or using heavy artillery is going to save your own troops' lives. But if you're talking about encountering one or two suspected Iranian insurgents at a time, who may or may not be armed, it's very a different situation.

Remember that case from Iraq when soldiers were ordered to "kill all military age males"? Now, I think it turned out that they actually took them captive and released them from the handcuffs so they could shoot them--not a close call; those people are hors de combat. But the order itself seems un-kosher to me, and was reported as un-kosher.

Fuck me, but to my mind, Idealist has the better of this one on the merits. At a certain point you have to give the guys with the guns instructions about when they can shoot someone without further instructions.

Further, I don't think the announcement has anything to do with what will actually be done to the Iranians, it's about trumpeting "Look, IRAN=BAD!!!! Killmorefasterfaster"

I read the article as saying that the US will no longer follow its policy of treating people it identifies as Iranians differently in an effort not to escalate things with Iran. You apparently read it that they are now going to go look for people they can identify as Iranians to kill.

Given that the article says that the old policy involved capturing Iranians and letting them go, while the new policy permits killing them, that's exactly how I do read it -- that people known to be Iranian and suspected of being wrongdoers that would under prior policy have been captured may now sometimes be killed.

It wasn't an announcement. It was a "leak."

Aren't we primarily fighting the Sunni insurgency? Just who are all these Iranian operatives alleged to be supporting, anyway?

Don't start paying attention to the facts, teo, or the entire operation falls apart.

113: Same diff, this is more about selling escalation to Iran domestically rather than anything happening on the ground.

111: I guess it depends on how much of the White House's pronouncements you're willing to believe. If one buys the contention that there has been significant evidence of Iranian infiltration, and that this policy is simply allowing the military to "take the gloves off" with known Revolutionary Guard and Pasdaran provocateurs, then Idealist's take on it makes sense. Unfortunately, this version of things involves assuming that the White House actually a) knows what it's talking about and who are or aren't Iranian agents, and b) is not lying through its teeth in the service of political grandstanding. Those aren't odds that any sane betting man I know would take at this point.

Also, referencing the article, note that the usual "senior administration officials" are as batshit as ever:

Senior administration officials said the policy is based on the theory that Tehran will back down from its nuclear ambitions if the United States hits it hard in Iraq and elsewhere, creating a sense of vulnerability among Iranian leaders.

Yes, get Iran to back off from supposed attempts to develop nukes -- and we're assured those attempts are real by the very same credible folks who brought the word "yellowcake" into public jargon, so you can take that to the bank -- by "creating a sense of vulnerability." Because God knows a "sense of vulnerability" has never tempted anyone to develop nukes.

Guys, think about how they define membership in an enemy force in other contexts. They are not terribly careful. To put it mildly.

There could be a policy change from "capture and release after three days" to "capture and keep in custody" rather than "it's okay to shoot Iranians you suspect of supporting our enemies." I guess that is what Idealist thinks. But that doesn't really seem to be what the article is describing, and these folks have a track record which make LB's, Charley's, etc. worries very convincing to me.

that people known to be Iranian and suspected of being wrongdoers that would under prior policy have been captured may now sometimes be killed

But that does not answer the question between us. We agree on this. The question is, was the prior rule one where targeting Iranians was avoided even when Iraqis would have been attacked and killed in the same circumstances, meaning that the new rule means everyone is treated the same and Iranian agents can no longer support our adversaries with impunity. This is how I read it.

I take it that your reading is that the prior rule for targeting Iranians was the same as the one for targeting Iraqis, and now we are going out of our way to kill Iranians. I do not see how you get this from the article. Of course (for the third or fourth time) if you are right in your reading, the policy is certainly terrible for a variety of reasons.

117: I don't believe a word of them, and I don't believe the actions taken on the ground have changed one iota, I think this is just another (particularly heinous) way of trying to say Ahmadinejad=Hitler, on to Tehran, Christian Soldiers, etc...

Somewhat off topic, but this article on the BBC web site caught my attention. In summary: the US military disposes of large quantities of surplus / used equipment each year; their major customers are US police forces. I know that there's concern over proliferation of 'SWAT' teams and the attendant militarisation of police forces in America; the regular disposal of military surplus equipment seems to be a mechanism, or at least feeds it.

Less off topic: in theory, the law in Iraq is the law of Iraq and if the country is not exactly at peace, it's certainly not at war, so if saboteurs or other lawbreakers (Iranian or otherwise) are operating there, they should be arrested by the Iraqi authorities. What does the UN mandate say on the matter of what may or may not be done by coalition forces in support of the Iraqi people?

I still suspect that the policy change is mostly about aerial attacks on places we think Iranians are hanging out.

122: Such as in Iran...

But that does not answer the question between us. We agree on this. The question is, was the prior rule one where targeting Iranians was avoided even when Iraqis would have been attacked and killed in the same circumstances, meaning that the new rule means everyone is treated the same and Iranian agents can no longer support our adversaries with impunity.

That's why my earlier question about whether you're allowed to kill enemies when it's not militarily necessary -- the sleeping soldier in my hypothetical. Clearly, if our prior policy was to capture Iranians under some set of circumstances, killing them under the same same circumstances was militarily unnecessary. A new policy of killing rather than capturing where capture is demonstrably practical (given that it was the prior policy), appears improper (where 'improper' may be better described as 'evil') to me.

123: That would be Phase II. Right now they're just trying to goad Iran into providing something that they can sell as a casus belli to a public that's no longer as eager to buy as it was in 1993.

119

So in other words Iranians are now being placed on the death lists.

119: isn't it possible that they think that being an Iranian in Iraq is grounds for suspicion of nefarious activity, whereas being an Iraqi in Iraq isn't? We have such a bad track record about this sort of thing, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

121: I'm pretty sure the UN resolution lets the "multinational force" detain people if it serves the security of Iraq.

the sleeping soldier in my hypothetical

Except that you can kill the sleeping soldier. War is not TV. As in litigation, you accept surrender, but otherwise, the best time to kick someone is when they are down and the best time to kill an enemy combatant is before they are in a position to kill you.

120,122: And my guess is that in the recent two operations in Kurdistan, soldiers were told just to pick guys up, and after having guns back pointed at them, told the bosses they wanted written rules of engagement.

the best time to kill an enemy combatant is before they are in a position to kill you

And the administration has such a wonderful track record at identifying enemy combatants. Do we have any reason to think that we should trust them to identify correctly which Iranians are engaged in combat against us, however broadly you want to define "combat"?

