This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Am I understanding this correctly that striking the boat and killing everyone would be fine and legal, striking the boat and killing a bunch and letting the rest drown or be eaten by sharks is fine and legal. But sending in a second strike to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime, Hegseth must be sent to the Hague for hanging?
I could see being upset about the initial strike, if there was another available option to intercept the boat, try the drug dealers, and hang them under law. It is better to go the extra mile to show you aren't making mistakes and accidentally striking innocent boaters.
But making the second strike the point of outrage? Yawn, don't care.
No, that relies on novel legal theory that dealing drugs is a form of terrorism, which seems highly dubious to me.
I think there is some irony here in that most of the (left, I assume) folks up in arms about the Trump administration taking kinetic actions against drug smugglers probably also take a very dim view of Western actions during/leading into the Opium Wars [1]. I certainly think China is at least viewing this all through a lens that sees that history more prominently.
More options
Context Copy link
The steelman for the "Drug dealers = Terrorists" position is that it isn't the drug dealing that makes them terrorists.
Its all the other violent activities they do that are incidental to dealing drugs which are pretty isomorphic to terrorist activities, even if motivated more by profit than ideology.
I think that in fact has been the argument since Tom Clancy wrote a fictional take on it in 1989.
The Justice Department, for instance, charges cartels with "Drug Trafficking" as a separate offense from "Narco-Terrorism" and "Material Support of Terrorism."
So its not so much a 'novel legal theory' as one that hasn't been rigorously tested before a Judge.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeap, should have pulled a Batman and just say “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you”
More options
Context Copy link
Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.
Simply firing two missiles at the boat would not be a war crime (well, there’s an argument to be made that these operations in general constitute extrajudicial executions more than warfare, I personally have mixed thoughts about it, but obviously for this discussion we’re assuming the combat itself is legitimate). The crime is from firing once, confirming the boat is disabled and sinking, noticing survivors in the water, then firing again to finish them off. This is unambiguously a war crime today and has always been considered egregious misconduct. Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water. That would be dishonorable. You would be expected to rescue them and take them prisoner, and perhaps then execute them in an orderly manner if deemed appropriate.
The concept is the same as how you don’t shoot at a pilot who has ejected from a shot-down plane, and is therefore no longer part of the battle. If you kill him in the process of shooting him down, c’est la vie, but if he bails out and you circle back to blow him away on his parachute, that’s beyond the pale.
I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, I'm pretty sure that if the ship still has significant ability to fight despite it's disability, a belligerent would be permitted, under the rules of war, to continue attacking the ship until it no longer poses a threat. Even if the continued attacks will inevitably result in crew deaths.
In my experience, the rules of war contain very few bright line safe harbor rules. Because such rules inevitably would invite abuse.
That being said, I am happy to consider your claim with an open mind. Can you please provide a specific cite to the provision of international law which you believe applies here?
If this is your claim, that it's a war crime to specifically attack the survivors of a ship that is disabled and sinking, then this is a more defensible position. But note that you changed two facts: (1) you changed the ship from merely "disabled" to "disabled and sinking"; and (2) you changed the attack from one which knowingly killed the crew (but perhaps was done for other reasons) to one where the point of the follow-up attack was to kill the surviving crew.
So I guess I would ask you to set forth what exactly you believe to be a war crime. Because I suspect you are setting up a motte and bailey argument. An attack directed at surviving crew of a disabled and sinking ship can be argued to be a war crime, but it's pretty unlikely that's what happened here. A follow-up attack on a partially disabled ship (which happened to kill the remaining crew) is more likely what actually happened, but that's much harder to argue to be a war crime.
So again: What is the exact war crime you are alleging here and do you have a cite?
Appreciate the thoughtful response -- I don't think we actually disagree very much here.
Agreed. I was using "disabled" to mean "firmly out of action", i.e. removed from combat and neutralized as a threat. So:
The ship literally sinking is not necessarily part of my claim, it could be dead in the water, but I agree that if the enemy ship is still moving or shooting it is plainly a legitimate target. I would phrase my claim as "it is a war crime to intentionally attack the surviving crew of a ship which has been neutralized or sunk."
