Post by ocelot on Aug 9, 2006 8:48:28 GMT -5
INDEPTH: REALITY CHECK
When is a war a War?
CBC News Online | Aug. 9, 2006 | More Reality Check
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Robert Sheppard began his career at the Montreal Star (may it rest in peace), spent 22 years at the Globe and Mail and was recently senior editor at Maclean's magazine. He has co-authored a book on the Canadian Constitution and writes on a variety of subjects.
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Every day for the past 28 we have been bombarded with the language and imagery of war from the fighting in southern Lebanon. Blockades, nightly rocket attacks, bombed-out apartment buildings and massive civilian evacuations have become part of our collective lexicon of these events.
Yet, with very few exceptions, almost none of the world's larger media outlets, nor international leaders themselves, seem to want to call the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah an outright war. Why is that?
Smoke billows between buildings in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam Tuesday, following Israeli air strikes. (Lotfallah Daher/Associated Press)A good part of the reluctance seems to be that the conflict / hostilities / violence / crisis in Lebanon — horrific as the toll may be on innocent bystanders — has not yet crossed an unspoken threshold.
As of yesterday, 97 Israelis had been killed in the fighting and at least 683 on the Lebanese side (the government in Beirut says it expects to find more bodies in destroyed buildings). By contrast, during Israel's Six Day War with the Arab world in 1967, approximately 800 Israeli military personnel lost their lives as did nearly 20,000 Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian soldiers.
The UN once defined a major war as one that had at least 1,000 direct deaths in a given year. Over time this definition has been watered down to the point where even important peace groups like Canada's Project Ploughshares and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute today use the 1,000 figure simply to define what they call "armed conflicts."
The euphemism would be easier to understand if wars were at such a peak that one had to be ultra-precise in defining one from another. But the fact is (and hard as this is to believe), the number of armed conflicts is down noticeably, even from as recently as the early 1990s.
Today there are between 20 and 33 armed conflicts in the world, depending on how you count and which group is doing the counting. That is almost half the 50 to 60 in the early 1990s, before the Cold War and its many proxy battles all over the Third World finally petered out.
What's more, the vast majority of today's conflicts are individual governments taking on their own insurgents. All but four or five involve countries fighting on foreign soil and these include the U.S. in Iraq, Canada leading the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, and Israel in Lebanon — all of them up against non-government opponents as well.
War's changing face
Since the 1990s, there have been two important trends in the nature of war and its definition.
One is the rise of Islamic militancy and the sectarian and social chaos it seems to want to bring about in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir and possibly Lebanon. (Hezbollah's motives are open to some interpretation; within Lebanon it has tried to position itself as a nationalist force.)
The other is the use of the UN and formerly defensive military alliances like NATO to try to "police" hotspots like Kosovo and Afghanistan and, again, possibly Lebanon, depending on how the current debates at the Security Council turn out.
In the late 1990s, Canada was at the forefront of many progressive-minded countries that sought a different definition of international security and a rationale for intervening in war-torn countries, particularly in Africa, where local governments couldn't contain the violence.
Much of this discussion took a different tack in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. But the upshot was that certain conflicts, at least, took on a shared responsibility and a desire to reach out and contain them in their place of origin.
One result was that the concept of what could be seen as a just war, as well as the notion of who in fact were the aggressors, became something of a moving target.
Declaring war
Historically, it was easy to know when a war was a war. As far back as the Renaissance, perhaps even to the Greeks in the case of city states, government fathers would issue some sort of formal declaration, to rally the troops as much as anything else.
But in modern times, declarations have fallen out of favour (unless you count Osama bin Laden's early jihadist warnings). Canadian governments have even been reluctant to have debates in Parliament when our soldiers were sent abroad on dangerous missions.
During the Korean War in the early 1950s, which was a formal war between North and South Korea at least (and still unresolved), Canada and the U.S. sent soldiers as part of a UN-sponsored "police action." Technically we weren't at war, though we really were: The Korean "conflict" was the first of the great euphemisms. A decade later, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson would use the same rationale to carry out the war in Vietnam, without any kind of congressional declaration.
The Vietnam War, of course, was also clearly a war by anyone's definition (over 58,000 U.S. dead). Plus it coincided with the rise of the international peace movement as well as the move by the UN to redefine war — essentially as an act of aggression by one state against another.
