The Inherent Flexibility of the Human Moral Compass: Part 2

This is Part 2 of a two part Blog, and should be read after Part 1.

We have seen that within three years of the start of World War II, all belligerents had foresworn a vow that they had all taken in September 1939 not to bomb civilians. In fact, by 1943 this was being undertaken on a daily, and nightly, basis throughout Europe. Furthermore, there was no longer any pretence that bombs were being dropped on militarised urban targets and that the nearby population was being bombed ‘by accident’. By then both sides were calling them, their own actions that is, ‘terror bombings’ – or, for more public consumption, by the euphemism ‘strategic bombing’. In any event, the avowed intention was to demoralise the civilian population and thus fatally damage the enemy’s morale and ‘will to fight’.

As soon as this principle was established, by the Allied military and government - without any involvement or discussion with the public or parliament – thereafter, all efforts were concentrated on undertaking this grisly task with increased efficiency and effectiveness. This is a classic human cognitive, once you have determined it is ‘alright’ to do something, you should do it as well as you can, thus reinforcing the justification.

That is how we ended up with Dresden.

In ‘The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner’, Daniel Ellsberg painstakingly describes the long slow process involved. Having convinced themselves that bombing cities, and killing as many civilians as possible was justified, the Allies then gradually perfected their technique.

They realised that explosives killed relatively few such targets, but that the resultant fires were much more effective. This resulted in a change of tactics to cause as many fires as possible; by using high-incendiary bombs and by adopting magnesium-thermite that could not be extinguished by water. As Ellsberg says:

“In 1943 the RAF successfully tested a theory that had been conceived some time before: that the best way to destroy large parts of cities was to harness the forces of nature by appropriately designed technology and tactics. Specifically, it was hoped that a “firestorm” could be created, a kind of fire that would change the local winds—in effect, altering the area’s weather. If enough planes were sent in en masse to do patterned area bombing with incendiaries, a lot of little fires would start simultaneously throughout a large area. This would be helped by first dropping high-explosive bombs, which would break up the structures and make for better kindling, and also block fire trucks from the streets. The fire departments would be unable to deal with the many small fires, which would spread and join together until they became a mass fire. A large part of the city would burn uncontrollably.

As this happened, super-heated air would rise rapidly in a strong updraft, thus creating a low-pressure area, sucking in winds from the surrounding area. In effect, the fire would create its own draft, changing wind patterns. And the new oxygen coming in would feed this fire like bellows on a hearth, turning the entire city into a furnace. That was the theory.

"After many attempts, success finally came in Hamburg on the night of July 27, 1943, in Operation Gomorrah. It was proven that with this effect, temperatures could rise up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone died in the area within the circle of fire, fed by winds coming from all directions, at up to 150 miles per hour. Those in shelters died from asphyxiation, if not from heat. The calcium carbonate in cement decomposes and the silicate sand in concrete can melt at this temperature, causing buildings to collapse. Asphalt melted and firefighters were trapped; their equipment bogged down on the street, preventing them from moving. People fleeing the flames were stuck in the asphalt and became flaming torches. The radiant heat itself without the visible flame was so intense that it crossed fire-breaks and streets and spread the fire within this zone of death. About forty-four thousand civilians died in Hamburg.”

This was regarded as a resounding success, and ‘Bomber Harris’ wanted more. From then on, the avowed purpose of Allied City bombings was to create such a ‘fire-storm’.

It was most successfully achieved with the destruction of Dresden over three days of bombing beginning on the night of February 13th 1945. A spectacular fire-storm was generated which killed some 25,000 people, incinerating even many of those who had managed to get to bomb shelters.

This was despite the fact that, according to a contemporary report by an RAF bombing analyst, “Dresden had little military significance and anyway the slaughter came too late to have any serious effect on the war”.

To this, finally, the public reaction showed evidence of distaste, and this caused Churchill to pull-back from his determination to allow such exercises. But the RAF was not cowed, and – ignoring Churchill – determined to purse these tactics.

When USAAF bombers were able to reach Japanese cities, the same tactic was pursued, and it worked particularly well with buildings made mostly from wood and paper. After all, as early as 1941:

“General George Marshall held an “off the record” briefing for seven senior journalists in Washington, during which he promised that if war with the Japanese did come, “we’ll fight mercilessly. Flying Fortresses [B-17s] will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out.”

Achieving this on the ground became a personal obsession for the USAAF commander, General Curtis LeMay.

In May 1945, the New York Times proudly reported casualty estimates for Tokyo civilians under a three-line headline claiming

TOKYO ERASED

51 Square Miles Burned Out in Six B-29 Attacks on Tokyo LeMay Backs Figures with Photos of Havoc —1,000,000 Japanese Are Believed to Have Perished in Fires

In the United States, the depersonalisation of small, non-European-looking ‘Japs’ having been in vogue since Pearl Harbour meant that was generally regarded as nothing more than good news.