But Idealist, this isn't a world war 2 or Vietnam movie either. We are talking about a conflict in which sleeping civilians may easily be mistaken for soldiers--and in which the Bush administration takes the position that anyone in the world it says is a soldier is a soldier, even when there's really no good evidence they're anything but a civilian.Can't you see how the theories you're supporting, combined with the way they tend to identify the enemy, could easily mean that any Iranian we find in Iraq is fair game?

Of course they're not going to come out and say that's the policy but of course people are worried.

119: The question is, was the prior rule one where targeting Iranians was avoided even when Iraqis would have been attacked and killed in the same circumstances, meaning that the new rule means everyone is treated the same and Iranian agents can no longer support our adversaries with impunity.

So, here you'd have to believe that there were actually significant numbers of Iranian agents supporting America's adversaries "with impunity" to begin with. On what grounds you expect reasonable people to believe this I have no idea. It surely cannot be just because the White House says so.

131:With the pilgrimages and holy sites, I presume there are on any given day and twice on friday, many many Iranians in Iraq. Not like Chechnyans in Afghanistan.

There is also no doubt in my mind that Iranians agents are active in Iran.

129: I'm not arguing that this "policy" is a good thing. I guess I'm in the unique position of out-cynicing McManus by saying that this has always been at least tacitly acceptable (and the fact that there haven't been tons and tons of Haditha like incidents is down to the training of our individual soldiers), and that the leaking of this information is all about beating the drum to attack Iran.

The cognitive dissonance of Americans shooting Iranians on sight for no reason is so great that learning of a policy by which we are supposed to do just that means, in WingNut World, that the Iranians getting shot must have done something wrong.

128

Enemy combatants like Ahmed Yassim ? This is the sort of thing we are talking about right?

131 You raise a number of fair and important points. But all of the points you raise seem to apply with equal force to Iraqis (or anyone else, for that matter) in Iraq. They do not have anything in particular to do with the question at hand which is whether--based on the facts as set forth in the Washington Post article to which we have been referring--it is unreasonable, much less evil, as a general matter, to stop treating Iraninan agents differently from the way we would treat Iraqis engaged in similar conduct.

Now, to the extent we disagree on the facts, we might come to different conclusions.

Now, to the extent we disagree on the facts, we might come to different conclusions.

Too garbled to fix. I really should focus and get some work done. I meant something like:

We seem to be reaching different conclusions mostly because we disagree on the facts regarding what this new policy really is.

Idealist, as the Post article explains, its hoped that by stepping up actions against Iranians in Iraq, Iran will back down on a number of fronts, including its nuclear program. This is consistent with stepping up Iran specific operations, as indeed we see in Irbil, and the December arrests. It's not about dissolving the differences between how Iraqis and Iranians are treated, it's about escalation as policy.

War is not TV.

You keep saying this. Your side has been invoking ticking time bomb scenarios and portraying any option that violates the most rights or spills the most blood as "clear-eyed" and "ruthlessly serious" since 9/11, all while doing little more than exacerbating terror and instability across the globe. You don't get to say "war is not TV" when your counterterror strategy is being plotted by a handful of war nerds jerking off to "24."

If you find stras strident, remember, those are just his Palestinian genes talking.

97: Jackmormon, I'm with you.

Of course (for the third or fourth time) if you are right in your reading, the policy is certainly terrible for a variety of reasons.

Fair enough.

128

I think you are wrong, you cannot lawfully kill the sleeping soldier if there is no military necessity to do so (as in the hypothetical).

Perhaps Americans has not felt feel modernism or nihilism in the same way as Europeans because geography and two oceans have insulated us from the experience of war ... until 9/11. Throughout our history, we witnessed wars from the comfort and safety of home. Violence offends us, but we experience it through the blunt affect of media. Perhaps we may feel anomie, but do we fully comprehend nihilism?

The neo-cons in government want us to feel nihilism and have us regard them as the cure. They offer the "Red-White-and-Blue Beast" of nihilism present that defeated the "Blond Beast" of nihilism past and will crusade against the "Jihad Beast" of nihilism future. By any measure, a beast is a beast is a beast.

How could anyone have withstood the political climate of post 9/11 America? Well prepared for such an event, the neo-cons exploited it with consummate skill while the rest of us were caught off-guard. Even the loyal opposition let us down. Ironic, isn't it? Evil becomes us.

"Evil becomes us."

I disagree. We lack the snappy black uniforms. No panache.

For once, I'm with idealist on this, at least on his narrow point against LB. War does involve killing large numbers of enemy troops and civilians, and in the end the "laws" of war break down. Remember the end of the first Gulf War, when we killed very large numbers of Iraqi conscripts fleeing down the Basra road?

I know a very nice, decent man, who bayonetted a Japanese soldier on his sickbed in the Burmese jungle. That was, he conceived, his duty and I think he was right.

It is just about possible to run counterinsurgencies as if they were police operations, provided you have enough intelligence: we more or less kept to the rules in Northern Ireland. Note, that under the Bush doctrine we (Brits) would have been entirely justified in assassinating the Noraid guys in Boston and New York. But I don't think it can be done when there are such huge cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic gaps as there are between the Americans (and British) and Iraqis.

All these facts I take -- and have always taken -- to be arguments against invading Iraq in the first place, and still stronger arguments against starting a war with Iran. Because if it comes down to a willingness to suffer and inflict atrocity, we will lose, not least because we have more to lose.

War does involve killing large numbers of enemy troops and civilians, and in the end the "laws" of war break down.

Aren't you answering the wrong question here? Sure, terrible things happen in war, otherwise decent people commit war crimes like bayonetting helpless invalids, and depending on the circumstances perhaps we don't judge them harshly. That doesn't affect the prior question of what the law of war is or should be, and it still does, insofar as I understand it, prohibit attacking someone who is hors de combat.

prohibit attacking someone who is hors de combat.

True, but irrelevant to the question you raised and the assertion made by others that there is some MacGyver-esque duty to capture people instead of kill them if it is possible to do so. To be sure, you cannot kill people who surrender or people, such as the invalid discussed above, who was hors de combat. But if I see a convoy of trucks that I reasonably believe are carrying arms for insurgents, it is entirely proper and reasonable under the laws of war to attack and destroy the convoy rather than try to capture it simple because it might be possible to do so.

As I have posted on other blogs, 19 men with boxcutters is not an adequate reason to suspend the Bill of Rights. Al-Qaeda is a vastly overblown and convenient bogeyman for the Bush Administration to invoke the equivalent of martial law and suspend basic human rights by keeping people living in fear. Al-Qaeda is a tiny threat in the grand scheme of things.

Three million people worldwide die every year from air pollution. Why haven't we declared a "war on air pollution"???

