WIDEN YOUR PARAMETERS
The U.S. Army War College journal Parameters is anything but a dull read. Foreign Affairs could take an editorial pointer or two from the Parameters staff in terms of selecting writers who won’t put their subscribers to sleep. Two winners from the current issue. The first article should be of particular interest to some of my more liberal fellow bloggers like praktike, Armchair Generalist and Mithras who check in here on occasion:
“Rescuing the Law of War: A Way Forward in an Era of Global Terrorism” by Michael H. Hoffman.
“The long-term import of recent trends can’t be overstated. The United States is surely—and not so slowly—bestowing legal status and privileges on members of terrorist organizations that have no precedent in the 3,500-year recorded history of warfare. Terrorists are acquiring legal recognition and support of a kind unavailable to members of US and other national armed forces, and for that matter unavailable to insurgents during civil conflict as well. (There are early intimations that the United States may end up unilaterally bestowing similar status and privileges on the members of opposing state forces as well as terrorist organizations.) The notion that opposing forces will ever make these unique legal privileges reciprocally available to the US armed forces simply doesn’t warrant serious consideration”
A counterintuitive opener but an analytically accurate one, as it describes a change to the operative interpretation to the Laws of War that the European Left have been pushing in diplomatic, legal and media circles since the 1970’s even as most EU states have effectively demilitarized.
The Euro-Left attempt to excuse unconventional fighters from Geneva Convention obligations and give them as ” edge” over pro-Western, conventional, government armies began during negotiations over the Geneva Protocols where our allies aligned themselves to a degree with the Soviet bloc on the issue. Back then, the guerillas were pro-Soviet Marxists fighting
” national wars of liberation”. Today they are Islamist terrorists with whose behavior gives them even less claim under Geneva to protection than the Marxist guerillas of yore. ” Lawfare”, so-called, is not a new phenomenon but an old campaign of the international Left.
The second article to which I’d like to draw your atention, has a great deal of continuity with the debate Cheryl Rofer and I recently had on History and Democracy promotion. Dr. Echevarria lays out a formidible case against oversetimating the uses of history ( or of historians, of which he himself is one):
” The Trouble with History” by Antulio J. Echevarria II
“The fundamental problem for historians is that, aside from being able to refer to such demonstrable facts as do exist, they have no objective references for determining (beyond a reasonable doubt) to what extent the histories they write either capture or deviate from the past. Put differently, they have nothing resembling the scientific method to aid them in determining whether what they have written is somewhat right, mostly right, or altogether wrong about the past. Quantitative history, intellectual history, “history from below,” and oral history, for example, each employ different methods. Yet none of those procedures can lay claim to the reliability of the scientific method—that is, developing a question or a hypothesis, conducting experiments to test it, revising the original hypothesis, then conducting further experiments to confirm the revised hypothesis, and finally reaching a conclusion.
Page 1 of 3 | Next page