I am not a lawyer and at best an armchair historian, but yes, I was able to find this portion of the Geneva Conventions, which should at least be illustrative: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gcii-1949/article-12/commentary/2017. This comes from the 1949 version of the Conventions; I believe that there is some similar provision in older versions or in some other older treaty, I think from the Hague in 1899, but I couldn't immediately find a source for that. It is considered applicable today, in any case. I also believe there are similar provisions in some other treaties (e.g. UNCLOS) but again I think the Geneva Conventions are illustrative enough on their own (also, if memory serves, the USA is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions but not of UNCLOS anyway). I am fairly confident that what is formalized in the Geneva Conventions was considered the proper way of doing things by custom for a long time, but I admittedly don't have a source at hand for that, it's just from my vaguely recollected history knowledge. Regardless, the historical aspect is only tangential to what is being discussed here.
Anyway. The relevant portion is the discussion of "wounded, sick, and shipwrecked" combatants, under Article 12. The set of [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] is used throughout the convention as a coherent category, and in short the point of the convention is that [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] enemy personnel should be rescued as POWs and given medical attention, to the best of the ability of the prisoner-taking side, and generally treated as required by all other protections for POWs. This is all pretty clear and straightforward, so what is at issue here is who counts as "shipwrecked". This is defined as follows:
Further:
And:
So, this quite directly supports my claim. If a US Navy officer ordered a follow-up strike on a neutralized ship in order to kill its crew, that would indeed be a war crime. Crucially, for the act to be criminal, the victorious party must knowingly fire on a disabled ship, and that's what's really at issue in the present case. The Geneva Convention discusses repeatedly that it is important for the defeated crew to be "refraining from hostilities", which generally seems to be interpreted as not firing (not remotely at issue here) and not maneuvering or otherwise attempting to complete a mission. This is what I was trying to get at in my first post. If the Navy simply fired two missiles at the boat, one after the other, that clearly would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, believed it to still be operational, then fired again to sink it, this would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, confirmed through surveillance that it was disabled but had survivors, then fired again to finish off the crew, this would be a war crime.
You dismiss the second case as "pretty unlikely", but that is exactly what the Navy/DoD is being accused of doing, which is why it is being treated as a Big Deal. In previous strikes on drug boats the Navy has released very clear targeting footage from drones and other aircraft showing the weapon impacts and aftermath, so it's unrealistic to think that they outright could not see the boat. In the absence of any released targeting footage it is impossible for the public to determine conclusively whether a war crime was committed. All we know for a fact is that two missiles were fired at the boat. If targeting footage shows two swift impacts that would plainly disprove a war crime. If targeting footage shows an impact, then a clear view of a burning boat with crew either on the deck or in the water, then another impact, that would prove a war crime, or at least would be very strong evidence. They would have to somehow prove that the second shot was fired without knowing that the boat was disabled and/or without knowing there were surviving crew members.
I've heard talk the the survivors reboarded the not-disabled boat and tried to recover the
drugscargo. If that is true, does it moot everything you've said thus far?You can see the pictures now, they've released some of them. It was obviously a drug running boat, and the only reason it would be something else is if they were running guns instead.
More options
Context Copy link
Apparently Article 13 sets forth the list of persons that would be protected under Article 12. I am skeptical that drug smugglers would be considered protected persons, but anyway . . .
Here's a question for you: Suppose the US were in a bona fide war with another signatory to the applicable Geneva convention. Suppose further that the enemy's merchant marine were transporting vital war materials on the high seas and it was important to us to stop these war materials from moving. Suppose further that our first strike against the transporting vessel rendered it inoperable but the war materials were still salvageable and there was a genuine concern that the enemy would salvage the war materials. In that case, can we agree that it would be permitted to launch further strikes against the disabled ship even if doing so would necessarily kill surviving members of the enemy's merchant marine?
This is, in substance, the unrestricted submarine warfare debate.