The point about the invalid was that, if left alive, he would have passed on information about the British soldiers to his comrades when they came back to camp (this was in a context of both sides sending out patrols from their camps to find where the other's were).

The more general point is that while it is wrong to kill prisoners, I can't see there is any obligation under the laws of war to try to take prisoner enemy soldiers whom you might otherwise try to kill.

But if I see a convoy of trucks that I reasonably believe are carrying arms for insurgents

What's the basis for the belief? A conviction that all trucks from Iran have arms? An anonymous tip from a rival cooking oil salesman? (Or from someone who thinks he has a more serious greivance)? This is the very heart of the objection to the policy. You want to assume it away, which is why, by and large, you're arguing with straw.

Which is fitting, I guess: we all know that straw is a unicorn's favorite food.

MacGyver-esque

You know, I'm really trying not be cross here with the "war is not TV" and "MacGyver-esque" but I have to say that I'd be enjoying this conversation more if you could disagree with me without implicitly calling me a childish moron.

And no, I'm not proposing a MacGyver-esque responsiblity to capture rather than kill whenever theoretically possible. I am saying that in a situation (and I recognize that you dispute that this accurately describes the policy change named in the article) where capture is, in fact, practical, as evidenced by the fact that it was our prior policy to capture the 'Iranian agents' that are the subject of the new policy, that we're getting close (note the hedging here, and try not to make fun of claims that I'm explictly not making) to the area addressed by how you are obliged to treat people who are hors de combat. Isn't there a responsibility to allow for and accept surrender where practical, and if we're talking about situations where capture had been the policy in the past, doesn't that suggest that the captured individuals did in fact surrender rather than fighting to the death?

And, of course, what Charley and everyone else said about being able to reliably identify 'the enemy' in a war like this. If what this policy is is a statement that we're going to take Iranian nationality or affiliation with the Iranian government as strong evidence that an individual is 'the enemy' and may, as such, be killed, that is, to use a technical term, really fucked up.

You know, I'm really trying not be cross here with the "war is not TV" and "MacGyver-esque" but I have to say that I'd be enjoying this conversation more if you could disagree with me without implicitly calling me a childish moron.

Fair enough. My annoyance is at the obnoxiousness of a number of other commenters; but you certainly have not been that way and my response should have been more measured to you. Sorry.

Isn't there a responsibility to allow for and accept surrender where practical, and if we're talking about situations where capture had been the policy in the past, doesn't that suggest that the captured individuals did in fact surrender rather than fighting to the death?

Respectfully, you keep changing the question. You initially asked if there was an obligation to capture whereever possible. The answer to that is no. Then you switched to hors de combat, and the answer, quite obviously, is no, you are not supposed to kill such people, but hors de combat has a particular meaning (for example, an invalid in a hospital bed), and does not seem to have anything to do with what we are discussion, which is people training and arming insurgent who are attacking, among others, US forces. Now, you have switched to the question of whether there is an obligation to accept surrender if offered. Of course there is, but that seems once again to have nothing to do with the issue at hand. That we were able to capture people does not mean that they just up and surrendered to us. To go back to the example I used above. If you see an arms convoy travelling down hte road, it is entirely appropriate to attack it. That you might have been able to stop it and that the people of the convoy, faced with the choice of surrender or being killed, might have surrendered, in no way changes the fact that it would have been entirely appropriate to bomb the convoy instead of try to stop it and capture the people in it.

As everyone keeps repeatedly pointing out, the issue isn't with what individual soldiers or individual commanders do on the ground, in the heat of battle.

As has already been pointed out, for example, this policy, for example, would have justified the British sending the SAS into New York, say, to assassinate Noraid fund-raisers. Or bombing Dublin.

148: We're not in the world of MacGyver here. The WaPo article indicates that our old policy towards suspected Iranian operatives/emissaries we wanted to intimidate was to capture, interrogate, and release them. Since that was our policy, this indicates to me that it was well within our capabilities to capture the operatives, that it wasn't a superogatory duty to capture them alive. So we're not talking, I think (and this may well be where our intuitions differ.) of convoys that we're not allowed to fire upon, but raids and arrests on tips. I'm assuming, that is, that the latter is the sort of case where the old catch-and-release policy would have applied.

(I'm also assuming that previously, if we caught an Iranian agent in the act of handing over the weapons to a bunch of insurgents, we would have been allowed to act to 'destroy the weapons cache' and if the Iranian was in the way, oops, his own damn fault. It seems ludicrous to suggest that our old policy was to get a search warrant.)

This is the policy that according to the WaPo is changing. Now, we're all working with limited information here, but from the description, it seems wrong to suggest that the change in question is from arresting weapons convoys to shooting them, but more likely, giving the ability to shoot a suspected operative whom we could have easily captured (because we have done so in the past.)

The 'changing the question' thing seems to go both ways here. If we're talking about bombing an arms convoy, are you suggesting that our policy in the past was to allow arms convoys to go their way unmolested so long as we thought they were manned by Iranians? What we're talking about here is situations where the nationality of the people involved is known and important (as it wouldn't be in the case of people unambiguously engaging in acts of war. If we believed, whether reasonably or unreasonably, that a group of trucks was full of arms destined for insurgents, we'd be bombing the trucks regardless of whether we also believed that they were driven by Belgians.).

Or, exactly what Cala said.

what Charley and everyone else said about being able to reliably identify 'the enemy' in a war like this.

OK. See now I want to take back the apology. Because you know full well that this argument has nothing to do with the issue at hand because it applies to everyone in Iraq. It always is hard to know exactly what is going on in war, and it is particularly hard in this one. But this is true for everyone. Whether, to go back to my example, a convoy that is carrying guns for insurgents is hard to tell regardless of whether the convoy is being driven by Iranians or Iraqis. That it is hard to see through the fog of war is a universal problem. Why is this universal problem a particular concern to you only with respect to Iranians? If it is a concern with respect to everyone, then you have a complaint about war, but not a policy that--as I read it--means that Iranian agents are no longer going to be given a pass.

If what this policy is is a statement that we're going to take Iranian nationality or affiliation with the Iranian government as strong evidence that an individual is 'the enemy' and may, as such, be killed, that is, to use a technical term, really fucked up.

Something else that is fucked up and obnoxious is ignoring my repeated concession that if the facts are are you suppose them to be--notwithstanding that I do not bellieve that the article we are discussing supports your view--then yes, the policy is fucked up.

