perspective on the war,” but the propagandist’s hand is also evident in the selective focus on American soldiers engaging in clean combat and aiding local Iraqis (Andén-Papadopoulos 2009:923). At the low end, combatants organize on Facebook and proselytize on Twitter. With barriers to entry virtually nil, it’s a rare insurgent movement that doesn’t have a web site. Heightened visibility has increased the propaganda value of the other side’s targeting errors or collateral damage. Davids fighting Goliaths often seem perfectly willing to draw their brothers and sisters into the fight in hopes of making them, willing or not, front-page martyrs for the cause (Skerker 2004).
During the Gaza Wars, Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) waged breaking-news media offenses. Both sides plied the internet with blogs, You-Tube, and Facebook. An IDF “vlog,” or video blog, provided a running narrative of Israeli restraint and precision in contrast to Hamas’s reckless and deliberate endangerment of civilians on both sides of the conflict. In one clip, a Hamas fighter, gun slung over his shoulder, dashes across a street carrying a young boy as a shield against Israeli snipers.25 In another, unexpectedly gruesome, YouTube skirmish, the IDF and Hamas accused each other of deliberately slaughtering animals in the Gaza Zoo: animal rights meet modern warfare.
Very different sorts of images are found on the so-called “war porn” websites. Billed as an unedited look at war, the sites feature soldiers’ photographs of severed arms, legs, or fingers, spilled intestines, or decapitated heads (“headshots,” in the posting lingo), often accompanied by crude or flippant remarks (“name this body part”; “that’s gotta hurt!”) as well as technical chat about what kind of weapon likely caused the damage depicted. This is the digital flotsam of today’s wars. But many soldiers who post pictures or contribute comments say the images force viewers to reckon with the true costs of war; that they’re a corrective to conventional media coverage that sanitizes war as a matter of decency and taste. “Maybe then the public will not be so rah-rah about killing people,” noted a user named “some more gore from the Q” (quoted in Andén-Papadopoulos 2009:924).
Of course, information and images of this sort are easy to manipulate. Iconic photographs mislead by abstraction and saturation. Some images go viral while others languish. Information activism has its moral hazards, too. Susan Sontag (2003) reminds us that a barrage of war images can be overwhelming and paralyzing. The privacy and safety of those uploading pictures can be put at risk (images and audio leave digital traces that can be used to identify the originator). Spin is endemic. While information broadcast by human rights groups usually adheres to certain standards of proof, user-generated and edited content usually doesn’t. Images are often shorn of context. Truth can dissolve in a mash-up of borrowed jpegs and bad information. On the user end, shallow “clicktivism” can replace meaningful study and engagement (Witness 2011; Carpenter 2012).
Greater transparency won’t of itself lead to greater accountability or better human rights outcomes. But the ubiquity of new media makes it more likely that the truth will out and that we will have a more detailed and less curated grasp on the reality of war. WikiLeaks was able to obtain, decrypt, and post on YouTube a 38-minute audio-video clip filmed from the turret of a U.S. Apache helicopter that showed the killing in July 2007 in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad of 18 people, including two Reuters journalists, by a burst of rounds fired from the gunship’s 30 mm cannons, followed by attacks on a van attempting to rescue the wounded.26 The gross disparity of power, combined with the callous banter of the gunners during the killings, makes the video disturbing to watch. Even taking into account the fact that one person on the ground appears to be holding an RPG rocket launcher and that a 3-minute version of the video was misleadingly edited, the episode belied official assurances that all the victims were confirmed militants, and cast doubt on the overarching U.S. narrative about the care and precision of attacks. After Pentagon officials defended the killings as within the rules of engagement (ROE) in force at the time, WikiLeaks posted classified versions of the ROE to suggest that wasn’t the case either.
The Power of Human Rights
The obstacles to realizing human rights in war are many: deference to the war powers of executive branches, push-back from militaries, and the view that vital issues of national security are ultimately beyond the reach of “peacetime” laws, just to mention a few. Human rights continue to combat the frankly militaristic idea that an acceptable measure of civilian harm is unavoidable and even expected in contemporary war. The more axiomatic and self-evident that belief becomes, the harder it will be to pursue brighter humanitarian hopes. Still, the currency of rights in international thought and practice is formidable and growing. Naturally skeptical of the exercise of power, unfettered by military mores, and singularly humanitarian in aim, human rights norms defend the continuity of rights in dark times, set a high threshold to infringe the right to life, and show healthy skepticism toward the recourse to war, and distrust, perhaps even incredulity, toward military claims regarding the conduct of operations. Rights bring the long-term and cumulative impacts of war into focus, highlighting the terrorization of people even by lawful attacks, and counting the true cost of war.
CHAPTER 2
Humanizing the Laws of War
How dangerous it can be to be innocent.
—Hannah Arendt (quoted in Owens 2007:72)
… whatever it is that the law is after it is not the whole story.
—Clifford Geertz (2008:173)
A human rights framework rejects the idea that war is a state of exception governed by a law unto itself. Rights protect human dignity “always and everywhere” (Provost 2002:19). The integrity and autonomy of the individual count in every case. To think of people in this way is to resist Thucydides’s tragic maxim that “the dominion of imperious necessities” makes war a “hard master” (Thucydides 1881:222). It is to affirm the intrinsic value of civilians and civilian life. These are people with rights who cannot be used for some military purpose. Soldiers, too, have a right not to be used as cannon fodder (cf. Walzer 1977:137). Juxtapose these categorical imperatives with the more utilitarian designs of humanitarian law, and the law seems wanting. As Louise Doswald-Beck, former head of the ICRC legal division, notes (2004:356), the safeguards afforded by humanitarian law conventions “have now fallen behind the protection provided by HR [human rights] treaties.” This is perhaps a cri de coeur from a field battered by new wars, but the rigor of rights does set them apart from the qualified protections available under the laws of war.
As noted, the idea that human rights are the law of peace and international humanitarian law is the law of war is hard to sustain given the character of today’s conflicts. These tensions still crop up in the form of turf battles between the regimes, but more pragmatic developments are unfolding within the law itself. Considerations of strategy and victory continue to marginalize human rights, but ideas and practices associated with rights are nevertheless seeping into IHL, rendering it less technical and tactical, less deferential to reasons of state, and more in step with the suffering of the individual victims of war. As Marko Milanović puts it,
The law applicable in war is no longer solely a law between sovereigns who agree out of grace and on the basis of reciprocity to limit themselves in their struggles to reduce the suffering of innocent people. Rather, human beings embroiled in armed conflict retain those rights that are inherent in their human dignity, which are more—not less—important in wartime than in peacetime. (Milanović 2011a:95)
Human rights and the laws of war have been loosely associated for decades, but it was not until the internecine carnage of the 1990s that the details of rights started to take hold in customary, and to a lesser degree, treaty law. The legal gap with regard to intrastate wars created an opening for rights, but so did the changing normative terrain. A web of NGOs, intergovernmental organizations and agencies, and progressive states pressed the issue. Human rights courts