Changes to the UN Charter in 1967 made that clear: Aggression was the enemy. (Though the state part would prove problematic in later years.)
From 1967 on, though, it was a straight line to the ousting of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 under UN auspices (the UN, formed to try to limit war to defensive situations, was now sponsoring an armed intervention). Also to Canadian jurist Louise Arbour recently warning both Israel and Hezbollah about committing possible war crimes in the current confrontation.
Arbour, the UN's high commissioner for human rights, was simply reminding both parties that deliberate attacks on civilian populations can lead to prosecution (and that international law now applies to groups like Hezbollah and not just governments).
But the unintended irony of her remarks was that responsible individuals could still be charged with war crimes, even if the world at large was, for whatever reason, holding back from calling the conflict an actual war.
» In Depth: What constitutes a war crime www.cbc.ca/news/background/middleeast-crisis/war-crimes.html
Act of war
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert didn't hesitate, mind you, when he launched his bombardment of Lebanon following the events of July 12. He called Hezbollah's attack on an Israeli convoy on the Israeli side of the border and the kidnapping of two soldiers "an act of war," which indeed it was.
The Geneva Convention prohibits such cross-border aggression as well as holding military personnel for ransom.
Since then, however, Olmert hasn't been quite as aggressive in his language and the fact that Israel hasn't targeted the seat of Lebanese government or its army (though it's come pretty close), suggests that he, too, is trying to avoid the notion that this is an all-out war, despite the constant din of the big guns.
Of course, he is also trying to keep Hezbollah's backers, Syria and Iran, from intervening directly in the conflict.
Semantically, though, world leaders appear to want to avoid the w-word, except perhaps for such obvious (and vague) targets as the war on terrorism or drugs or obesity. There are even some we simply try to sweep under the rug, such as the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo: With at least four million dead since 1998 it has become the war the world ignores.
Legally and internationally, there are consequences to the practice of war, including reparations and the treatment of prisoners and civilian populations — as well as how to stop one.
For most of us, that may be the real reason we don't dare call this current conflict in Lebanon a real war, all appearances to the contrary. We don't want it to rumble along forever.
When is a war a War?
CBC News Online | Aug. 9, 2006 | More Reality Check
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Sheppard began his career at the Montreal Star (may it rest in peace), spent 22 years at the Globe and Mail and was recently senior editor at Maclean's magazine. He has co-authored a book on the Canadian Constitution and writes on a variety of subjects.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Every day for the past 28 we have been bombarded with the language and imagery of war from the fighting in southern Lebanon. Blockades, nightly rocket attacks, bombed-out apartment buildings and massive civilian evacuations have become part of our collective lexicon of these events.
Yet, with very few exceptions, almost none of the world's larger media outlets, nor international leaders themselves, seem to want to call the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah an outright war. Why is that?
Smoke billows between buildings in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam Tuesday, following Israeli air strikes. (Lotfallah Daher/Associated Press)A good part of the reluctance seems to be that the conflict / hostilities / violence / crisis in Lebanon — horrific as the toll may be on innocent bystanders — has not yet crossed an unspoken threshold.
As of yesterday, 97 Israelis had been killed in the fighting and at least 683 on the Lebanese side (the government in Beirut says it expects to find more bodies in destroyed buildings). By contrast, during Israel's Six Day War with the Arab world in 1967, approximately 800 Israeli military personnel lost their lives as did nearly 20,000 Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian soldiers.
The UN once defined a major war as one that had at least 1,000 direct deaths in a given year. Over time this definition has been watered down to the point where even important peace groups like Canada's Project Ploughshares and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute today use the 1,000 figure simply to define what they call "armed conflicts."
The euphemism would be easier to understand if wars were at such a peak that one had to be ultra-precise in defining one from another. But the fact is (and hard as this is to believe), the number of armed conflicts is down noticeably, even from as recently as the early 1990s.
Today there are between 20 and 33 armed conflicts in the world, depending on how you count and which group is doing the counting. That is almost half the 50 to 60 in the early 1990s, before the Cold War and its many proxy battles all over the Third World finally petered out.
