KNOW YOUR ENEMY
Recently, Jay Tea over at Wizbang has taken on some tough topics. With an honesty and forthrightness not seen very often by one of the “mortal humans” of the blogsphere, Jay Tea’s latest target is the Geneva Convention.
As I pointed out in my post on the Marine killing in the Fallujah mosque, the incident was at worst, ambiguous as it related to whether or not the Geneva Convention had been violated. Jay Tea takes that a step further and says the entire document should be re-thought:
“The Conventions were passed in a simpler time, when wars were much more clearly defined. One nation would attack another, and then they’d fight back and forth until one side won or both sides got tired of fighting. But it retained the “personal” touch — it was one government or head of state against another, and there was a certain element of peerage involved. The good guys dressed one way, and the bad guys another, and you could tell them apart at a glance.”
He points out that the current conflict involves “terrorists (who) fall into a gray area between criminals and soldiers, having elements of both but being fully neither.” He points out the shortcomings of treating criminal acts of terrorists as crimes:
“Clinton especially treated terrorism as a law-enforcement problem, and threw cops and lawyers at it. It had it’s moments of successes, but failures as well. We locked up the people behind the first World Trade Center bombing, but that didn’t prevent 9/11.”
He calls for a new “Convention”:
“So it’s time for a new Convention, where the United States can outline just how it will deal with such people. And this one shouldn’t be held in Geneva. Geneva is a resort community — people go there, go to the spas, eat chocolate, ski, and what not. We need this new convention to be somewhere that has seen terrorism up close and personal, where the wounds are still fresh and the delegates will be constantly reminded of just what this new enemy is. My suggestions are places such as New York City; Fallujah, Iraq; Beslan, in Russia; or perhaps Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 fell to earth.”
What Jay Tea doesn’t point out is that while the Geneva Convention is “easy” to violate when your enemy is in civilian clothes and using civilians in the cowardly manner of a shield for your nefarious crimes, it did work reasonably well when fighting the Iraqi army and, will work if and when we fight the Iranian army. He’s correct for being concerned about the Convention’s use against the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, but my reading of it (and I’m no expert) leads me to believe that it’s protocols can be stretched to cover situations like the Marine found himself while in the mosque without scrapping the whole deal.
Besides, getting 192 nations to agree to ANYTHING these days is well nigh an impossibility. And can you imagine nations that sympathize with the beheaders, disembowelers, torso splitters, eye gougers, tongue slitters, ear loppers, and hand choppers at a summit to try and make the laws of international conflict more humane?