My annoyance is at the obnoxiousness of a number of other commenters

If you want to stop being obnoxious, you could just stop implying that the policies you defend, which have so far resulted in the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and untold misery scattered across Iraq and the larger Middle East, are somehow more mature and sensible than those of your naive, childlike political opponents, who were too fucking "MacGuyveresque" to launch a half-assed invasion of the wrong fucking country in the first place.

Why isn't Ideal's experience in the military determinative? There must have been instruction and classes ("Who You Can Kill") at some point along the way, no? And people seem to be asking question about what is allowed, rather than a question about what should be allowed.

(Unless, of course, Ideal cut that class.)

re: 160

Indeed.

Leaving aside the ethical case, there's a big pragmatic problem with an order which explicitly authorizes the killing of agents of a power with whom one is in a state of tension. It escalates that tension. It's a stupid thing to do, unless your aim is to foster the escalation of that tension ... which, funnily, enough ...

I know you've acknowleged that -- I've acknowledged your acknowledgement. I'm continuing to argue because I think the 'fucked up' interpretation is much more persuasive.

Maybe I'm missing something you know that I don't -- do you know of a prior policy that said the equivalent of: "Even under circumstances where we reasonably believe that an individual is engaged in acts of war against the US, such that we would generally be justified in attacking them, should we also have reason to believe that such an individual is of Iranian nationality it is our policy not to injure them in any fashion so as not to inflame US-Iranian relations. We will attack Iraqi insurgents and non-Iranian 'foreign fighters', but not Iranian foreign fighters."

Because you seem to be saying that there was such a policy, and that all that's happened is that it's come to an end. I'm not aware of such a pre-existing policy.

If we're talking about bombing an arms convoy, are you suggesting that our policy in the past was to allow arms convoys to go their way unmolested so long as we thought they were manned by Iranians?

See my 85. The article says we were bending over backwards not to fight back notwithstanding that they were training and arming insurgents who were attacking us, among others. So yes, I read this as that there was a policy of avoiding killing Iranian operatives when they could be captured and releasing them when an Iraqi insurgent would have been imprisoned.

Right. That, to me, sounds like empty rhetoric because it just sounds so unlikely.

releasing them when an Iraqi insurgent would have been imprisoned.

This, maybe, but no one would be making a particular fuss if the announced change in policy was to continue to hold captives of Iranian nationality on the same terms we hold captured Iraqis.

Idealist, to be an enemy combatant in this war YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CARRYING WEAPONS OR INVOLVED IN A FORCE CARRYING THEM. You could be a "suspected Iranian agent" based on some intelligence tip, which may or may not be complete bullsh*t--sitting on your couch watching TV. Or you could just be a guy sitting and watching TV. Maybe you agree that such a person could legally be considered a "combatant"--but in any case the administration you're defending certainly would. In that situation, is there a legal obligation to try to capture him rather than kill him? Is it okay as a matter of policy? I still do not know your answers to those questions.

The 'leaking' of this policy is so clearly a deliberate move in the escalating game of cat and mouse being played with the Iranians.

It's not about pragmatic decision making in war time, or about treating the Iranians like anyone else, or the implementation of standard rules of engagement.

empty rhetoric

What a cogent fact and logic-filled retort. I've got better thngs to do. You folks have fun talking among yourselves.

Fucksake

Dude, I wasn't saying that you were engaging in empty rhetoric, I'm saying that an administration official saying that we'd been 'bending over backwards' not to attack Iranians in Iraq sounds to me like someone engaging in empty rhetoric -- it is not, in fact, a clear statement that we had been letting Iranians go their way unmolested when they engaged in the same conduct that would justify an attack on an Iraqi. If that was our policy, then your position makes more sense, but that phrase is not enough to make me believe that it was.

Again, I was not in any way referring to your use of rhetoric -- rather, I was saying that the phrase you were relying on sounded like rhetoric rather than a statement of policy.

re: 170

If he wants to throw a hissy fit, that's his right.

And if I want to try and keep it polite with a RL friend, that's mine. (That sounds snippy, but you know, Ideal's not a random internet right-winger, he's someone I spent a long time working with.)

re: 172

Yeah, fair enough, perfectly understandable.

I don't know him in real life, and on teh internets he annoys the fuck out of me.*

* as I may well annoy other people...

I'm sure I know as many right-wingers in real life as anyone here, and I like and care about a good number of them - seeing that a couple of them raised and gave birth to me - but that doesn't mean that arguing with them over politics is necessarily going to be fruitful or productive. At this point, anyone who still defends the war in Iraq is either very stupid, very ignorant, deeply delusional, or a very, very bad person. I think it's perfectly possible for someone to be all of those things while simultaneously being friendly, charming, and perfectly likable, but it doesn't make them any likelier to be open to reason, and it doesn't make them any less responsible for supporting policies that have lead to the pointless deaths of thousands.

174: WTF? I haven't read the whole thread, but Ideal seems to be discussing intra-war decisions, not whether going to war or not made sense. I'm sure all you're saying is true. I believe people who kill dogs slowly for simple amusement are likely to be bad people. Neither claim seems have much relevance to the argument in this thread.

I think SJ is saying that someone who supported and still supports the war is so fundamentally wrong that there's no point engaging with them on any related topic. I don't take that position myself.

175: Idealist is splitting hairs on a dog's corpse. The new "capture or kill" policy has nothing to do with rules of engagement and everything to do with provoking Iran into a war. That Idealist will happily defend this policy - and do so as a "realistic" alternative to childish qualms about killing pilgrims and so forth - after standing by the initial atrocity of the war for so long, says more about his side than it does about the wisdom of killing Iranians.

Or to make that even shorter: this is someone who was for the war and is still for the war, and is now supporting a policy that will get us yet another war. He doesn't care about Shiite pilgrims. For whatever reason, he just wants war.

I think that's a mistaken reading of Idealist's positions.

Idealist's position seems to me to be that the policy in question is just a change in the rules of engagement allowing the Army to kill or capture people who are obviously Iranian agents.

I find it hard to square this with the statement in the article that "Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority," which would seem to denote a push for active and aggressive targeting of supposed Revolutionary Guard members.

I find it irritating that Idealist has made repeated attempts to assume away the "fog of war" objection that many commenters raised about the policy; this gets particularly absurd in 159, where he tries to claim it's irrelevant to the issue because it applies to everyone in Iraq. No shit, it applies to everyone in Iraq -- that is the point. The assumption that this means it's not going to have a greater effect on Iranian civilians in a context where the army have been instructed to go on the offense against the Republican Guard makes no sense to me. And given what we know about the massive intel debacle of the Iraq War thus far, the pretense that the "fog of war" issues are comparable to any other war seems dubious at best.

