Dr. Charli Carpenter and the Laws of War

Charli Carpenter is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She's also a progressive Israel-hater at Lawyers, Guns and Murder. I wrote previously on Charli's entry on Palestine. See, "Israel-Bashing Progressives Paint Iran/Syrian-Backed Border Incursion as 'Martin Luther King-Style Non-Violence'." Not only is Charli's post itself a disgraceful bit of anti-Israel propaganda, the anti-Semitic comments therein are shocking, as I noted:

It's like a bloodthirsty mob that's mainlined a toxic zombie cocktail of Noam Chomsky and the Hamas Charter's genocidal jihad. Seriously. It's Western Jew hatred condensed in netroots fever-swamp form, available on an ostensibly responsible academic political science blog.

I tried to generate serious discussion at the thread (who knows why?), but Robert Farley childishly scrubbed my link and replaced it with his favorite jail-bait pop songster. Che's chicken, I guess. Manchild loser.

Anyway, Charli's an expert on civilian protection in international conflict, and her writing is quite conducive to the extreme left's campaign of delegitimation of Israel as an apartheid state. In two recent essays at Foreign Affairs, Charli utilizes the widely discredited Goldstone Report as a launchpad for a theoretical and legalistic discussion on reducing civilian casualties through international law. See "Fighting the Laws of War: Protecting Civilians in Asymmetric Conflict," and "War Crimes Reporting After Goldstone: Filling the Geneva Regime's Gaps Through Monitoring." Charli shifts to a more systemic focus, but, especially in the first essay, which is a book review, the abstraction at the argument ends up leaving her case missing the most important problems when applied to Israel's recent wars. One of the more inane points she makes (or not inane, if we understand it as essentially a crude Code Pink-style gambit), is that the U.S. should actually abjure precision-guided remote weapons technology in favor of sending in boots on the ground. Basically, if nation-states had skin in the game they wouldn't kill civilians. Rebutting a point made by Michael Gross, in Moral Dilemmas and Modern War, she argues:

In outlining the limitations presented by the laws of war in addressing modern conflicts, Gross argues that the current legal framework for civilian protection must change to meet state interests. He is sympathetic to the new tendency among Western states to broaden the scope of acceptable military targets to include civilians who assist insurgents. Yet this is a deviation from the existing norm by states seeking to pursue their interests outside the bounds of the law. Were this trend adopted as a new legal standard, it would be nothing less than an abandonment of the current rules, weakening civilian protection rather than strengthening it.

Moreover, underlying Gross' belief that the laws of war must change to meet states' needs is the historically flawed notion that modern combat presents unique challenges. The kinds of asymmetries in the warfare he writes about are hardly unprecedented. The laws of war have in fact already adapted to many of the questions that, according to Gross, have been raised for the first time by recent wars. The current framework distinguishes, for example, between civilians who support warring factions by providing food and shelter, who are not automatically rendered legitimate targets, and civilians who take up arms themselves, who do lose their immunity. Gross points out that these rules place critical restraints on the actions of state militaries. But he overstates the case when he suggests that the laws of war tie their hands completely. To Gross, there seem to be only two options for state forces engaged in asymmetric wars: bend the rules by fighting guerrillas with an expanded notion of legitimate targets, or prepare to lose.

Yet a third option exists: militaries can choose to place their uniformed men and women in harm's way rather than cede the moral high ground by placing civilians in greater danger. When Gross describes the fundamental dilemma of asymmetric war as "who do we bomb when there are no more accessible military targets?" he assumes that states must deploy aerial firepower to defeat their unconventional enemies. But this is not the only tool in the arsenals of Western states. To combat insurgents and protect civilians simultaneously, governments could choose to use ground troops, which are arguably better equipped to discriminate between innocent bystanders and insurgents and their accomplices. Although militaries risk significantly higher casualties by deploying their troops rather than dropping precision bombs, this sacrifice is precisely what the logic of just war requires: that civilians not become more expendable than a country's armed forces.