If a surface warship has found an unescorted enemy merchantman, or driven the escorts off a convoy, it is in sufficient control of the situation that it can reasonably be expected to hail the target, board it, seize the ship, the cargo, or both, and take crew prisoner if necessary. (Warships carry much larger crews than merchant ships). If the merchantman doesn't respond to a hail and gets fired on, the warship is able to rescue survivors and either seize the cargo or allow it to go down with the crippled ship - including if necessary by using a deck gun to pound the crippled ship into flotsam after the crew have successfully evacuated.
If a submarine finds an unescorted enemy merchantman, it could in principle offer the same courtesy (and occasionally in WW1 this actually happened - WW1-era torpedoes were unreliable and you didn't have many of them, so allowing the crew to evacuate and then sinking the ship with the deck gun was the way to go). But obviously the sub doesn't have the ability to seize cargo or take survivors on board in the way a surface ship would so the crew are left drifting in a lifeboat.
But more realistically, the submarine normally has a sound military reason for hitting and running - either the aim is to torpedo a merchant ship in a convoy without being spotted by the escorting destroyer, or to attack an unescorted merchant ship in an area where enemy destroyers are operating so you want to get away fast before one shows up. So in practice, when you use submarines to interdict enemy merchant shipping (which was the main use case for submarines in both world wars) you are sending merchant ships to the bottom with all hands on board. Given the customs of the sea that would later be institutionalised in the 2nd GC, the vast majority of sailors (including plenty of uncucked naval officers) saw unrestricted submarine warfare as per se perfidious and/or piratical. British Admiral Arthur Wilson favoured hanging submariners as pirates, leading to a backlash and ultimately to British submarines proudly flying the Jolly Rodger - the most recent example being HMS Conqueror when it returned to port after sinking the Belgrano in the Falklands War. Ultimately, the world's navies decided that USW was too militarily useful to be illegal, and Donitz was acquitted on that charge at Nuremberg.
Using small drones operated from a safe distance is more like submarine warfare than surface warfare - you don't have the resources to do things the old-school way so if you want to effectively interdict the commerce in illegal narcotics, you have to be willing to send boats to the bottom with all hands. A surface navy or coast guard officer who sank a boat with all hands "to send a message" when he was on the scene and able to board would be considered a moral monster by everyone who has ever set sail - and doubly so if he took a second shot on a crippled boat to make sure it sank without rescuing the crew. This is quite apart from any criminal liability under the UCMJ or 2nd GC - naval law implements sailors' understanding of morality.
Here we have a case where the US has admitted that they could have interdicted the drug boats the old school way with a surface warship, but chose to use drones. Hegseth said that the point was to use lethal force which wasn't strictly necessary "to send a message", which, regardless of legal technicalities, is evilmaxxing for the evulz from the perspective of maritime custom and tradition. If Hegseth is bullshitting and the real motivation is to interdict more boats with less resources, then this is in the territory of "is USW militarily necessary in a way which overrides sailors' gut feeling that it is piratical?"
Umm, does that mean "yes"?
Would you mind linking me to the source of your quote? I am skeptical.
I made a mistake - it was Rubio and not Hegseth. I found it on Lawfare Media. Googling gives many examples of MSM coverage such as this in Politico, although I note that most of the MSM articles don't use quotes, so it is possibly a paraphrase.
I clicked on a hyperlink in your article and here's what Rubio apparently said:
Looks to me like another case of an uncharitable reading in order to demonize the outgroup.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
War crime conventions apply to uniformed soldiers and civilians. A core portion of the legal argument for these attacks is that these boats are not uniformed military (obviously) nor civilians (obviously) and are instead nonuniform guerrilla terrorists who fail to abide by any conduct contemplated in any war crimes regime the US has adopted.
Under modern customs, irregular combatants are not considered total outlaws and are still expected to be treated properly as POWs. I'm not sure if this is explicitly codified in international law or in US military policy, but it is certainly the general case. For example, even when fighting Al Qaeda or the Taliban, coalition forces were not allowed to summarily execute surrendering enemies (which is essentially what the Navy is being accused of in this case). The clearest example of this is the case from a few years back where an Australian special operations unit was found to have executed a group of Taliban prisoners because they could not fit them into their helicopter. The fact that the Taliban troops were neither regular military nor civilians did not protect the Australian soldiers from prosecution.
