BackStory; Rules of Engagement: Ethics in Warfare

This is backstory, I'm Peter Onuf. It was one of the worst killings of innocent civilians by U.S. contractors in Iraq. Four Blackwater guards got long prison terms this past week for what they said was a legitimate use of force in a Baghdad square eight years ago. Here's CNN. The incident ultimately led to the loss of immunity for contractors operating in Iraq and caused America to make a promise that justice would be served. Today on backstory, the laws of war, we'll consider a military strategy once thought out of bounds, freeing enemy slaves. And the curious case of chemical weapons, here's how the Germans justified using poison gas in World War I. This is actually a more humane method of warfare than bad-edding people or blowing them to pieces. That's all coming up on backstory. Go away. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia,

the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guide. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Balla, 20th Century Guy, here with Ed Ayers, the 19th Century Guy, and Peter Onus with us. The 18th Century Guy, and today we are taking on a kind of a touchy subject, the kind of subject that could press a few buttons. Oh, let's press buttons, that sounds good, that's what we should be doing. Caroline Frank is an historian at Brown University and she joined us to tell the story of two different wars, fought by two groups of people following two different sets of rules. We'll start with the first of these wars, what's known as the Pequot War. In 1637, the Pequot Indians were a powerful tribe in southern New England.

They controlled a lot of land and a lot of resources. At this point, the English settlers in the area that would be modern day Connecticut more or less were vastly outnumbered by the Pequots, but the Indians see them as a threat, as growing in numbers and wanting more and more of their land all the time. As for the English, they see the Pequots as terrible stewards of that land and maybe in league with the devil too. So the Pequot and the English had been getting on each other's nerves for some time. A skirmish here or skirmish there, but eventually the English decided enough was enough. They enlisted the help of another Indian tribe, also enemies of the Pequot, the Narragansett. The Narragansett saw this as a great opportunity to move into Pequot territory. And so... They decided to advise the English on the best ways to approach a Native American tribe militarily. And they said, you know, the way we do things is we don't march out in a field in the middle of the day in a big group, it's better to get them at night when they're not expecting

you. So what happened was the English came together with the Narragansett and discussed a plan. They decided to sail over to where the Pequots were living on the coastline by mystic rather than march because it would be more quiet and they would sail at night. They first sailed past the Pequot village and were spied by some Pequots who thought, okay, good, they're going away. This night fell, they turned around and came back and got off their ships and came off and came on to land and approached the village. And this is where things take a strange turn. Now the Narragansett understanding of what was going to happen at this time and the English understanding were different and somehow they hadn't realized how this was going to play out. And the Narragansett's mind, they would capture people. They had actually asked the English ahead of time to assure them that no women and children would be killed.

And as the battle started, as they went into the Pequot village, the goal was to scare people and the shock and off actor and get people to flee or lay down in surrender. And then given a surrender, the Narragansett would get what they wanted, which was hunting rights in the area, maybe some Pequot slaves. Instead, the English who came from a very different background of warfare, and this is where we get into the really interesting aspect of this story, the English were shooting at people and fired the entire village. The Narragansett's saw the fire going up and were horrified. And people began to flee from the village and as people were fleeing, the English would shoot them point blank with their firearms. And at the end of the day, over 700 Pequot men, women, and children, young and old were mathichard and the Narragansett were absolutely horrified.

When it comes to fighting wars today, there are rules everyone's supposed to play by, like the Geneva conventions dealing with a treatment of civilians and prisoners of war, or rules about invading sovereign nations. We've probably heard these rules invoked in debates over America's use of unmanned drones, or as was in the news this week, over private security contractors in war zones. On Monday, four former Blackwater guards received lengthy prison sentences in the killing of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians eight years ago. Trying to figure out what is fair in war and why are questions that Americans have struggled with for centuries. But with each new war, those questions seem to take on new currency and new urgency, as people try to fit new fighting technologies into the ethical frameworks of the past. Today we're dusting off an episode. We did a while back that looked at some of the answers Americans have come up with. What has been considered fair throughout history?

