Tag: NATO

Syria: Even fainter hope

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Mike Corgan

Map of Syria
Image in public domain

The tragic course of violence in Syria, falling mostly as it usually does on women and children, highlights the limitations of the United Nations as a means of peaceful conflict resolution in the world.

Even at its best, the UN can only do in situations like the Syrian civil war what the Security Council allows, and that body is set to stop action rather than take it.

The best analogy of the Security Council is that of a circuit breaker. It shuts down anything that is too big for the system to handle. The idea is that if any of the five permanent members (P5) really don’t want an action, then taking it would likely cause a more widespread and destructive situation.

Right now China and Russia are both balking at anything more than admonitions to Syria for what the Assad regime is doing to its own people. Neither country, each with its own restive and sometime violent Muslim minorities in Central Asia, wants any kind of precedent-setting UN response that promotes intervention in internal state conflict, however bloody and barbaric.

Russia has the additional motivation of not wishing to be seen as weak because it abandons a decades-long client state.

Who else could intervene? NATO is withdrawing forces from both Iraq and Afghanistan as fast as it can. Trying to set the house in order for another Middle Eastern state is not on any member’s agenda.

The ratio of Arab League rhetoric to action is nearly infinite.

Israel can only watch and hope. Geopolitically speaking, a fractious Syria on its border is a positive thing–but one sunk into chaos is not.

And even if some outside power did step in to stop the massacres, the aftermath of regime change now evident in other Arab states like Libya and Egypt is not at all encouraging.

It is the inevitably depressing commentary on humankind that perhaps only exhaustion of one or both of the combatants will end the killing. Inspired leadership by someone, anyone, could also be the answer but, alas, that is an even fainter hope.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of International Relations, Boston University

Lawless technology available to all (Just war, Part 10)

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Mike Corgan

One senses a barn door closing after the horses have gone out.

There are well-substantiated rumors that NATO convinced Slobodan Milosevic to abandon his war in Kosovo by demonstrating what we could to do to him with our computers beyond just our airstrikes.

Hellfire missile on predator drone
Hellfire missile on Predator drone, inscribed with "In memory of Honorable Ronald Reagan." Image in public domain.

Several years later, Russians, probably with government support, used computers to shut down Estonia for three days over a perceived slight to a statue honoring Russian liberation of Estonia.

Obama administration officials declined to use cyber war against Qaddafi for fear of the example it might set.

We’ve also taken the lead in using drones to strike targets anywhere in the world. What the Bush administration started, the Obama administration has just about perfected. Think of what goes on daily on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Recall the recent stir about killing two Americans by drone strikes in a remote area of Yemen.

Even the Administration realized that here, too, a line may have been crossed. And drones are a relatively cheap technology available to many countries.

The question for us is what rules or laws specific to this new technology are in force? Simple answer, there really aren’t any.

There have been no conferences, no updates of Geneva Conventions, no sustained discussion in public forums about any of these new ways of war that take us far beyond what troops, tanks and ship have always
done.

These weapons are equally effective no matter who uses them and they are available to all.

The capabilities are here. We need to bring out into the open a discourse about rules, laws and norms now.

Michael T. Corgan, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, International Relations, Boston University

Humanitarian intervention and war (Just war, Part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

[Editor’s note: This is the second in the series on just war by Dr. Michael Corgan.]

The anguish for leaders of countries is never about right versus wrong. It’s usually about bad versus worse or right versus right. Nowhere is this anguish more sharply drawn than in the tension between legal war and just war as defined by just war theory.

To set the simplest case first, the current legal restrictions on the use of war are essentially the United Nations Charter, which all states have signed, and the attendant treaties and conventions that attempt to codify restraints on armed aggression.

Defendants at Nuremberg Trials
Nuremberg Trials: Defendants in their dock, circa 1945-1946. (National Archives photo in public domain; from Wikimedia Commons)

Basically, the only legal recourse to war is self-defense against aggression. The one addition is that a state may, if requested, come to the defense of another state that cannot defend itself against aggression.

The famous Nuremberg Trials following WWII brought the world’s attention to the issue of expanding the criteria for war beyond legally permitted war. Up to that point, international law had been guided by laws that had been agreed to and written down.

But what law had the Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg violated? Certainly no law of the Third Reich had stood in their murderous way. But just as clearly, “crimes against humanity” had been committed, as all civilized nations agreed, even if there were no legal protocols for addressing such crimes.

Enter the idea of “natural law” and the elaboration of just war doctrine, which rejected the prevailing assumption that recognized every state as sovereign and as inviolable for what it did within its own borders.

The new idea of humanitarian intervention as a justification for war was first called into play when NATO took military action in Kosovo in 1999. Was this a legal use of war? Not according to current interpretations of the treaties almost all nations had signed. Was it a just war? If the Nuremberg principles were valid, then it seems it was just, at least from the standpoint of having a just cause.

We will return to this dilemma later but subsequent just war posts will first look at the other five criteria for just war and the conundrums they raise.

Michael T. Corgan, Associate Chair and Associate Professor of International Relations, Boston University