This doesn't even get into the question of whether the drug runners should really be classed as "combatants" in the first place as opposed to merely "criminals". If they are properly classified as criminals then these strikes are summary executions (or arguably just murder), not legitimate combat, and would be illegal anyway... but that's not really what's at issue here.
No one seems to know what is really at issue. You have a bunch of folks pointing out military codes and treaties. You have other people just handwaving. You have other people citing laws about piracy. Given that the "this is illegal" side has deployed so many different niche legal theories that seem to routinely fall apart upon full interrogation, I think we've gotten to the point of clarity that this is an "arguments as soldiers" situation, and some people just want more Coke and Venezuelans in the US.
If you ignore legal technicalities, the real issues are fairly clear. Before the alleged "double-tap", they were:
For contrast, if we ask the same questions about the War on Terror, the answers are:
After the double-tap story, the first question becomes slightly more pressing because the level of force the administration is proposing to use is "Maximally destructive naval warfare, equivalent to USW" rather than "Civilised naval warfare".
But fundamentally, this is an important issue because pre-Trump, US policy was to treat drug smuggling as a law enforcement issue, and to interdict it by having civilian Coast Guard vessels intercept drug boats and arrest the drug dealers, with lethal force only used if the drug traffickers fought back. Trump is now treating drug smugglers as a wartime enemy. And no Congresscritters were harmed in the making of this policy change.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You and others (u/UwU , /u/haversoe) are ignoring both the letter of the law and spirit of the law. The letter of the law (such as Geneva article 3 -- https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gci-1949/article-3 ) does not apply to pirates or criminals at sea. They are not a member of armed forces, they never signed the conventions, they are not on the territory of a signing state, they do not get protected.
The spirit of the law is that international law is basically a gentleman's agreement (often observed in the breach), the cooperate quadrant of a prisoner's dilemma to make war slightly more awful. If an enemy unit has been completely defanged, and I capture them instead of killing them, that costs me little, and if my opponent does the same to my troops, we are both much better off because fewer men die unnecessarily. Therefore, it is in my interest to make an agreement with my opponent and order by officers to obey the agreement so that our men are given similar treatment. The spirit of the law is furthermore that members of official armed forces are usually decent, good, productive men, often with families, who are doing the right thing in serving their country, and even if they are on the wrong side of the war, will be productive citizens in the future and it will be tragedy for any more to die than necessary. They are not criminals. The parachuter who we rescue and imprison instead of shooting, may go on to have a great life.
Whereas with drug runners and pirates, we are not in a gentlemen's agreement with them, and we do not want to preserve their life. I could really care less if they are just excuted on the spot, left to be eaten by the sharks, or brought home to be hung. Either way, they are dead. So there is a big difference between executing the drug dealer who deserved to be killed anyways, versus executing the parachuter who we want to live.
They probably wouldn't bother to waste ammo, but if they did shoot the pirates in the water, absolutely nobody would care.
That’s true, but I don’t think it would’ve been considered “proper” conduct. They might sink a pirate ship and leave without making a rescue attempt but I don’t think they’d finish off survivors. And it would be more a case of “nobody is going to miss them anyway” rather than active policy. Certainly many pirates were captured from sunk/defeated ships, then tried and jailed/whipped/executed according to the law. Admittedly I got a bit carried away with the historical analogies, I have some knowledge but I’m far from an expert and it’s not a perfect parallel to the issue at hand anyway.
Part of the (legal) problem is that the anti-drug operation is being justified in no small part by declaring the smugglers to be irregular combatants (narco-terrorists) affiliated with the Venezuelan government. If they are merely ordinary drug smugglers then the Navy should not be sinking their boats at all, per US law, and doing so would be criminal. But if they are combatants then the strike would be a war crime. There’s no version of modern law where killing the survivors after destroying the boat is legal/acceptable conduct.
