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Confirmed User
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: TX
Posts: 198
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FROM THE AFTERWORD OF A BOOK I READ RECENTLY!
Second of three parts!
Quote:
It would be one thing if the ICC were something more than a misguided exercise in legalistic Tranzi mutual masturbation; if it could, in other words, be effective in limiting the horrors of war.
It cannot be effective. Ever.
This is because of the very nature of war itself. There is nothing a court can do that, in terms of punishment that deters, even begins to approach the horror men inflict on each other in war, routinely, in the course of normal and legal operations. There is nothing any court can do that can even hope to catch the interest of tired men, hungry men, men fighting for victory and their lives. No sensible court would even try.
There is some conduct which cannot be deterred. When life is at stake, the law recognizes no "no trespassing" signs. When the choice is between picking pockets at a mass hanging of pickpockets, and risking the noose, or facing slow starvation . . . well . . . at least the rope is fairly quick.
Similarly, when the choice on the battlefield is life or death, what power has some uncertain court distant in both time and space to deter anything? The simple answer is; it has none. What trivial power has the law with its trivial possible punishments to deter conduct that might save soldiers' lives, their comrades' and their country's in the here and now?
* * *
Yet we can see that, however imperfectly, the customary law of war has often worked?even without any such body as the ICC and without Spain's recent disgusting, illegal, morally putrescent attempt at exercising sovereignty over American soldiers. It has worked imperfectly, to be sure. Yet it has worked often enough . . . indeed, within western war it has worked more often than not.
Where the laws of war have worked to mitigate the horror and protect innocent life they have, by and large, done so when the combatants were of the same culture, shared the same values, and had what we might like to think of as a basic decency.
That's rarely been quite enough. It needed a little something else, some other reason to follow the rules.
The other reason was the threat and fear of reprisals.
Tranzis hate reprisals, which are war crimes in themselves but war crimes which become legal in order to punish an enemy who violates the law of war, deter him from violating it, and remove the advantages which accrue from such violations. The Tranzis don't hate reprisals merely because they're ugly, cause suffering of innocents, etc., though they hate them for those reasons, too. No, Tranzis hate reprisals because reprisals work to enforce the laws of war and their own silly courts fail.
Reprisals work? You're kidding us, right?
Wrong. Why wasn't poisonous gas used in the Second World War? The threat of reprisal. What happened when, in 1944, the Germans threatened to execute some numbers of French resistance fighters and the French Resistance, which was holding many German prisoners, answered, "We will kill one for one"? The French prisoners held by the Germans were left unharmed. Why didn't the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War execute the white officers of black regiments as they had passed a law to do? Because the Union credibly threatened to hang a white Southern officer for every man of theirs so mistreated. Why didn't the United States or South Vietnam execute, generally, Viet Cong guerillas who had gravely violated the laws of war in the course of the insurgency there? Because the North Vietnamese had prisoners against whom they would have reprised had we or the South Vietnamese done so.
Reprisals work; courts and statutes do not. The law of war, because of the nature of war, must be self enforcing, through reprisals. Nothing else can work and any attempt to do away with reprisal is an indirect attack on and undermining of the law of war.
But then, the law of war and mitigating its horrors are not really what the Tranzis are about. Undermining national sovereignty? Replacing sovereign nations with themselves? That's what they're about.
The Tranzis aren't about eliminating war's horrors? Oh, John, Oh, Tom . . . say it isn't so. (Interject dual sigh at the vast iniquity of mankind here.)
It's so.
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