Collatoral damage

However, the place to draw the line between combatants and noncombatants is often not clear-cut[1]. Nagel draws the distinction between those contributing to the support of the survival as a human being of members of an opposition’s armed forces does not qualify them as legitimate military targets – they would be engaged in farming and supplying food, for instance, war nor no war[2]. Other occupations, for example, munitions workers, assimilate noncombatants into the ranks of the military to a greater or lesser degree. The lines between combatant and noncombatant can become increasingly blurred when realist discussions of total war are allowed to enter the picture, or considerations that reckon collective guilt on behalf of the populace of unjust regimes for failing to overthrow their oppressive overlords. Nevertheless, just war considerations are directed towards the principles of the war conventions specifying that once identified, noncombatants cannot be attacked at any time.

Unfortunately, the nature of warfare means that unavoidable harm will inevitably come to civilians. Despite their in-principle immunity based on discrimination, noncombatants of all sides are frequently the collateral damage of otherwise legitimate military activity. The term collateral damage refers to the “destruction unavoidably incurred in the act of destroying a target deemed to be of military significance”[3]. A “principled” approach emphasising taking precautions to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants appears in commentary on US military strategy during the Iraq War:

Nobody likes war. People get killed no matter how careful you try to avoid hitting civilians…I cannot think of another country that put in so much effort to avoid civilian casualties as the USA has in this war[4].

Despite the precautions, however, civilian casualties were still incurred. Nevertheless, just war theory, providing certain criteria are met, does offers justification to exonerate combatants of guilt for the type of effects of modern warfare described below:

And a new way of war did not necessarily prevent some old mistakes: once again, cluster munitions killed and maimed civilians…[I]n the weeks immediately after the war, it was hard to be sure how many innocent bystanders have died[5].

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[1] See Daniel S. Zupan, War, Morality and Autonomy: An Investigation in Just War Theory. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 81-93 for an extended discussion of this issue.

[2] Nagel, War and Massacre, 69.

[3] James Turner Johnson. Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 221

[4] Paul Reynolds, “Vox Populi – Worldwide war-talk on the web” in Sara Beck and Malcolm Dowling (eds.) The Battle for Iraq (Adelaide: ABC Books, 2003), 185

[5] Paul Adams “Shock and Awe – An inevitable victory” in Sara Beck and Malcolm Dowling (eds.) The Battle for Iraq (Adelaide: ABC Books, 2003), 120.