And when have people simply bent the rules to suit their own ends? We began by taking a closer look at the Pequot War of 1637, which was really more like a series of scrimmages that boiled over into the massacre we just heard about. To understand why the Indians on both sides would have been so horrified by it, we need to consider what their version of war fighting looked like up until then. Here's Carolyn Frank again. The firing of the village is not something the Indians would have done. In general, when they fought, they did fight in forests, highly decorated with war paint. The goal was to frighten your enemy, but the intention was not generally to kill. Captain Underhill, who led the Pequot massacre for the English, was a professionally trained soldier in the Netherlands. And he made the comment that the Native Americans could fight for seven years and kill barely seven people, scornfully and sarcastically. He made that comment. And for Underhill, these men were unmanly.

They were, they were wimps, as we would say today, but their goal was never to kill people. And in fact, during a Native American ambush, during a battle, if there were one or two dead in the field or on the ground, fighting stopped. And people were allowed to collect their dead and take them off the field before fighting resumed. You mentioned the experience in Netherlands for Underhill and other English fighters. When Europeans made war on each other, there were lots of barbarities, of course. But there was an emerging idea of a limited war or law of nations, a law of war covering war. And that is indiscriminate killing, particularly of civilians, was increasingly not encouraged or discouraged. Why didn't that ethic apply in the new world? Well, it's interesting. I think, first of all, you have to look at who's waging the war here. Often, the English crown was against these sorts of battles.

Now, it's easy for them sitting across the ocean, but they would have preferred a more harmonious relationship between the tribes and the English who were here. They wanted them to become subjects. But one does think of the experience these English people had had fighting the Irish. The Irish were considered tribal people who did not deserve the respect of proper military protocols. The English fighting the French or the Holy Roman Emperor, it may have been a different story than the type of battles they conducted fighting the Irish. And the approach that they took to the Native Americans was similar to the way they dealt with the Irish, where some of the rules dropped, and they did horrible barbarities, horrible things. What was the Indian perspective on this English way of making war? You know, I think that it was a lesson for the Indians.

They had to be more, you know, treat the English a little more carefully. They saw that the English knew no bounds in warfare. Over the next 40 years, the Indians in southern New England learned this lesson well. Lots of tribes, not just the Pequot, stepped up their fighting with the colonists and started making more alliances with one another. They gained access to better weapons, like muskets, and got quite good at using them. And everything came to a head in 1675, and another war between the English settlers, their Native American allies, and other warring Indian tribes. This one was called King Philip's War. Well, it lasted a year, and covered the entire scope of New England all the way up to Maine. And it was the bloodiest war in American history, on American soil. And proportionally, yeah. proportionally to the population at the time. And I think that it shows the degree to which there had been injury done by the English to the Native Americans across the board at this point. These cultural misunderstandings had just had gone too far in a lot of places.

What's the difference between the way Indians had traditionally made war and how they were making war now in King Philip's War? Yeah, you do see emerging at this point of the techniques of battle. And you see the Native Americans, one thing that they did quite a lot was to sneak up on families and torch their homes and kill the women and children. And some of the horrible stories that circulated about the Indians and sort of the beginning of the myths that we have about the barbaric Indian scalping people comes from the King Philip's War. This sort of attack on people's homes did not have any part of Indian warfare before the English. Caroline Frank is an historian at Brown University. Peter, that's a very powerful story about the 17th century. And we know, however, the story didn't end there that even if the Peacquats learned savagery from then, the battles of white Americans and American Indians took place across a vast continent and for centuries. So we know that this lesson, whatever it was, had to be learned over and over again. And somehow a commonality across all that period of time and across all that space was the treaty, the opposite of slaughter and massacre.

Yeah. How would we reconcile the story that we just heard with the larger story of American Indian relations with the United States? Well, that Caroline rightly emphasizes misunderstanding across cultural boundaries. What happens over the long term is evolving understandings, ways of coexisting. On the one hand, there's a simple brute fact of the balance of power that is can Indians effectively retaliate while the King's Phillips War, they retaliate. But the second thing, in addition to recognizing the capacity or power of indigenous people, is a recognition of them as people. And the treaty, which is much derided in American history, in American Indian law. Yeah, what are treaties after all?