The paucity of evidence for the Iran-Iraq arms link is also a major issue, and one that would seem to support SJ's contention in 177. Idealist seems to want to take the White House at its word on this but can give no reason to do so, which in the context of this White House's unprecedent mendacity seems really, really obtuse. As far as I've seen his response to this is to carp about how "war is not TV" and complain about how other commenters are being obnoxious.

I don't think the guy "just wants war" but I can fully understand SJ's exasperation.

The administration saying they were bending over backwards to avoid harming a hair on the head of any Iranian agent is so obviously a lie that I have to wonder about the naivete of anyone who believes it.

No, I think there has been a difference. Not in allowing arms convoys to go unmolested, or in allowing Iranian agents to go about their business undisturbed. But in releasing Iranians. Because Iraqi politics demands it.

In Iranian 'agent' is in a completely different position, in Iraqi politics, from an Iraqi insurgent. The 'agent' has a sovereign, to which the senior Iraqi leadership is indebted, to argue his case. Likely as not, the 'agent' was doing something of which the senior Iraqi politician approved. These are the gloves that are coming off: henceforth, US policy towards Iranian agents will be unmoored from the needs/wishes of Iraqi politics.

Now the only way to make this stick is to kill them, rather than capture them. Because anyone in custody can and will be subject to pleading from the Iranaian governkment to the Iraqi government, and the latter's failure to be able to effect a release demonstrates the nature of the Iraq US relationship.

All the objections about who's an agent or a combatant are still true, and we can expect mistakes to be made. Iran's not going to go to war over killed cooking oil salesmen, though.

179: Me too. Idealist is very far from the most obnoxious war supporter, if he even is one, I have met on the Internet. Andrew Olmstead is for example a war opponent who supports Congressional action to end it, but alos a soldier on his way to Iraq.

I can easily think of reasonable military reasons to change these ROE's. That those reasons may not correspond precisely with the Bush/Cheney reasons does not diminish Idealist's credibility or sincerity.

Example:The US makes a raid on Moqtada Sadr's lawyer/IED maker (whatever). In that office/house is an Iranian diplomat/citizen who yells "Stop shooting. I am Iranian" The new rules would prevent hesitation and letting the Sadr minion slip out the back door.

I'll go back to my obnoxious mode now.

Bob's comment just blew my mind.

Truly he contains multitudes.

183 was probably a terrible example.

According to Col Pat Lng of Sic Semper Tyrannis, there are several hundred thousand agents of the Iranian gov't(s) in Iraq. Add civilians, and there may be as many as a million Iranians on any given day. Considering the aggressive manner the US is prosecuting the war, I can understand the Pentagon wanting expanded ROE's. I mean killing Iraqi civilians as collateral damage has no consequences, but the Iranians among them could get a troop in trouble.

Freer fire zone!! Yippee!

Bck to obnoxious mode.

161, see 81 and 96.

Idealist is very far from the most obnoxious war supporter

What does obnoxiousness have to do with it?

Idealist, a question if I may: do you know of any incident -- any whatsoever -- where American troops refrained from firing upon hostile Iranian personnel (operatives, soldiers, whatever) by sole virtue of them being Iranian? I've never heard of such a thing which I frankly find ridiculous; and in the absence of such an incident, your reading of the article, that somehow only know are we taking the gloves off, is ludicrous on its face.

What it looks like to me -- as it does most people here, I think -- is that the level of proof required to open fire/put steel on target/whatever has changed from overtly or demonstrably hostile elements, which is fine, to whoever anyone thinks might be an Iranian operative. Not a combatant; not a member of a military organization; just someone that someone else thinks is involved somehow. That's a huge distinction, TV war or not. It's virtually identical to the dissolution of habeas corpus, the notion that the executive is gifted with such beneficent wisdom that they never actually have to ask whether the person they're targeting is guilty of the crime or not -- nor, indeed, ever be held accountable for their mistakes.

LizardBreath asked in 98 and 106 whether you are allowed under the laws of war to kill enemy soldiers you could safely capture. Idealist claims in 128 in 148 that you are. I believe he is wrong.

Here is a short summary of the laws of war. While Lizardbreath's exact hypothetical is not covered it does say:

"... Enemy soldiers should be given the opportunity to surrender."

and the following are considered illegal targets:

" b. Persons who are "out of combat." These would include
prisoners of war who surrender, are wounded, sick, or otherwise
unable to engage in combat. Parachutists, who are defined as descending airmen from disabled aircraft, are also protected. "

Asleep would seem to fall under otherwise unable to engage in combat. If you can't shoot parachutists who might require considerable effort to round up and capture I would think a sleeping enemy soldier is also entitled to an opportunity to surrender when that can be easily provided.

Grrrr. Insert a comma after "heard of such a thing" and "know" s/b "now".

Anyone who would like their thoughts diverted from the distressing state of the nation by lovely pictures of baby pandas in the Sichuan Wolong Panda Protection and Breed Center, email me (anacreon at gmail) -- I got a bunch of pix in the mail that I haven't seen anywhere on the web yet.

Aha! Here they are.

I much appreciate the panda photos. So cuddly and backwards-to-forwards reversible looking.

Asleep would seem to fall under otherwise unable to engage in combat.

Sleeping doesn't make one unable to engage in combat, it just slows your reactions down at the start. That is considered to be a good thing if one is doing the attacking and a reason sentries are supposed to stay awake.

Do you really think the people who drew up the GC and subsequent rules didn't know about sleep or just forgot to mention it?

Although, assuming that link is reliable, which from the URL it looks as though it should be, you are supposed to give enemy soldiers an opportunity to surrender (presumably only when you could do so without endangering yourself). So, barring the 'sleeping sentry' possibility, where giving an opportunity to surrender would involve alerting other enemy soldiers, it looks as if shooting a sleeping enemy without waking them to allow a surrender is in fact improper.

I suppose if you run into one or two snoozing and there are lots of you, that would apply. Otherwise, from all accounts of small unit engagements I've ever heard or read about, one goes in shooting and if someone gets a chance to surrender during the action, they're lucky. It's not like yelling "FBI!" or "I'm David Caruso, you can tell by my sunglasses, you're so busted!" first.

The thing is, you're not at all likely to find *everyone* asleep in a combat zone nor would anyone who values his ass assume they all were.

Biohazard has it exactly right in 197. We can all--lawyers like LizardBreath and me above all--dream up hypotheticals at the intersections of the laws of war (someone looks like a sleeping sentry but really they are in a diabetic coma, do you have to check before you shoot them?), but in the real world, not a lot of them have much applicablity.

