Rules of Engagement
Why military honor mattersIn 1998, an article by Colonel Charles J. Dunlap Jr. appeared in the United States Air Force Academy’s Journal of Legal Studies warning that a new form of warfare lay ahead. Because our military resources are so far beyond those of any other country, Dunlap argued, no society can today meet us through symmetrical warfare. Therefore, our 21st-century opponents will stop confronting us with weapons and rules that are the mirror counterparts of our own. They will instead use asymmetrical or “neo-absolutist” forms of warfare, resorting to unconventional weapons and to procedures forbidden by international laws.
What Dunlap meant by “unconventional weapons” is clear: the category would include not only outlawed biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons (the last of which, in the view of the United States, only itself and a small number of other countries are legally permitted to have) but also unexpected weapons such as civilian passenger planes loaded with fuel and flown into towering buildings in densely populated cities.
This article has become a book!
Rule of Law, Misrule of Men
Elaine Scarry
MIT / Cloth / $14.95 / April 2010
A passionate call for citizen action to uphold the rule of law when government does not. Arguing that post-9/11 legislation and foreign policy severed the executive branch from the will of the people, Scarry offers a fierce defense of the people’s will as guarantor of our democracy.
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About the Author
Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, is author of On Beauty and Being Just and Rule of Law, Misrule of Men, from Boston Review Books.
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I spent more than two years conducting interviews and research on that battle. I interviewed nearly 100 participants of the battle, to include members of the embedded media, survivors of the Ambush of Jessica's unit and sailors and Marines who were actually involved in Ms Lynch's rescue.
Ms Scarry should read the account I wrote several months ago: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/568yzazb.asp or my entire book before she tries to claim that American forces violated the sanctuary of Iraqi hospitals. An entire Marine battalion was engaged in a two-day fight around the Tykar Hospital in Southern Nasiriyah and found, once they overcame the enemy, that it was a fortified strongpoint with sandbagged fighting positions on the roof and in nearly every window. The facility also housed a weapons cache, hundreds of gas masks, a torture chamber, a dug-in tank and the offices of Chemical Ali.
The military commanders would have been remiss if, less than a week after the fight at Tykar, they would not have gone into the Saddam Hospital in force.
By the way, not a single person was injured in the hospital during the rescue operation - Iraqi or American. Jessica was 70 lbs and near death when she was rescued.
Richard S. Lowry
www.marinesinthegardenofeden.com