class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # Dirty Wars ## The Shock of the Old ### Jack McDonald --- class: inverse # Lecture Outline .pull-left[ How does starvation help us to understand indirect harms to civilian populations? ] .pull-right[ - Living With Hypocrisy - Old Ways of War - War and Infrastructure - The Shock of the Old - Conclusions and Connections ] ## Main Points War crimes, while shocking, are a way of understanding how and why the rules of war matter to coalition generation and maintenance Examining starvation tactics is a window into many different forms of coercion that predate the "war as battle" ideal of inter-state warfare in the 19th Century Contemporary warfare is inextricable from infrastructures that support civilian life that are linked to global markets and politics ??? This lecture examines the continued use of raids, sieges, starvation, and slaughter in contemporary warfare. In this session we will examine attacks upon infrastructure as a means of warfare and its continuing relevance for contemporary conflict. The lecture will focus upon the conflicts in Iraq and Syria to examine the degree to which modern-day attacks upon civilian infrastructure differ from those of the past. Discussion Questions: Is coercion possible without implicitly threatening civilians? How does focusing upon infrastructure change our view of destruction in war? Readings: Howe, Cymene, Jessica Lockrem, Hannah Appel, Edward Hackett, Dominic Boyer, Randal Hall, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, et al. “Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 3 (May (2016)): 547–65. Thomas, Claire. “Civilian Starvation: A Just Tactic of War?”, Journal of Military Ethics 4, no. 2 ((2005)): 108-118. Power, Susan. “Siege Warfare in Syria: Prosecuting the Starvation of Civilians,” Amsterdam Law Forum 8, no. 2 ((2016)): 1-22. asd --- class: inverse # Part 1: Living With Hypocrisy ??? --- # War is Illegal but Sanctions are Legal > We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it? > I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it. Madeleine Albright .left-66[ ![Kellogg Briand Pact and UN Charter](img/2020/warillegal.png) ] .right-66[ ![Madeleine Albright](img/2020/albright.jpg) ] ??? --- # Starvation is Now Illegal, Sieges are Legal ![Starvation pictures](img/2020/starvation.png) .pic80[![Pictures of sieges](img/2020/siegespics.png)] ??? --- # Open Civilian Harm in IR > In 2015, Russian airstrikes destroyed a large bakery run by the Turkish aid agency IHH in northwest Syria. According to the Union of Non-Governmental Organizations of the Islamic World (UNIW), the bakery served around 50,000 people. > The same year, Russian planes destroyed the largest bread bakery in the western countryside of Aleppo, affecting 120,000 people’s access to bread. Strikes against bakeries did not cease until the precarious ceasefire agreement over the opposition-held enclave of Idlib, negotiated by Russia and Turkey in March 2020. In January 2020, Russian bombs were still targeting bakeries in Idlib, with ten civilians killed in the city of Ariha in one such bombing. > “The attacks are recklessly indiscriminate and the pattern and number of attacks suggest that government forces have been targeting civilians,” stated Human Rights Watch in a 2012 report, stressing that “reckless, indiscriminate attacks and deliberately targeting civilians are war crimes.” Like hospitals, bakery bombings are part of a systematic strategy to “punish” the population of opposition-held areas by denying them access to vital goods and services. Lyse Mauvais, _From bombing bakeries to building them_ ??? https://syriadirect.org/news/from-bombing-bakeries-to-building-them-bread-instrumentalized-by-the-assad-regime/ --- # Humanitarian Politics > The first deconfliction exchanges began in September 2014, when a U.S.-led coalition intervened against the so-called Islamic State in northern and eastern Syria. When Russia and Turkey launched their own military interventions in Syria in 2015 and 2016, respectively, they, too, were included in the deconfliction process. OCHA continues to feed information to all three nations, who are expected to share it with their allies and restrain them from attacking objects on the no-strike list. In Russia’s case, that means the Syrian government. > In his own briefing to the Security Council, OCHA’s Mark Lowcock also brought up attacks on deconflicted targets. He pointedly noted that many sites on the no-strike list that “are not hospitals have not been attacked,” suggesting that health-related targets are deliberately selected for destruction. While avoiding direct accusations against the Syrian and Russian governments, he dropped hints, phrased as rhetorical questions, that OCHA’s no-strike list is being used to find and destroy medical clinics. “If I were an NGO running a hospital why would I want to give you details of my location if that information is simply being used to target the hospital?” Lowcock asked. Aron Lund, _The UN Made a List of Hospitals in Syria. Now They’re Being Bombed._ ??? OCHA, the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, defines deconfliction as the “exchange of