It is thus a small step to rationalising the dropping of what was regarded simply as a more efficient means of achieving the same effect: the atomic bomb. This explains why, as Ellsberg describes, there was absolutely no equivocation or debate about the morality of dropping atomic bombs on Japan by the US military or the President, it was simply an extension of previous policy. Truman famously said on many occasions that neither the prospect nor the actual use of the atom bomb ever gave him a moment’s hesitation or a night’s troubled sleep.

We also now know that Japanese government and military were well on the (admittedly rather long) path to surrendering before the bombs were dropped, as was well known by the Allies. Furthermore, in fact, the final straw resulting in a surrender on 15th August 1945, was not the atomic bombs at all (dropped on 6th and 9th August), but rather the declaration of war against Japan by Russia in the days between the bombings.

After the war, Admiral Soemu Toyoda said, "I believe the Russian participation in the war against Japan rather than the atom bombs did more to hasten the surrender." Prime Minister Suzuki also declared that the entry of the USSR into the war made "the continuance of the war impossible".

Upon hearing news of the event from Foreign Minister Togo, Suzuki immediately said, "Let us end the war", and agreed to finally convene an emergency meeting of the Supreme Council with that aim. The official British history, The War Against Japan, also states that the Soviet declaration of war "brought home to all members of the Supreme Council the realization that the last hope of a negotiated peace had gone and there was no alternative but to accept the Allied terms sooner or later.

After the war, in his memoirs Admiral William D Leahy, said:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

As he was the chief of staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, it is a shame that there is no record of him voicing such an objection at the time.

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan”. Similar statements were made by Fleet Admiral Halsey, and even by Major General Curtis LeMay himself.

In any event, the main reason that the Japanese had held out from surrendering for as long as they did was the Allied demand for an ‘unconditional’ surrender and the declaration that Emperor Hirohito would have to step down. How ironic that after defeat, the occupying commander, General McArthur decided to keep the Emperor in position after all.

So why did was the first atom bomb dropped? As we have seen, it was partly because it was a no-brainer, as a simple continuation of previous policy to kill as many Japanese civilians as possible, and partly for a number of other reasons:

• ‘because it was there’, and ‘to see what would happen’. According to Halsey: “[the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it”. Actually, I feel that this is rather unfair on the scientists – many of whom moved heaven and earth to try and stop the use of their invention – but it does apply to aspects of the military

• in similar vein, but in a more determined sense - on the part of the military rather than the scientists - to be able to witness and calculate the difference between the effect of ‘ordinary’ bombing ordinance, and the atomic bomb

• Truman could have waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the occupation of Japan

• to demonstrate the power of these new weapons to the Russians at the start of the Cold War.

In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert S McNamara recalled General Curtis LeMay, saying: "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." McNamara continued: “And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

In another Blog I have noted that the Indian Judge at the post-war Japanese Military War Crimes Tribunal dissented from the majority verdicts because he believed that the Allied victors should have been arraigned as war criminals in relation to the atomic bombs.

The supposed popular belief is that the US generally believed that the killing of thousands of Japanese civilians was justified on the grounds that it saved the lives of many American soldiers.

As Bomber Harris put it in 1945:

“Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier”.

That's one hell of a 'but'...

This brings us straight to the nub of more recent morally dubious military calculations; the view that there is an asymmetrical value to be placed, not just on our soldiers as opposed to their soldiers, but our soldiers as opposed to their innocent non-combatants.

Rather than send in a troop of special forces to assassinate a man in the Middle East that we believe to be a terrorist, and risk losing some of those men – the view prevails that we are justified in using artillery, bombs and/or drone to ‘take him out’, even if it necessitates ‘collateral damage’ in the form of non-terrorist men, women and children.

For some reason, maybe associated with the customary firing of AK-47s into the air in celebration, wedding parties are notoriously vulnerable. Here are just a handful of examples, all easily retrievable in multiple media sources, and none denied by the belligerent forces involved:

• Haska Meyna wedding party airstrike on 6th July 2008 where 47 civilians died, including the bride

• Azizabad airstrike was carried out by the USAF on Friday 22nd August 2008 in the village of Azizabad which is located in Shindand district. The airstrike killed an estimated 78 to 92 civilians, mostly children, and a number of structures in the village including homes were damaged or destroyed, although there remains some dispute about the accuracy of these figures. A Taliban commander was the intended target of the airstrike

• Wech Baghtu wedding party airstrike on 3rd Nov 2008 in which 37 civilians died, mostly women and children