For what it's worth, from having been taught the law of war in a variety of settings from basic training to the Command and General Staff College, and even more from having had to teach it to my cadets when I was an ROTC instructor, the two most common hypotheticals people worry about (none of which seem to have much applicability to the question at hand) are:

First, the problem alluded to in 146. What do you do with a wounded enemy soldier if you are on patrol beyond your own lines. Being hors de combat and wounded, one set of rules makes clear that you must take him prisoner, provide him medical treatment and evacuate him to safety. However, the reality is that you probably cannot do any of those things, and indeed, if you do not kill him to silence him, he will jeopardize your mission and likely get you killed.

Second, is the use of human shields. This is a partcular problem in low intensity combat and counterinsurgency. What do you do if a car is getting ready to crash into your checkpoint and there are children in the back seat?

You can sit in a classroom (or on the Internet) and talk about the right thing to do in such situations, but going through the reality must be a special kind of hell.

182: not cooking oil salesman, no. What about people who were affiliated with the gov't but were not in fact trying to help insurgents kill US troops?

197, 198: Both of you are hammering on the point that in the reality of combat, you can't demand that our soldiers capture rather than kill anyone, it's unrealistic to assume that it's always going to be possible. I got that. I've understood it from the beginning of this argument. To the extent that anything I've said implies that I didn't understand it, I was unclear, and I apologize for my lack of clarity.

My point is that with respect to the policy we are talking about, if I'm reading the story correctly it applies to a particular set of factual circumstances, not clearly identified in the story, where our prior policy was to capture, and our current policy is to kill. Under those circumstances, whatever, precisely, they may be, capture (that is, allowing for the possibilty of surrender and accepting it) is practical, because it was the prior policy. So arguments about the impracticality of allowing surrender don't, generally, apply to the circumstances that are the subject of this policy.

capture (that is, allowing for the possibilty of surrender and accepting it) is practical

You continue to confuse two fundamentally different things. Capture is often a possibility. On mission a patrol can be given is to find and capture enemy soldiers and bring them back for interrogation. But that a patrol is able to capture enemy soldiers does not mean that it must.

You are confusing the fact that capture may be possible with a situation where capturing an enemy rather than killing him or her is required. That capture is possible in no way makes it mandatory. It is mandatory in only a limited number of circumstances.

On mission a patrol can be given is to find and capture enemy soldiers and bring them back for interrogation. But that a patrol is able to capture enemy soldiers does not mean that it must.

It must allow for the possibility of surrender where practical, right? And it must accept that surrender where practical? So if we're quibbling about not second-guessing the judgment of the soldiers in the field, that's fine, I wasn't planning to on any global basis. But where the practicalities are clear, I don't think I can agree with you.

It must allow for the possibility of surrender where practical, right?

The way I understand your question, the answer is no. There is--in general--absolutely no obligation to give an enemy an opportunity to surrender before attacking and killing him or her, even if it would be practical to do so. See Biohazard in 197 or the text you quoted of mine.

It must accept that surrender where practical? Yes. But that is completely different from the first question.

There, I'm working off the link in 190 -- perhaps we're arguing about a distinction between 'should be given the opportunity to surrender' and 'must, where practical, be given the opportunity to surrender'.

I'm working off the link in 190

Come on. The link in 190 says that a Marine may not fire on an enemy who has thrown down their weapon and has offered to surrender. Enemy soldiers should be given the opportunity to surrender.

Claiming that the link in 190 sets forth a general rule that you must allow for the possibility of surrender where practical is a bit much when you leave out the critical qualifier enemy who has thrown down their weapon and has offered to surrender. Yes, when an enemy throws down his arms and offers to surrender, you must accept the surrender. This has absolutely nothing to do with some general obligation to capture rather than kill the enemy where practical.

That's a bizarre reading of the quoted text. What would it mean to give someone the 'opportunity to surrender' if they had already surrendered? That sentence can only apply to enemies who have not yet surrendered, but who nonetheless should be given the opportunity to do so.

I thought that the Rules of Engagement were classified. Are we discussing something different from those classified ROE?

We're discussing obligations under the general law of war -- the reference I'm working off is what looks to be a Marine training document Shearer found and linked in 190.

That's a bizarre reading of the quoted text. What would it mean to give someone the 'opportunity to surrender' if they had already surrendered? That sentence can only apply to enemies who have not yet surrendered, but who nonetheless should be given the opportunity to do so.

Respectfully, I have a hard time accepting that you seriously believe what you have written. The quoted text plainly and obviously (at least to a soldier or Marine) means that if surrender is offered, it must be accepted. Or, put differently, once the enemy throws down his arms and offers to surrender, you should accept that surrender rather than shoot them. If you genuinely were confused on that point, please take my word as someone who was taught this particular point of the law of war in basic training, NCO academy, the Primary NCO Course, the Basic NCO Course, Officer Candidate School, the Officer's Basic Course, the Officer's Advanced Course, the Combined Arms and Services Staff School and the Command and General Staff College, as well as having taught it myself to ROTC cadets, that it means what I say it means.

I think Idealist is right on this narrow point, LB; I don't know the U.S. military rules of engagement, but even under just war theory, there's no general obligation to capture rather than kill; most of the jus in bello stuff covers how you're allowed to kill, and what you're allowed to do once they've surrendered, but doesn't require that in every engagement, the enemy be given the opportunity to surrender; I could keep this sentence going, upon review, with more semicolons; I choose not to.

That said, I think Katherine (and mine and several other people's) point above is worth considering; it's not clear what 'suspected Iranian operative' means, and whether a 'suspected Iranian operative' means 'enemy combatant' in either the usual sense or the Padilla-in-O'Hare sense, and whether 'enemy combatant' is co-extensive with soldier, or could mean 'in Kurdistan while Iranian'.

That's an impossible reading of the quoted text. If someone has already surrendered, there can be no issue as to whether to give them an opportunity to surrender -- they had an opportunity and they took it.

Given that you were taught this particular point of the law of war in in basic training, NCO academy, the Primary NCO Course, the Basic NCO Course, Officer Candidate School, the Officer's Basic Course, the Officer's Advanced Course, the Combined Arms and Services Staff School and the Command and General Staff College, as well as having taught it yourself to ROTC cadets, you shouldn't have any difficulty finding an alternative official document which clearly states that there is no obligation to give an enemy soldier the opportunity to surrender at any point before he has already done so.

206:Two enemy side-by-side. One throws down his weapon, the other keeps shooting. Change from auto to single-shot?

House full of people, 1 window sniper, another window white-flag, Apache arming missles?

Hell, I am trying to imagine specific examples where the Iranian is known as Iranian, could not be targeted before yet now can be. Not doing well. Idealist is not really helping.