Tribes are just a scam, a kind of fig leaf over the acquisition of conquest of an entire continent. I think we tend to overstate that in a kind of sense of collective guilt about taking the land, but those treaties have consequences. And you can see it in the courts today in the disposition of cases on Indian claims and recognitions of Indian sovereignty. All of that is the legacy of all the treaties that were made. That's a legacy of, in fact, the way wars were conducted over the long course of American Indian history. That doesn't mean that they were good wars. It doesn't mean they were fought well or decently, but it does mean that you saw the enemy that is if you're the Americans or the English before them, you saw the enemy as worthy of treating with, you know, you start off with the English settlers thinking that they are civilized their Christian and they're facing savages in the wilderness. Making war and then ending war making peace is a civilizing process on both sides. It's the way that you resolve conflicts that establish precedence that in their cumulative force lead to something we might recognize as civilization.

We're going to take a short break. When we come back, what do you do when the current rules of war restrict your tactics? Easy, change the rules. You're listening to backstory and we'll be back in a minute. We're back with backstory. I'm Brian Bellow, here with friends and co-hosts, Ed Ayers. Hello. And Peter Onif. Hey, Brian. Today, we're talking about the rules of war and American history, who makes them, who breaks them, how do we even decide what's fair in the first place? Today, the Geneva Conventions are the gold standard for international humanitarian law. They say what can it cannot be done to prisoners of war, to civilians, and to the injured during wartime. What you may not realize is that these laws took their modern shape in the American Civil War. It was during this war that Francis Lieber, a Prussian immigrant with ties to both the North and the South, was asked to draft a comprehensive code. Eric Minnell has this story.

Article 79. Every captured wounded enemy shall be medically treated according to the ability of the medical staff. When Francis Lieber was 17, he was shot through the neck. He was from Prussia, modern-day Germany, and he was fighting against Napoleon's armies in Belgium. I suddenly experienced a sensation as if my whole body were compressed in my head, and this, like a ball, were quivering in the air. I could feel the existence of nothing else. It was a most painful sensation. Lieber then asked a fellow soldier to put him out of his misery, to shoot him dead, but the soldier wouldn't. A few minutes later, that soldier was shot in both kneecaps. He died, while somehow Lieber survived. Lieber spent the next several years studying politics and philosophy in Europe. He hoped to get a big city university job in the United States, but the market for Prussian theorists with revolutionary tendencies was slim. And so in 1835, after a few years in Boston and Philly, he had to take a job at the new South Carolina College in the then small town of Columbia. He hated it. He referred to it as his exile.

I live in the South, it is true. But with respect to culture and intellectual life, I might as well be in Siberia. But over the next 20 years, the years leading up to the Civil War, it would become increasingly clear that a man longing for the North, but laying down roots in the South, that was exactly the kind of man you'd want writing the laws of war. Article 42. Slavery, complicating and confounding the ideas of property and of personality, exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature and nations has never acknowledged it. Francis Lieber owned and rented slaves to work in his home. He wrote about them in his diary. Today, Tom, as we call him, entered our service. He is about 14 years old, and we pay his master $4.50 a month. But as the entry continues, it becomes clear that Lieber's dealings with slavery are complicated. The little boy brings with him a blanket, which is all he ever had to sleep upon. He has but one shirt. Slavery is abominable in every respect. It is a dirty foul thing.

In all of his writings, to himself and to his friends in the North, Lieber seems to find slavery repulsive, and yet he participated. Perhaps he felt he needed to fit in. He was a prominent professor at a prominent school in a state where slavery was a given. And he had political ambitions. He wanted to be the president of the university. So for the 20 years he spent in South Carolina, he paid for slaves, all the while cursing the act under his breath. Though for Lieber's oldest son, Oscar, life in the South was less complicated. He grew up there. And so in 1856, when Francis Lieber was finally asked to come back North to take a job at Columbia University, the family split. Lieber, his wife and two younger sons moved, while Oscar, the oldest, stayed behind. Article 21. The citizen or native of a hostile country is thus an enemy, and as such is subjected to the hardships of the war.