• Granai airstrike, sometimes called the Granai massacre, refers to the killing of approximately 86 to 147 Afghan civilians by an airstrike by a USAF B-1 Bomber on May 4, 2009, in the village of Granai in Farah Province, south of Herat, Afghanistan

• Uruzgan helicopter attack in February 21st 2010 which resulted in the killing of many Afghan civilians, including over 20 men, four women and one child, by the US Army with another 12 civilians wounded. The attack took place near the border between Uruzgan and Daykundi province in Afghanistan when special operation troops in helicopters attacked three minibuses with "airborne weapons”

• at Mir Ali, North Waziristan on June 4th 2012 senior al-Qaeda leader Abu Yahya Al-Libi was killed in a second drone strike, following an initial attack which killed five people and injured four others. After the first attack, a group of 12 people, including local residents, came to the assistance of the victims, Al-Libi was reported to have been overseeing the rescue efforts and was killed in the second strike, along with between 9 and 15 other people, including six local tribesmen

• Wazir Tangi 18th September 2019 US drone strike aimed at militants hiding among farmers killed 32 pine nut harvesters, and injured 40 others

• Nangarhar province drone strike on September 20th 2019 targeting ISIS militants carried out by US forces in eastern Afghanistan killed 16 civilians, and wounded 8

• Musa Qala wedding part on 22nd September 2019 – at least 40 civilians, including 12 children, died and 9 wounded when Afghan military forces, supported by US airstrikes, struck against a Taliban hideout in the building adjacent to the ceremony

I gave up researching after easily finding these nine well-documented instances; there are many, many more – the overall frequency of such instances is indicated neatly by the fact that the last three listed here took place in a space of only four days, in which over 88 innocent men, women and children were killed.

According to the 2019 Brown University Costs of War study, during the war ij Afghanistan (2001-present), over 31,000 civilian deaths due to war-related violence have been documented, and some 29,900 civilians have been wounded. It is true to say that this includes attacks by all sides in the conflict, including NATO and Afghani, as well as terrorist forces – however, it is also true to say that by far the most such casualties are caused by the United States, either the Pentagon or the CIA.

All these attacks are characterised by three things:

• condemnation by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and/or other human rights groups, and

• an expression of regret for the loss of any civilian life by the US armed forces, occasionally along with offers of financial compensation to the victims’ families

• an admission along the lines that (and this is an actual example) "significant errors were made in carrying out the airstrike”, and stating something like (another actual example) "the inability to discern the presence of civilians and avoid and/or minimize accompanying collateral damage resulted in the unintended consequence of civilian casualties”.

So, here – in these final italicised words – is the distillation of the real issue.

An obvious comment to make on such a proposition is that one might imagine that if the armed forces of a ‘moral’ and ‘civilised’ authority are unable to discern the presence and therefore likely death of civilians while considering such an attack, then the attack should not be made.

So, why are they being made? And being made again, and again, and again?

Because along with the inability to discern is the inability to care.

The military moral compass he been so distorted, that the people making these judgements do not care enough about the civilian casualties because they do not place a sufficiently high ‘value’ on them in relation to their own over-riding military or political objectives.

The sheer number of bystander casualties in the real examples make a mockery of the plot of the 2015 movie Eye in the Sky with Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren, where over a nail-biting 102 minutes the military commanders agonise over the decision to initiate a drone attack in a Kenyan town that will kill three high level terrorist targets, when there is a real likelihood that a child selling bread nearby will also be killed, or badly injured.

I say mockery, since manifestly - in real life - no such agonising takes place as evidenced by the sheer number of additional casualties. The other ironic thing about it, in passing, is that it portrays a joint operation and it is the US drone pilots doing all the agonising, and the UK’s Colonel (Helen Mirren) who wants to go ahead regardless.

They are making these moral judgments in our name. They are making the kind of calculation that Ford made in relation to the Pinto design, and that Harry Lime tried to seduce Holly Martens with at the top of the Ferris Wheel in The Third Man:

“Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”

The question then, is, how many innocent dots do they think they can afford to 'spare'? As soon as the answer is ‘one’, the question is settled.

A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him for £5m. She smiles demurely and replies affirmatively. He then asks is she would still sleep with him for £5. The woman is greatly offended and says, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” To which he replies: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price”.

Let’s take a closer look at just one particular drone strike. It is notable for four aspects; firstly, it was undertaken by Barak Obama, who might be considered somewhat more moral and mild than the average US President; secondly, because there was just one innocent bystander; thirdly, because the death of the bystander was absolutely inevitable, not merely accidental; and fourthly, because he was innocent.