Iranian arms convoy:AFAIK, no one runs checkpoints without being stopped.

Unloading truck:if armed, shoot;if unarmed, capture; if unloader runs away, shoot in back even tho no threat?

I am not getting it.

alternative official document

I have e-mailed you a document from the Army Judge Avdocate General School. I could not make a link work. Look at pages D-6 through 8.

Combatants are lawful targets unless "out of combat."

Out of combat means generally Prisoners of War, the Wounded and Sick in the Field and at Sea and Parachutists (not to be confused with airborne troops).

My suspicion is that what has changed are the situations where American soldiers are in no direct, immediate danger, or very little.

"That house comtains insurgents and Iranians."

Previously:can't bomb it

Now:Bombs away.

That's a generally useful document, and on the specific point we're talking about implicitly (but convincingly) supports your position. Can you post the URL where you found it? I'd like to see if I can figure out how to link it so that I can refer to it.

I went haring off on this point partially because it made sense to me, and then because the document in 190, read naturally, supported it. (Which I still think it does, but I've accepted that it's just poorly written.) But it's not central to my argument that the 'fucked up' interpretation of this policy change is the most natural one.

This discussion does nothing to diminish my belief that journalists who report on military matters ought to have formal training on the field, and that newspapers ought to grant anonymity to "senior administration officials" approximately never.

Can you post the URL where you found it?

http://www.jagcnet.army.mil/tjagsa

Look under TJAGTLCS Publications for Law of War Workshop Deskbook (2006) in the International and Operational Law section.

This should be it.

What we're really arguing about here is on page D-7 and D-8, paragraph 2(a)(3).

(3) GP I, article 51(3) states that civilians enjoy protection from targeting "unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities." The Commentary states the requirement that civilians abstain from "all hostile acts," is defined as "acts which by their nature and purpose are intended to cause actual harm to the personnel and equipment of the armed forces." This concept is discussed further in the chapter on Geneva Convention IV, Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, which includes a discussion of "direct part" and "active part."

The Iranians who are the subject of this policy are civilians in the sense of not being uniformed members of a hostile force. The question is whether we're talking about people who are 'taking a direct part in hostilities' or not. If there'd been a prior policy of keeping our hands off Iranians who were known to be taking a direct part in hostilities, then you're absolutely right about this change in policy being no big deal. That just doesn't sound like what the story was talking about.

"The question is whether we're talking about people who are 'taking a direct part in hostilities' or not."

I'd suspect that a civilian doing (while not under duress) anything more positive to aid the other side than saying "Hi" would be considered as taking a direct part in hostilities and that's probably the way it's always been.

Given we're down the rabbit hole and at the Mad Hatter's tea party already, this ROE change sounds more like a reversion to the norm for warfare rather than anything new and ominous.

The question is whether it's a reversion to the norm, or a change in evidentiary standards (I know, this isn't law enforcement, but I don't have another word for it.) Someone seen to be holding a gun and engaging in hostilities, fine, they're a combatant. Someone seen handing ammunition to the first guy? Fine. Someone sitting having dinner, and he's Iranian, and informants say he's employed by the Iranian government, and they also say that he's linked to insurgents? IMO, not fine, particularly if we're now taking 'employed by the Iranian government' as evidence of 'taking a direct part in hostilities'.

I think you're right that the line there has always been fuzzy. But what we've been doing throughout this Global Effort Against Things That We Wish Wouldn't Happen is treating people as though they've taken 'direct part in hostilities' on the basis of incredibly weak evidence. This story reads to me like an intent to further weaken that standard with respect to people affiliated with the Iranian government.

216

I still don't see it. On page D-1 (II B Principle of Military Necessity) of the document you linked, it lists two requirements for an action to be justified:

1a) A military requirement to undertake the action;
and
1b) The action must not be forbidden by the law of war.

So without a military requirement to kill the sleeping soldier I don't see the justification.

what we've been doing ... is treating people as though they've taken 'direct part in hostilities' on the basis of incredibly weak evidence.

You're absolutely not going to get any argument from me about that. I think the admin applied and applies what is essentially no standard at all to anyone, the Iranians happen to be designated specifically now, and that made public, to "send a message". It's unfortunate the message is "We're baffled, not capable of dealing with stuff, and very, very angry". My kids were once two years old, I know the symptoms quite well.

221

I think we are talking about something like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and "hurting our mission" could refer to advocating friendly relations between Iraq and Iran.

222: Try page D-6, para B.1.a.

Status based. The easiest situation is when you are facing an enemy that has been declared a "hostile force." If an individual falls into the group of those declared a hostile force, then he may immediately be targeted without any specific conduct on his part.

I read that as saying for someone whose status as a combatant is unquestioned, you can can target them whatever they're doing, including snoring.

Someone sitting having dinner, and he's Iranian, and informants say he's employed by the Iranian government, and they also say that he's linked to insurgents? IMO, not fine.

I absolutely agree, assuming that he has not taken a direct part in hostilities as discussed in your 219. And (for maybe the fifth time) if what is going on is that a decision has been taken to shortcut the analysis discussed in 219 and declare that all Iranians in Iraq have taken a direct part in hostilities, I agree that such a decision would be bad for a host of reasons. As before, I just do not read the Washington Post article that way, although I understand that you do.

We can all have our own ideas about this policy, and apparently it's no different within the Pentagon:

At the Pentagon, military officials say there are still arguments over the rules for confronting Iranian operatives. Are they legitimate targets simply because they are identified as part of Iran's military? Or do American forces need evidence that they are importing weapons or sowing chaos? Publicly, officials say the answers to those questions are classified. Privately, a senior official said, "It's all still a matter of debate."

225

I read it as a two part test. First there must be a military necessity for the action. Second the action must not violate any law of war. In other words you can not kill anybody or destroy anything unless there is a military necessity to do so. See for example p D-6 (III A 3) which forbids attacks that do not offer a definite military advantage. So although killing a sleeping soldier does not otherwise violate the laws of war it still is not allowed if there is no military necessity to do so.

The Iranians who are the subject of this policy are civilians in the sense of not being uniformed members of a hostile force.

I'm far from an expert in this, but I think of the Pasdaran is being at least quasi-military. Unlike, say, VEVAK (which is surely also active in Iraq). I know that the exact status of the Pasdaran has been the subject of a number of district court decisions in cases under 28 U.S.C. 1605(a)(7), but I think results have tended to vary.

But it's not a force we are at war with at this moment -- whether or not the Padrasan is a quasi-military organization, it's not in itself a 'hostile force' that renders its members fair game. Or if it is, then we are now at war with Iran, which while I've been worrying about it, is news to me.

