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0 pointspasabagi3y ago0 comments

I'm not really doing whataboutism. I just think that the contemporary framework for thinking about 'war crimes' is asinine, and the traditional framework, where a war of aggression was in itself the 'ur-crime', makes more sense. The US is an interesting case study for me, not because they're so awful, but rather because they (almost uniquely) have both the resources and the resolve to avoid war crimes, and yet, the results are hardly distinguishable from states with neither. The figures are not yet there, but I doubt the rate of violent death during the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be signifigantly in excess of that seen in Iraq in 2003, or in 1990, despite the fact that the Russians seem to make no effort to avoid civilian casualties, and the US made fairly comprehensive efforts.

The vast majority of the damage done by a war is not in massacres, or isolated incidents, but rather in the normal practice of warfare: attacks upon infrastructure, collateral damage, blockades and sanctions. These are the drivers that send life expectancy plummeting, and the idea that you can 'clean' war by avoiding some forms of violence, generally selected for symbolic reasons, is absurd.

So in the case of the UN, the reason why it's a good model is that the UN is unlikely to engage in wars of aggression, so even if the conduct of its soldiers are awful, they are ultimately less problematic than a national military.

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runarberg3y ago

Indeed. Abu Ghraib is actually kind of unique in US history, it is an exception of the norm where the people responsible are actually charged, found guilty, and not pardoned after the fact. Compare this to e.g. Guantanamo—which is still, over two decades later, holding people captive which have never been charged of any crime—has not held anyone responsible for systematic torturing of prisoners. Obama even went so far to explicitly immunize James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen who designed the torture program, as on of the first thing he did in office.

Even the Nosiour square massacre in 2007, which was a particularly atrocious, and not conducted by a military personnel, took a whole year to file charges (despite overwhelming evidence) found five Blackwater soldiers guilty, but had the charges dropped on technicality in 2009 (despite taking a whole year in preparing the charges). Now later rulings found this was an error, and four of them were finally charged with the massacre 2014 (seven years after the massacre). Charges were as such:

- Dustin Heard - 12½ years in prison

- Evan Liberty - 14 years in prison

- Nicholas Slatten - Life without the possibility of parole

- Paul Slough - 15 years in prison

Additionally Jeremy Ridgeway got 1 year and 1 day in prison in a special deal by pleading guilty and testifying against the other.

Predictably all four (not Ridgeway) were then pardoned by Trump in 2020.

This is a clear case of the US justice system not actually wanting to press these charges, and only did so reluctantly after an immense pressure from the electorate.

If you also compare the Nisour Square Massacre to the helicopter murders of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh (as leaked by Chelsea Manning). The only people that answered for those murders were Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, and that was only for revealing the truth about those murders.

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