What's more, the vast majority of today's conflicts are individual governments taking on their own insurgents. All but four or five involve countries fighting on foreign soil and these include the U.S. in Iraq, Canada leading the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, and Israel in Lebanon — all of them up against non-government opponents as well.
War's changing face
Since the 1990s, there have been two important trends in the nature of war and its definition.
One is the rise of Islamic militancy and the sectarian and social chaos it seems to want to bring about in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir and possibly Lebanon. (Hezbollah's motives are open to some interpretation; within Lebanon it has tried to position itself as a nationalist force.)
The other is the use of the UN and formerly defensive military alliances like NATO to try to "police" hotspots like Kosovo and Afghanistan and, again, possibly Lebanon, depending on how the current debates at the Security Council turn out.
In the late 1990s, Canada was at the forefront of many progressive-minded countries that sought a different definition of international security and a rationale for intervening in war-torn countries, particularly in Africa, where local governments couldn't contain the violence.
Much of this discussion took a different tack in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. But the upshot was that certain conflicts, at least, took on a shared responsibility and a desire to reach out and contain them in their place of origin.
One result was that the concept of what could be seen as a just war, as well as the notion of who in fact were the aggressors, became something of a moving target.
Declaring war
Historically, it was easy to know when a war was a war. As far back as the Renaissance, perhaps even to the Greeks in the case of city states, government fathers would issue some sort of formal declaration, to rally the troops as much as anything else.
But in modern times, declarations have fallen out of favour (unless you count Osama bin Laden's early jihadist warnings). Canadian governments have even been reluctant to have debates in Parliament when our soldiers were sent abroad on dangerous missions.
During the Korean War in the early 1950s, which was a formal war between North and South Korea at least (and still unresolved), Canada and the U.S. sent soldiers as part of a UN-sponsored "police action." Technically we weren't at war, though we really were: The Korean "conflict" was the first of the great euphemisms. A decade later, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson would use the same rationale to carry out the war in Vietnam, without any kind of congressional declaration.
The Vietnam War, of course, was also clearly a war by anyone's definition (over 58,000 U.S. dead). Plus it coincided with the rise of the international peace movement as well as the move by the UN to redefine war — essentially as an act of aggression by one state against another.
Changes to the UN Charter in 1967 made that clear: Aggression was the enemy. (Though the state part would prove problematic in later years.)
From 1967 on, though, it was a straight line to the ousting of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 under UN auspices (the UN, formed to try to limit war to defensive situations, was now sponsoring an armed intervention). Also to Canadian jurist Louise Arbour recently warning both Israel and Hezbollah about committing possible war crimes in the current confrontation.
Arbour, the UN's high commissioner for human rights, was simply reminding both parties that deliberate attacks on civilian populations can lead to prosecution (and that international law now applies to groups like Hezbollah and not just governments).
But the unintended irony of her remarks was that responsible individuals could still be charged with war crimes, even if the world at large was, for whatever reason, holding back from calling the conflict an actual war.
» In Depth: What constitutes a war crime www.cbc.ca/news/background/middleeast-crisis/war-crimes.html
Act of war
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert didn't hesitate, mind you, when he launched his bombardment of Lebanon following the events of July 12. He called Hezbollah's attack on an Israeli convoy on the Israeli side of the border and the kidnapping of two soldiers "an act of war," which indeed it was.
The Geneva Convention prohibits such cross-border aggression as well as holding military personnel for ransom.
Since then, however, Olmert hasn't been quite as aggressive in his language and the fact that Israel hasn't targeted the seat of Lebanese government or its army (though it's come pretty close), suggests that he, too, is trying to avoid the notion that this is an all-out war, despite the constant din of the big guns.
Of course, he is also trying to keep Hezbollah's backers, Syria and Iran, from intervening directly in the conflict.
Semantically, though, world leaders appear to want to avoid the w-word, except perhaps for such obvious (and vague) targets as the war on terrorism or drugs or obesity. There are even some we simply try to sweep under the rug, such as the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo: With at least four million dead since 1998 it has become the war the world ignores.
Legally and internationally, there are consequences to the practice of war, including reparations and the treatment of prisoners and civilian populations — as well as how to stop one.
For most of us, that may be the real reason we don't dare call this current conflict in Lebanon a real war, all appearances to the contrary. We don't want it to rumble along forever.