(That should be properly hedged given that I don't know what I'm talking about, but you see what I mean. A uniformed Swiss soldier in Germany in 1945 isn't a civilian -- he's a soldier. But he's not a soldier from a country at war with anyone. Given that he's not a member of a force formally hostile to anyone, shouldn't that make him a civilian in the sense that he's not a proper target unless he's actively engaging in hostilities?)

I think 230 and 231 have it right.

230 -- It's apparently a matter for debate.

232 -- And that's why the story was on the front-f'ing-page of the Washington Post. That is, this is the debate being played out in the public.

We'll be hearing a lot about how there isn't a plan to go to war on this that or the other desk, and how these are just a series of brushback pitches. Trouble with the brushback pitch is that if you hit the batter, you can empty the bench. I think that the attacks of 9/11 and on Pearl Harbor were both brushbacks gone bad. Gulf of Tonkin, too, to the extent that anything actually happened there.

I'm not saying that the brushback should be off the table. It's a very bad idea, though, to start a brawl you're not sure you can win.

(Actually, I don't think a pitcher ever admits to throwing a brushback -- but instead accuses the batter of crowding the plate. This is just part of the brushback . . .)

233

"We'll be hearing a lot about how there isn't a plan to go to war on this that or the other desk, and how these are just a series of brushback pitches. Trouble with the brushback pitch is that if you hit the batter, you can empty the bench. I think that the attacks of 9/11 and on Pearl Harbor were both brushbacks gone bad. Gulf of Tonkin, too, to the extent that anything actually happened there."

Huh? The Japanese knew perfectly well that attacking Pearl Harbor meant war with the United States.

Sort of off-topic, by yeah, Pearl Harbor was not supposed to be a brush back pitch, it was a daring but ultimately ill-conceived attempt at a knock-out punch.

I'm willing to reconsider, but there's a space between 234 and 235 where my thoughts on this live. War with the US, OK, but a war that would be effectively over from the beginning: a war that is no war. That is, conquest of the Philippines (and the rest of southeast asia) without any resistance from US forces in North America.

Yeah, not a military historian (OR A PHILOSOPHER APPARENTLY FUCKING DISSERTATION), but as I undestand it, the idea behind Pearl Harbor was to remove the U.S. as a threat in the Pacific so Japan could get on with the empire building without our navy in the way. Didn't work, but it wasn't like playing chicken.

I don't know if 9/11 was intended as a brushback or not; reportedly, they didn't think the towers would come down, but honestly, if you fly planes into buildings in NYC, we're going to smack something. That shouldn't have been hard math.

My point being that if the Japanese leadership thought that by sinking the fleet -- even the carriers -- they would be free to conduct their military policy in East Asia with impunity, they were mistaken.

Yeah, the metaphor fails. I retract it.

I think the point of the 9/11 attacks was to get the US to rethink its policy of supporting Pakistan and Egypt. And Saudi Arabia.

The whole 'let's up the cost and make them redo their cost-benefit equation' theory has real problems when applied to real people.

Perhaps, rather than a brush-back pitch, a bean-ball intended to incapacitate a key player?

My point being that if the Japanese leadership thought that by sinking the fleet -- even the carriers -- they would be free to conduct their military policy in East Asia with impunity, they were mistaken.

Agree such was their hope and that they miscalculated. I believe that their miscalculation was based on what I see as a miscalculation over how ready the United States was to go to war in the Pacific anyway.

My point is that I'm a little bitch about the brushback analogy. The Japanese at Pearl Harbor weren't trying to goad the United States into doing something that would give them a reason to declare war on the United States; they were going for a knockout, and they weren't worried about plausibly making us look like the aggressors.

Whatever we're doing in Iraq, it seems like we're trying to bait them into retaliating, or that it's at least a likely result of the course we're taking, which means we just have to hope Iran's sense of self-preservation is better than ours.

242 before 239.

I think the point of the 9/11 attacks was to get the US to rethink its policy of supporting Pakistan and Egypt. And Saudi Arabia.

I confess not to know what al-Quaeda's public pronouncements on the attacks said, but this seems like a dubious goal. I assume the real purpose (and it succeeded) was to gain support in the Muslim world. The attacks said "We are strong and daring and no longer will the game be just the US pushing the leaders of Muslim nations around."

241 -- Yes.

242 -- I don't see the purpose of the brushback pitch as starting a brawl, or tricking the batter into crowding the plate. It's to back him off so you can strike him out with a ball thrown low and outside.

It is my opinion that there is a significant faction of our government that believes that we are already at war with Iran, but that stupid people in and out of the government refuse to believe/see it.

The last ten or so comments should, I think, go down as evidence of why sports metaphors are ill-advised.

No, no, Charley: keep going with the baseball metaphors! Or tag-team John Thullen to take over for you!

244 -- I don't believe AQ's public pronouncements. Agreed that PR w/in the community of potential converts was a big part of the motivation. Plenty of targets would've met that goal, and among them, the one that also might lead the far enemy to stop supporting the near enemy is a logical choice.

It is my opinion that there is a significant faction of our government that believes that we are already at war with Iran, but that stupid people in and out of the government refuse to believe/see it.

And this, while I recognize that it's possible, makes me want to hide under my desk and start rocking back and forth, whimpering softly. Don't we get to make a conscious, public, decision about whether to go to war? It shouldn't be a matter of controversial belief whether we're at war or not.

247: Thullen indeed has a certain je ne sais quoi as a commenter. ("What does that mean?" "I dunno.")

I'll note that I took 'brushback' from the NYT story linked in 227. I propose that LB call the President, and demand that he order the cessation of policymaking through sprots metaphor. Cala should also be on the call. I'm sure with if you double-team him, he'll unload the ball, rather than take the inevitable sack.

In interviews over the past several weeks, officials from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House insist that Mr. Bush's goal in Iran is not to depose a government, Iraq-style, but rather to throw a series of brushback pitches.

Okay, now I'm alarmed.

241: I think their war-party's goof was in believing their own propaganda about their invincibility & racial superiority, and also not paying attention to relative production capacities. Adm. Yamamoto and several others in their military certainly expressed misgivings in their writings and in other's remembrances.

And there's a certain unwillingness on the part of others to credit the Glenn Ford aspect of American reactions in calculating their own. First they shoot his wife and he gets mildly annoyed. Then they poison his sheep and he gets pissed-off. Then they kill his dog and he gets his old but carefully maintained holster and Colt from the trunk where he put them after retiring from the gun-fighting biz and wipes them all out.