Foreward: I have hesitated to publish this piece, because I’m not sure I have anything profound to say on the subject. (Of course, the more cynical and unkind amongst you might think that’s pretty much the norm). So this offers no solution to anything – just poses a “What the Hell are we thinking?” kind of question for you to chew on.

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The decision by the United States to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine for use in their ongoing battle against Russia continues to cause debate. Cluster munitions are subject to controls under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Or are they? It turns out that although 111 nations have ratified the cluster munitions accord, those signatories do not include the United States,  Russia, and Ukraine (and also Brazil, China, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Iran, Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, and Turkey). So, the major parties to this conflict are all in agreement that cluster bombs are fair game. ‘Nuff said.

Those who advocate for the use of cluster bombs appear to have a “can’t make omelet without breaking eggs” sort of rationale for their use. Civilian casualties, –  collateral damage from delayed explosion of “dud” bomblets – are regrettable, but are not a good reason to forego the military advantage that cluster munitions provide. When you think about it, balancing the possibility of future civilian casualties against the probability that you cannot dislodge the Russians from their dug in positions without cluster munitions makes it a reasonable decision to use them. All’s fair in love and war. Of course, the fact that many of the nations that have not signed on to the convention are the nations that produce and sell these munitions, may explain their different opinions.

Thinking about the dubious morality of cluster munitions led me to considering the whole concept of rules of war. A declaration of war is a momentous thing. It’s a suspension of the normal rules of civilized conduct. When we declare war, we are saying that although it is normally a felony in any civilized country to kill or grievously wound another person, circumstances exist that now make it acceptable to kill or wound. In Vladimir Putin’s alleged mind, the preservation of a fading Russian hegemony and the protection of ethnic Russians inside Ukraine from the spread of Ukrainian Nazism were sufficient justifications for the taking of many lives. That justification for his assault on Ukraine is obviously ludicrous. But since he has chosen to invade, the world laws say “well, if you are going to carry out this abhorrent course of conduct, at least we expect you to do so by an accepted set of rules”? Really? 

Think about the whole concept of a prohibited weapon. What that means is that although it would be all right for you to kill me as a combatant in a war, it would be wrong of you to kill me with mustard gas or nerve gas. You could go ahead and shoot me, but you mustn’t use a poisoned bullet. You might be able to use an expanding bullet (a dum-dum, or hollow point bullet covered under the Hague convention of 1899) even if your country had signed the Hague convention if, unfortunately for me, my country had not signed that same agreement. I find that last one particularly strange. It’s OK for me to put a rifle bullet into your chest, but I should take care to ensure that the design of the bullet improves your chances of surviving the attack. Isn’t that just a bizarre rule? If it’s OK for me to shoot you and try to kill you, why would it not be OK for me to do that in the most efficacious manner possible? 

Let me tell you something. If you decide that it’s OK to kill me, I really don’t care how you propose to do it. I’m going to take offense at your lousy attitude.

As part of the conflict in Ukraine, the Ukrainian people are assembling evidence of “war crimes”. Other than the simple fact of you being in someone else’s country trying to kill people, what would be considered a war crime? The answer is, almost anything that a soldier does in that country that isn’t a clear military necessity. 

A United Nations document on war crimes includes acts such as wilful killing, torture, taking hostages – the kinds of things you might expect, (except that I always thought the reason you gave a soldier a gun was so that he could wilfully kill whoever you directed him to kill). Launching an attack that will cause incidental loss of civilian life, damage to civilian objects or widespread long-term damage to the environment that would be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated” is a war crime. I admire the sentiment that says you really shouldn’t kill civilians. But if killing defenseless civilians caused the government of the defending power to give up and cede defeat, then the killing of those civilians would seem to convey a military advantage. I’m not at all sure why we would expect an aggressor to treat any non-combatant as anything less than an enemy and a threat. A good clean war is an oxymoron.

War crimes also include attacking or bombarding undefended towns and villages which are not military objectives, and directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or historic monuments. Amazing isn’t it? It’s acceptable under the rules of war to kill people, but not acceptable to destroy a museum. 

And who is to judge what was justifiable in terms of overall military advantage or what was or was not a valid military objective? The answer is, and always has been, that the winners judge. And the winners write the history books.

Geneva and Hague conventions date back to the 19^th century. The Geneva conventions got a major re-write in 1949, after the second world war. So, I’m not able, with the limited research that I care to bother about, to tell exactly which conventions were in play between 1939 and 1945. I imagine Hitler was a war criminal for bombing London’s civilian population and losing. And I imagine Churchill was a war hero for bombing Berlin, Dresden, etc and subsequently winning. Prior to 1949 the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing something like 100,000 civilians in an act that would appear to have no concrete military objective. The US dropped 81 million liters of Agent Orange and other chemicals on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia which surely caused food shortages and long-term damage to the environment. But we rarely refer to these acts as war crimes. Winners write the histories.

I have no solutions to offer. War Crimes are hideous, but so is the basic objective of “clean” warfare which is killing people on the other side. I didn’t write this to propose solutions.  I mean, I’d really like to replace all that verbiage with a rule like “thou shalt not kill unless some bastard is threatening your home and family and then you are free to do whatever it takes”. But I don’t suppose that is likely to happen. 

I don’t really want to get rid of all those war rules – they may be having some limiting effects of soldiers’ behaviour. I simply want to air my puzzlement over how we can think it is reasonable to have rules and protocols on the most appropriate ways to kill each other. It feels to me like the declaration of war is an admission that all rules are off the table. Proposing civilized rules for what is, at its heart, a totally savage and uncivilized act seems like a contradiction in terms.

I hope that when the aliens come to visit they don’t find out that we have written down rules for how we should conduct ourselves when we’re trying to kill each other. They might decide we’re obviously beyond salvation and harvest the whole bunch of us as a useful supply of protein.