Edit: @KMC as well
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, you literally would. There's no war crimes for pirates. It requires state actors, which these are not. They are beyond the law, and have put themselves there. Narco cartels are not signatories to the geneva conventions, and would not be allowed if they wanted to.
Pirates do not deserve due process, and never have, and never will.
Just to further drive this point home: the narcos are engaged in what is effectively chemical warfare. They are in the process of violating the GC when they were shot out of the water.
No, they're not; this is just sophistry.
Yeah, at that point, you'll have a hard time waging a war that's chemical-free (SMBC).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Personally, I think these guys ARE state actors, but Venezuela has obvious incentives to never ever claim them, so they're acting under the flag of no nation, and thus its hard to see why we shouldn't call their bluff and just treat them like pirates until Venezuela actually complains.
We're also at the point where the U.S. response to sending these boats has been made clear. I'm sure there are also backchannels where its communicated "if the boats keep coming, we're going to keep blowing them up."
They keep putting the boats in the water. What precisely are they EXPECTING. "Don't worry brother, they will surely detain you for a fair trial if you're caught in the act. Pay no attention to the reaper drone circling overhead."
It would explain the extra personnel on the boats. Illegal smuggling as a patronage jobs program.
My priors on a struggling petrostate trying to make up lost funding by becoming a narcostate are pretty high.
The only other viable explanation would be that Maduro has lost significant control over his territory to gangs, but for obvious reasons wouldn't want to admit that, so this is in fact just cartels acting with impunity and they consider the occasional drug mule being obliterated as the cost of doing business.
Its just possible that the boats getting ganked are intentional diversions from, I dunno, actual submarines or some more surreptitious shipping methods.
I mean isn’t Venezuela’s crime problem and failed-statery pretty well known?
Uncharitably, most lefties I talk to seem to be studiously ignorant of it.
I used to use Norway vs. Venezuela vs. Saudia Arabia as a case study in why Socialism doesn't cause prosperity, but sitting on billions of barrels of oil (or similar natural resources) does, and even then socialism can ruin it.
I'm unsure, myself, as to whether Maduro intentionally permits gangs to thrive or just partnered with them out of convenience/desperation, but I do believe it is all tied up in a giant Kleptocracy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was a rather more pointed example of this, IIRC, where deniable Russian troops in Syria got in a dustup with the US military. The story I heard is that US forces contacted the Russians demanding that their forces cease fire and withdraw, were told that no Russian forces were involved, tee hee, and responded by annihilating the Russian troops with a sustained, overwhelming bombardment.
The Battle of Khasham, for those interested in reading more.
More options
Context Copy link
That's as clear an example of Defect/Defect as you can ask for. Sucks for the Russians... but doesn't it always?
More options
Context Copy link
>mfw I'm a member of a deniable military squad working for a sovereign nation, and I am denied by my nation when the opposing force has arty.
Or if you like:
"Andrei, you've lost ANOTHER Mercenary Battallion?"
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes it would be a war crime. Why do you think there's so much ink spilled down thread about whether the second strike was to sink the disabled boat and the deaths were incidental or that it was done specifically to kill the survivors? You are not allowed to kill shipwrecked crew who are out of combat.
What say you to this: "Am I understanding this correctly that shooting the fighter plane down and killing the pilot would be fine and legal, allowing the pilot to bail to be eaten by bears in the woods is fine and legal. But strafing the parachuting pilot to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime?"
More options
Context Copy link
Killing combatants who are hors de combat (i.e. providing "no quarter") is illegal for signatories of the Hague convention of 1899. It's a war crime. In any case, it's not clear that's what happened and I assume that's why Congress is investigating. If they find evidence the civilian leadership committed a war crime, I have no idea where it goes from there. When it's a uniformed guy, the military branch convenes a court martial and hopefully justice is served one way or the other. But when is the last time a department head has been found guilty of anything?
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, because that's apparently what happened and so that is the rope by which his enemies will attempt to hang him. If he had let them drown, that would be the rope instead. If he had killed them all in the first strike, then that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link