information and planning advisories by humanitarian actors with military actors” in order to “remove obstacles to humanitarian action, and avoid potential hazards for humanitarian personnel.”20 Practically speaking, deconfliction has come to mean that the UN helps humanitarian actors on the ground relay information about their presence and their legally protected status to military actors operating in the area, including by registering them on what is informally known as a “no-strike list.” https://tcf.org/content/report/un-made-list-hospitals-syria-now-theyre-bombed/?agreed=1 --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[ What is your opinion of sanctions that have humanitarian consequences? Is it ever possible to have effective sanctions without humanitarian consequences? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 2: Old Ways of War ??? --- # Civilians as Targets > Rather than privileging either civilians or combatants in our discussions of the ethics of war, we need to think through the implications of the impossibility of the distinction. Some might say that both are persons with equivalent claims to life. Taking seriously what the attempted distinction revolves around – namely the question of the involvement in harm - one might, alternatively, not start from entitlements but simply begin to acknowledge the way in which we are always potentially harmful to each other. ‘Innocence’, in this view, marks an impossible separation from politics. Living together means having effects on one another; some of these may be harmful. Maja Zehfuss, _Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War_ ??? (control thru NC targeting) --- # Raids, Slaughter, and Slavery > pastoral peoples' relationship to land and competition with others for it drove their system of war, a system much aided by their ability to swoop into agricultural zones to plunder then depart (using their stock to carry away their plunder). Thus began the long adversarial relationship between sedentary agricultural peoples and the still very large population of _mobile_ foragers, and, later, pastoral nomads. Wayne E. Lee, _Waging War_ .pic70[![DREF framework of Al-Dayel et al](img/2020/dref.jpeg)] ??? quote p.32 --- # Starvation - Destroying food supplies is a key way to drive populations from an area - Laying waste to agricultural production was a key method of triggering a battles - Scorched earth is a sensible way to deal with approaching armies - Economic warfare is war - We can detect "high/low" boundaries in warfare by looking at cattle raiding - Control of food supplies/punitive cattle raids a key element of COIN .left-40[ ![Tastes like home...](img/2020/bkiraq.jpg) ] .right-40[ > In 1692, in Belgium, Luxembourg could not move forward to Enghien, as he wished to do, but he had to remain for three weeks at Soignes, because his wagon pool was not sufficient for the transport of foodstuffs from Mons, where his depot was. It is hardly 18 miles from Mons to Enghien and 9 miles to Soignies. Hans Delbrück, _The Dawn of Modern Warfare_ ] ??? - Food availability is a fundamental limit on warfare - Reading maps of army paths - they could easily "eat out countryside" making pursuit impossible - Large armies require complex networks of food to sustain them - Contemporary warfare is weird in terms of food availability --- # Sieges .pull-left[ ![The Siege of Aleppo](img/2020/aleppo.png) ] .pull-right[ - We think of war in terms of battles, most of the time sieges were more important - Starvation is a key element of warfare that we don't usually think about - Modern sieges are very weird due to humanitarian aid and global connections ] ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[ What should humanitarian organisations do if it is clear that their aid is being redirected for military or political purposes? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 3: War and Infrastructure ??? --- # What is Infrastructure? > The word "infrastructure" typically conjures associations with physical networks for transportation, communication, or utilities. Infrastructure is considered to be a hidden substrate-the binding medium or currnet between objects of positive consequence, shape, and law. Yet today, more than grids of pipes and wires, infrastructure includes pools of microwaves beaming from satellites and populations of atomized electronic devices that we hold in our hands. The shared standards and ideas that control everything from technical objects to management styles also constitute an infrastructure. Far from hidden, infrastructure is now the overt point of contact and access between us all-the rules governing the space of everyday life. Keller Easterling, _Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space_ ??? --- # Why Does Infrastructure Matter in War? .left-40[ ![Europe in 1812](img/2020/europe1812.jpg) ![Deaths by napoleon on moscow campaign](img/2020/napoleondeaths.gif) ] .right-40[ ![The Schlieffen plan map](img/2020/schlieffen.jpg) ] ??? --- # Civilian Infrastructure .medium[ > After several weeks with relatively few attacks on civilian or dual-use infrastructure, NATO—frustrated by the lack of progress—accelerated the pace of the