Three points: Charli's reflexively resistant to an expanded definition of combatants (at the highlighted passage above), which is an odd thing considering that from Afghanistan to Iraq, and most definitely in the case of Israel's wars against state-backed Islamist movements, it's increasingly non-conventional combatants who are waging war against states. Such fighting forces aren't generally paying attention to the Marquess of Queensberry niceties of supranational legal institutions. And while true that ground units would be more likely to avoid killing non-combatants, the argument goes explicitly against trends in anti-insurgency toward unmanned high-technology warfare. Americans don't necessarily tolerate casualties, especially over time and when victory in war in unassured. Thus making a case for increasing the number of engagements with boots on the ground is sneaking in an antiwar argument to increase the political costs of war and perhaps reduce military effectiveness in some cases.

Also, it's basically dishonest to begin analysis of civilian casualties with the Goldstone Report. Even before Richard Goldstone renounced his own investigation in the Washington Post, the legitimacy of the Goldstone Report was highly contested (it's an international solidarity hit piece). In her most glaring omission, Charli neglects mention of the use of human shields by irregular forces, which was one of the most important aspects of Palestinian war fighting during the 2008 war. See the Jerusalem Post, "'Hamas Used Kids as Human Shields'":

Hamas gunmen used Palestinian children as human shields, and established command centers and Kassam launch pads in and near more than 100 mosques and hospitals during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last year, according to a new Israeli report being released on Monday that aims to counter criticism of the IDF.

The detailed 500-page report, obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post, was written by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Malam), a small research group led by Col. (res.) Reuven Erlich, a former Military Intelligence officer who works closely with the army.

The IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) cooperated with the report’s authors and declassified hundreds of photographs, videos, prisoner interrogations and Hamas-drawn sketches as part of an effort to counter the criticism leveled at Israel in the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report.

Work on the Malam report began immediately after former judge Richard Goldstone issued his damning report of Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip in September.

One example of the material revealed in the Malam report is an-until-now classified sketch of the village of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza discovered by IDF troops during the operation, that details the extensive deployment of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and snipers inside and adjacent to civilian homes.

The sketch was discovered in a home of a Hamas operative together with several IEDs and Kalashnikov rifles.

“The Goldstone Report is one-sided, biased, selective and deceptive, since it simply accepts Hamas claims at face value and presents everything through Hamas’s eyes,” Erlich said.

The Malam report also provides an analysis of another sketch found during the offensive in the Atatra neighborhood in northern Gaza City that Erlich said proves Hamas’s culpability for the ensuing death and destruction.

“By placing all of their weaponry next to homes, by operating out of homes, mosques and hospitals, by firing rockets next to schools and by using human shields, Hamas is the one responsible for the civilian deaths during the operation,” Erlich said.

More at the link, and see also the full report, "Response to the Goldstone Report: Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from the Gaza Strip; The Main Findings of the Goldstone Report Versus the Factual Findings."

Finally, Charli Carpenter has long exhibited an anti-American streak in her research under the guise of scholarly inquiry. It was blatantly obvious during her writing on WikiLeaks, although perhaps less so in her writings on civilian protection. But reading over her second piece cited, "War Crimes Reporting After Goldstone," one finds a confidence in the effectiveness of international law that's hardly warranted in the case of Israel. Charli argues for the creation of a new monitoring agency centered at the United Nations. But of all places in international politics, the U.N. is without a doubt the most hostile to the existence of Israel, and thus it goes without saying the the Jewish state would never get a fair hearing in such monitoring activities so long as investigative power rests among the anti-colonialist majority at the world body. (The essential discussion is Dore Gold's, Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos.) Again, even if we take her analysis as abstracting to the system level, Charli's ineluctable referent is the Israeli case: "The hubbub over the Goldstone report raises the question of whether the UN is capable of independent human rights investigations." It's thus easy to see why Charli would post a lame piece of anti-Israel propaganda (on the ridiculous notion of the May 15th Nakba border incursions as "non-violent"). And soon enough the bird-brained LGM commentariat started spouting off about Israel's "apartheid state" now oppressing those poor Palestinians who enjoy more rights in Israel than in any Arab regime in the region.

IMAGE CREDIT: Serr8d's Cutting Edge.