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New kinds of conflict demand new rules

There are fewer rules of engagement now than when the first Geneva Convention was enshrined in 1864

Deborah Orr
Friday 25 July 2003 00:00 BST
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Latif Yahia has a particularly good reason to be relieved about the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. As a 23-year-old, he was recruited as Uday's body double and subjected to plastic surgery to hone the resemblance. He suffered 11 assassination attempts in the five years he was compelled to impersonate Uday at dangerous public engagements and eventually fled from Iraq to Britain after Uday shot him during an argument.

"I escaped with my life intact," Mr Yahia wrote recently, "but I can't count how many times I have been stopped at airports. Not just in England, but every time I go on holiday I am held or arrested. Hopefully, if the news that Uday is dead is true that will all stop and I will be able to carry on my life in peace."

This is one little vignette among the thousands that help to explain why Iraqis are now clamouring to see pictures of the dead brothers. Whether or not these grisly artefacts will convince people remains to be seen. But who can blame Iraq for wanting it anyway?

The US administration has decided to oblige those who crave a sight of the snaps. And so another tenet of the Geneva Conventions is eroded. Yet it is hard to work out what would have been gained by rigid adherence to these increasingly debased old rules of engagement anyway.

In this case, concerned as it is with communicating with a population far less squeamish about such matters than those who made the rules, it is clear that the Conventions are not terribly relevant to the situation on the ground. Anyway, it could quite reasonably be argued that Uday and Qusay do not, in life or in death, qualify for protection under the Conventions. After all, fighters who violate the rules demanding a clear separation between combatants and non-combatants, thus endangering the civilian population, give up the right to protection.

There's no doubt that by holing themselves up in a residential area, armed to the hilt and determined to fight to the death, the brothers continued to show their disdain for humane convention of any kind. Further, we may feel appalled that a child was slaughtered in this raid. But it has to be remembered that by providing Qusay's 14-year-old son, Mustafa, with a gun, the Hussein siblings also broke the Convention on not allowing those under 15 to engage in hostilities.

And so on. In this war, the spirit of the Conventions, as well as the letter, has been broken again and again, by both sides. Who in their right minds would ever have expected the Saddam regime to abide by the rules of war? Instead, of course, they have broken every one. No one can deny that these violations have caused the Anglo-American force no end of trouble. But they've also provided no end of latitude as well.

How convenient it is that when faced with an enemy who is not abiding by the rules, those very rules can be cited as the authority that sanctions similar violations by the Anglo-American forces. Just as the unconventional fighters of Afghanistan were conveniently labelled "illegal combatants" by clever manipulation of the Conventions, so too such outrageous liberties as shooting into crowds and detaining any Iraqi who seems "suspicious" are explained by the catch-all excuse that the Anglo-American forces simply don't know who their enemies are, because they're not abiding by the Conventions' demand that "combatants must be clearly distinguishable from civilians".

What an awful irony there is in the fact that it is the citing of the Geneva Conventions that, technically, justifies their flouting. Yet while again and again we are told that the Anglo-American forces are engaged in a new kind of war, these same forces prefer to twist and distort the rules so clearly designed to police the old kind of war, than to engage in formulating refined conventions that might act as a valid moral compass in the future.

The oddest paradox is that the very worst aspects of this war come about when efforts are made to be seen to be abiding by agreed international standards for warfare, however much they must be massaged in order to do so. This is the real gap that Tony Blair tried so clumsily to bridge when he attempted to bring the US to the UN in its prosecution of the invasion.

By now it is clearly understood that the legal basis for war, drawn up so narrowly by the Attorney General, was tissue-flimsy and inaccurate in practice, as it was based on poor intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. David Kelly's suicide, whatever the ins and outs of who accused who, who "sexed up" what, and who ordered this, can be directly linked to this miserable act of legal contortion.

The Government and the Bush administration do have the vast majority of the Iraqi people on their side. In a recent poll, 50 per cent gave their backing to the invasion, while another 25 per cent supported it with the proviso that they'd have to see how it panned out before they could commit themselves to full approval.

But while both of these governments now cite the humanity of their act of regime change as being justification enough for war, the fact remains that they seem to relish not at all the task of pushing international debate in a direction that might enshrine the deposition of evil regimes as an international duty rather than as a pick-and-mix global turkey shoot.

Had Mr Blair been less keen to join the fight, and more keen to adopt a third way, arguing a basis under which the international community should consider regime change in any authoritarian state as a matter of principle, instead of looking for ways of legitimising his moral position through other means, he would not be in the mess he is now. A real attempt to make an intellectual challenge to the bankrupt idea that people can be subjected to all kinds of torture and suppression as long as their leaders are no threat to other countries would have been a real contribution. So would a push to rewrite the Geneva Conventions to reflect the reality of the kind of war Mr Blair appears to favour.

The Geneva Conventions are outdated in several ways. As long as the Conventions stick to the idea that only those in uniform have rights as combatants, then as in this war, the powerful are handed the opportunity to make systems up as they go along. Guantanamo, and its like, will flourish.

It is clear too that however repugnant the thought may be, the US will remain wedded to aerial bombardment of countries it is attacking. No matter how smart the bombs are, how sound the intelligence guiding them, such warfare will always run risks of maiming civilians. At the moment this is against the Conventions, even though it is the shape of war to come.

The least a combatant country waging war in this fashion should be compelled to do is to present some sort of acceptable proof that the country in question welcomes invasion. Furthermore, the invader should be prepared fully to compensate those it maims and kills, both with cash and the best of medical attention. At present, a country waging war in this fashion is not even under an obligation to count the injured and dead, let alone consider it their legal duty to care for them and their families.

Those against the war, from both left- and right-wing perspectives, will find such suggestions frightening or distasteful. But the fact is that the rules as they stand at the moment mean nothing. They are irrelevant to warfare today. Which means that there are fewer rules of engagement now than when the first Geneva Convention was enshrined in 1864. What progress we make, what history.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

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