On 21 May 2016 President Obama authorised a drone strike against Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, then the leader of the Taliban, in Ahmad Wal, Balochistan, Pakistan.

Mansour had crossed earlier that day from Iran into Pakistan at the Taftan, Balochistan border crossing, where he started looking for a ride to Quetta. Said Ahmed Jan, an employee of a bus company, was trying to fill up the final seats of his Quetta-bound minibus but Mansoor wasn’t interested, he wanted his own car. He then haggled with Habib Saoli, a local taxi company owner, for a taxi to take him instead. He agreed a fare of 14,000 rupees (£90) for the 600 km (370 mile) trip.

The ‘lucky’ taxi driver randomly assigned to him was called Mohammad Azam. After six hours on the road the Toyota Corolla they were travelling in was struck by two Hellfire missiles launched by Reaper drones; they probably didn’t even notice they were dead.

Mohammad Azam was a father of four who also supported his disabled brother, Yar Muhammad, and everyone locally seems to agree that he had no connection whatsoever with the Taliban or any other terrorist group. Mureed Shah, a local government official for the area, said Azam had “no links with any militant group”. “I know Azam personally. He was working on a low-paid job to support his poor family,” Shah said. “I have written to the government in Quetta to pay compensation to the family.”

Mohammad Qasim, Mr. Azam’s brother said, “My brother was innocent. We all are sure that he didn’t know anything about his last passenger’s identity. Like many other drone victims, Azam wasn’t connected to any militant group.”

Nevertheless, the President of the United States was willing to take the deliberate decision to attack that Corolla in order to kill Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in the full knowledge that he would also be killing Mohammad Azam.

So, just one dot then.

For the record, the United States Department of Defense, for its part, has said that, according to its intelligence, it “has assessed Mullah Mansour’s driver to be a combatant,” but has offered absolutely nothing by way of proof. Furthermore, the undisputed record of the seemingly random and unplanned series of events that took place that day in Taftan would appear to be consistent with the unlucky Mohammad Azam having absolutely no idea who his passenger was.

I should also say, that I am not opening the other can of worms in relation to this theatre of conflict, as to whether or not the international laws of war would permit the US to kill Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour even if there was no collateral damage. That is another very moot point, albeit another Blog subject entirely.

If the position was reversed, and the US was at war with another country that targeted one of its Generals ‘accidentally’ killing his wife, we can have absolutely no doubt about the level of moral outrage that would follow, along with the accusation of a war crime. But, then, what is the current rate of exchange between the value of ‘innocent’ US citizens versus ‘innocent’ foreigners?

It is also only fair to point out that the current ‘civilised’ law of war does ‘allow’ for civilian collateral damage. The First Additional Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibits:

“an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.

Which – of course - means that conversely, it permits incidental loss of civilian life which is not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Helpfully then, the ‘civilised’ world has provided broad guidance as to how may ‘good’ dots you should be willing to throw away to kill a number of ‘bad’ dots: no more than is ‘proportional’. That’s all right then, sounds so civilised does it not?

Leaving aside whether or not that 1949 judgment is a reasonable one to make 70 years later and not under the shadow of a World War that left 50 million civilian dead, one can surely draw a distinction between ‘old-fashioned’ symmetrical warfare between states, where there are massed armies, and a front line and civilians might be expected to be aware of danger areas and at least try and keep way from them, to asymmetrical warfare where a taxi driver cannot have a clue that he can expect death from the air if he picks up the wrong passenger.

Where do we go from here? How do we get back to a more civilised approach to the willingness to be so cavalier about risks to the lives of innocent bystanders?

In the old days, I would have said public opinion. But those days appear to be long gone. After every atrocity, public disgust is engendered, human rights bodies declaim and condemn, the press reports it – and then – and then – nothing changes, nothing gets done and we become inured to the outrage (which is what it is) – bit by bit.

As a result, over time, those happily taking these risks with other people’s children get even more numb, one might say comfortably numb, and come to the conclusion that nobody really cares and thus, they can ‘afford’ a few more dots, each time.

Thus, the road to hell is paved…

For those that are interested to take this further. Here are some useful resources and other links:

• Daniel Ellsberg - The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

• United States Army War College Press – Lethal and Legal? The Ethics of Drone Strikes

• Amnesty International – “Will I Be Next?” US Drone Strikes in Pakistan

• Human Rights Watch – Troops in Contact

• Institute for Policy Studies – The Coming Drone Blowback

STOP PRESS: In May 2020 President Trump revoked the previous policy that required the Central Intelligence Agency to account for civilian deaths from drone strikes. The nature of Trump’s new mandate for the CIA allows for less accountability and inferring diplomatic immunity to all its personnel, preventing them from being named in public.

That'll help...