campaign and expanded the tasking list to include targets aimed at bringing the impact of the war home to the Serbian people, especially in the capital city of Belgrade. These included state-run radio and television stations, railroad and automobile bridges over the Danube, and the power grid that provided electricity to most of Serbia. By the end of the war, 85 percent of Serbia was without electricity. Ward Thomas, _Victory by Duress: Civilian Infrastructure as a Target in Air Campaigns_ > The wartime destruction of Yemeni infrastructure caused significant harm to civilians, undermining their basic human security and economic livelihoods. With the entry of the Saudi-led coalition into the war in 2015, attacks on infrastructure shifted from targeting primarily energy installations to a broader range of targets, including agriculture, fisheries and health care. The widespread targeting of infrastructure reflects a broader trend of increasing direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure in recent MENA conflicts, particularly through air strikes, shelling and fighting in contested cities, ports and their hinterlands. Jeannie Sowers and Erika Weinthal, _Humanitarian challenges and the targeting of civilian infrastructure in the Yemen war_ ] ??? https://doi.org/10.1080/09636410600666238 --- # Harm via Infrastructure - Direct and indirect causes - Intentional and unintentional acts - Necessary and unnecessary actions - Foreseeable and Unforeseeable harms ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[ How long do you think it will take to rebuild cities like Kobani, Raqqa, and Mosul? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 4: The Shock of the Old ??? --- # The Problems of Urban Warfare ![Collection of images about urban warfare](img/2020/urbanwarfare.png) ??? --- # Modern Siege - The way to defeat a defended urban area without direct assault is to prevent the defenders from acquiring food and water - If food supplies are permitted for humanitarian purposes, there is no way for the attacker to ensure that they are not diverted to military defenders. Is this a good reason to prohibit food deliveries? - If civilians leave, the remaining food supplies will allow defenders to hold out for longer. Should this be permitted? - It is very difficult, if not impossible, to attack an urban area to regain control without killing significant numbers of civilians - If the defender does not permit civilians to leave, whose fault is it if they die in an assault? - If causing civilian casualties is a significant issue for one side, does refusal to attack urban areas give their opponents an incentive to operate in these places? ??? --- # Coercion Under Globalisation > Russia, backed by China, on Friday cast its 14th U.N. Security Council veto since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011 to block cross-border aid deliveries from Turkey and Iraq to millions of Syrian civilians. > The resolution, drafted by Belgium, Kuwait and Germany, would have allowed cross-border humanitarian deliveries for a further 12 months from two points in Turkey and one in Iraq. But Syrian ally Russia only wanted to approve the two Turkish crossings for six months and had proposed its own draft text. > Russia and China vetoed the text while the remaining 13 members of the Security Council voted in favor. A resolution needs a minimum nine votes in favor and no vetoes by Russia, China, the United States, Britain or France to pass. > U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft told the council after the Russia and China vetoes that she was in a state of shock, saying the consequences “will be disastrous.” She described Russia and China’s opposition as “reckless, irresponsible and cruel.” Michelle Nichols, _Russia, backed by China, casts 14th U.N. veto on Syria to block cross-border aid_ ??? --- # Starvation: Control and Bargaining .pull-left[ ![Syria Siege Map, 2015](img/2020/syria2015.jpg) ![Syria Siege Map, 2017](img/2020/syria2017.jpg) ] .pull-right[ ![Syria Siege Map, 2016](img/2020/syria2016.jpg) ![Syria Siege Map, 2018](img/2020/syria2018.jpg) ] ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[ Is it better for international organisations to "tell the truth" and maintain access to conflict zones, or for them to do the maximum possible humanitarian good, even if that involves refusing to acknowledge war crimes, etc? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 5: Conclusions and Connections ??? --- # Key Points .large[ Older forms of warfare still work, even if many techniques are now banned under LOAC Infrastructure damage has the potential to cause more long-term harm than war itself Urban warfare poses an irreducible set of problems that will only increase in importance as the world urbanises ] ??? --- # Key Questions .large[ Do you think it is possible for humanitarian groups to be truly neutral in civil conflicts? Should states have a right to intervene to provide aid in a conflict? If so, how does that connect to the right to use force? How should states like the US and the UK approach the problem that they will be unable to persuade states like Russia from interpreting LOAC in the same way? ] ???