U.S. and British soldiers are surrounding Baghdad as I write, and I’m thinking about St. Augustine of Hippo. If that venerable 4th-century philosopher were alive today, he’d have much to say about the current war ﾗ especially because of the technology being used to fight it.
Augustine lived in a time long before laser-guided cruise missiles and night-vision goggles, when wars were fought with swords, pikes and siege engines, crude weapons that measured victory by the amount of blood spilled. But often, good people were attacked by bad ones, and needed to fight back; so Augustine tried to reconcile Christianity with bloodshed.
Combat was justified, he concluded, in the defence of Christian society, or when the purpose of the war is peace. “War should be waged only as a necessity,” he wrote, “and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace.”
That philosophy worked (more or less) until the 16th century, when Henry VIII’s lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and later the Dominican theologian (and co-drafter of international law) Francisco de Vitoria, sickened of the bloodlust of the Crusades, forged the doctrine of a “just war.”
Building on Augustine, they declared war had to be a last resort, after the failure of all diplomacy. Only a competent and legitimate political authority could declare war, and the stated objectives had to be the real ones. The cause had to be morally justifiable. To avoid suicidal lunacy, the war had to have a reasonable probability of success. The anticipated results had to outweigh the human cost of suffering and death. Finally, civilians could not be involved.
It’s hard to think of any war fought in the intervening centuries that could be justified under all these rules. But technology is changing some of that.
We can leave politicians and theologians to debate the More-Vitoria principles concerning diplomacy, the competence of the leadership, the stated or covert objectives and moral justification in the context of the Second Gulf War; but the kind of gee-whiz technology used in modern weaponry increases the probability of success for the United States, and helps tilt the moral balance in favour of results over the cost of human lives.
Essentially, better technology increases U.S. credibility when Washington states it is not targeting certain things; on Thursday, for instance, when the lights went out in Baghdad, the Pentagon could count on a measure of believability when it tried to reassure reporters that it wasn’t aiming at the city’s power generators.
Contrast this to the Second World War, when (historian John Keegan tells us) the best technology available, working under ideal conditions, could rely on only 70 out of 500 bombs landing within 300 metres ﾗ the length of three football fields ﾗ of their targets. In one sortie against a steel factory in Japan in 1944, the Allies had to drop 376 bombs before they scored one direct hit.
Crude technology in weapons exacts a terrible cost in civilian life, a kind of messiness that plays badly not only in theological but political circles as well. It’s no surprise that in the 20th century, advances in weapons technology introduced the phenomenon of mass civilian casualties.
Most people may not appreciate the knowledge that their horror of casualties has theological underpinnings as well as political ones, but better technology is bringing that aspect of the More-Vitoria doctrine closer to reality.
Technology ﾗ or the lack of it ﾗ is also playing a role in Iraq’s strategy. Years of sanctions have left its army with even less gadgetry than the one that fought in the First Gulf War in 1991, resulting in some apparently easy wins for the “Coalition of the Willing” this time around.
But as the Battle for Baghdad starts, it appears Iraq’s strategy is to lure the coalition into a dirty urban scuffle, fought by snipers, grenades and block-by-block fighting, even hand-to-hand combat. In hardscrabble urban conflicts, the most sophisticated toys ﾗ cruise missiles, supersonic fighter aircraft, global positioning systems and satellite reconnaissance ﾗ are almost useless.
The Americans are terrified of the prospect; not only will they suffer greater casualties fighting with small arms while invading a city they’ve never been to, they will have to justify the deaths of many Iraqi civilians as well, deaths that are inevitable in this kind of warfare.
And civilian deaths are becoming increasingly less acceptable with each new advance in the technology of war.
The Iraqi strategy is placing the Americans in a difficult ethical position: The more they boast about the accuracy of what they like to think of as the most awesome array of military firepower ever assembled, the fewer casualties will be tolerated by a public increasingly looking for the moral comfort offered by precise surgical strikes. If the initial cruise-missile attack on the presidential palaces of Saddam Hussein had succeeded in forcing a quick end to the war only hours after it had begun, as U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had clearly hoped, few civilians would have died, and technology would have given the coalition forces a measure of moral justification.
A dirty urban battle may in fact be Iraq’s most sophisticated weapon, a tactic that is already eroding whatever sympathy the coalition forces may have had in the Muslim world: Strip the coalition of its technological powers and force it to kill civilians, thereby winning the larger war, the one for the hearts and minds of Islam. It’s cynical and repugnant, but it would be logical for a regime that sees suicide bombing as morally justifiable.
Technological development is not just a matter of getting a leg up on the enemy; its very existence becomes a moral factor in international conflict, one that stretches from the fourth-century thoughts of St. Augustine through to the future.
By Jack Kapica, globetechnology.com
