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Originally Posted by irateplatypus
war certainly does have rules. it's called the law of armed conflict. there are no rules that are imposed from outside of humanity (unless you are willing to grant the involved presence of God and will count moral structures based on religious convictions) but we do limit ourselves in very meaningful ways in order to align our method with internationally accepted standards. do you think that we could not be more effective in killing our enemy without any self-imposed limitations? i'm speaking about the very limitations that our enemy does not observe.
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What are these rules? Who enforces the law of armed conflict? Is it the U.N. that america only acknowledges as a matter of convenience or is it the international criminal court that america refuses to recognize? Whatever rules you claim exist, i think they all go out the window as soon as bullets start flying. What do you think the ratio of prosecuted atrocities to unpunished atrocities is? I think we could be a lot more effective in killing our enemies, but we'd also probably be a lot more effective in killing civilians, which is bad for public support of war.
The problem with pointing to the law of armed conflict is that it really doesn't amount to anything. It might strive to make war more humane, but i would argue that such a thing is not possible. That's like coming up with a "law of sexual assault" in an effort to make rape more humane. It's lip service. In the end innocent people are still dying and someone is still getting raped. I'm not saying soldiers are rapists, either, just that war seems to have a many rape-like qualities.
I'm not saying i don't respect the role armed conflict has played throughout the history of our humanity. I'm just not trying to pretend that it is anything other than what it is, namely, horrible.