When the Civil War began, in 1861, all three of Lieber's sons decided to fight, his two youngest for the North, and Oscar for the South. Meanwhile, Francis Lieber started lecturing at Columbia. His series for that fall? The laws of war. It's something he'd been thinking about since his time fighting Napoleon, and people were fascinated. The New York Times published the lectures as they were delivered. The Civil War was posing all sorts of new legal problems, and Lieber was offering a fresh take on how to solve those problems. The Lincoln administration took notice. They asked Lieber to consult on the issue of guerrilla warfare in Missouri. Lots of men dressed as civilians were attacking Union soldiers and wreaking havoc across the state. The Confederacy had given its blessing to these guerrillas, which put the Union in a bind. Should they treat these men as legitimate soldiers, or as criminals? The old way of thinking was that all you needed to be considered legitimate was the blessing of a real army.

Francis Lieber said, no, if you want to be treated as a soldier, you need to look like one. You need to uniform and a command structure. Shortly after this, Lieber received devastating news. His son, Oscar, who had been fighting for the Confederacy, had been killed in the Battle of Williamsburg. One of Lieber's other sons, Hamilton, had been badly wounded earlier in the year. The conflict was consuming his family, beholden me, the symbol of Civil War. And then, in December, the Lincoln administration reached out again. They wanted Lieber to pull together a more comprehensive code of conduct, a law of war that would deal with all sorts of issues, a new framework for a new era of warfare. Lieber obliged. Four months later, the Union Army issued General Order's No. 100, the code. It was Lieber's magnum opus. It was groundbreaking. It covered topics ranging from torture to prisoners of war to the looting of cultural artifacts. It set the stage for the next century of humanitarian law.

We like to think that laws are decided by neutral parties, that the people who write the rules don't have a horse in the race. But in war, it's just the opposite. A father writing the rules for his sons seems the most logical, the most humane of authors. Lieber understood war could destroy. In many ways, his code actually sanctions destruction. But he also understood that when it's all over, we have to pick up the pieces. War, Lieber thought, isn't just about tearing things down. It's about pulling them back together. Article 16. Military necessity does not admit of cruelty. That is, the inflection of suffering for the sake of suffering, or for revenge, nor of maming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. And, in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility, which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult. Eric Mendel is one of our producers.

And when we talk about the Lieber codes influence on today's law of war, what we generally have in mind are its prohibitions against things like torture and assassination. But the thing that comes up in the code more than any of those things is actually slavery. In no uncertain terms, the code declares that slaves who have escaped to union lines are, quote, immediately entitled to the rights and privileges of a free man. Another provision, one that would prove highly controversial, says that, quote, the law of nations knows no distinction of color with regards to prisoners of war. John Fabian Witt and historian at Yale has just written the definitive book on the Lieber code. According to Witt, the code aside from regulating army activities was also intended to help justify Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, a proclamation that could easily be viewed as a violation of the laws of war. Since 1775, when Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, announces to the slaves of Virginia that they come to his side, he'll free them. American statesmen and soldiers have been committed to the idea that the one thing that civilized states do not do in wartime is free enemy slaves.

We see that from the Continental Congress. We see it in Washington's reaction to the carrying off of slaves from New York in 1783. And when the union decides to move to emancipation in the fall of 62, there's a real threat that they are here by violating the cardinal principle of the American laws of war. And so the emancipation proclamation calls forth this code to reverse that tradition and to reverse the longstanding view that emancipation is a violation of the laws of war. Why would they have thought that in the first place? There's two different things going on. One is the idea that slaves are private property of the enemy, so it's not a legitimate military target. It would be like shooting at civilians to free enemy property. The second side, though, is the real fear that freeing slaves in wartime will produce a survival insurrection and nightmare-ish humanitarian atrocities. I'm assuming that people at the time, not the least among them, the Confederates, would have disagreed.

The South was outraged when the code is issued in the spring of 63. Jefferson Davis calls it barbaric, Secretary of War James Seddon describes it as an outrage. And they are responding to two things in it. One, they're responding to the emancipation justifications that are in that code. They're also responding without rage to the defense of the use of armed black soldiers. The South had committed itself from, as early as the fall of 62, to treating as criminals any blacks they found in union uniform upon being captured. And so one of the things the code does is intervene in that dispute, even as it's arising. The code announces that there can be no discrimination on the basis of color in the treatment of enemy prisoners. Now, if we were trying to force ourselves to be completely even handed in all this, that sounds a little bit like changing the rules after the game has begun to advantage the union cause.

That they are in some ways inventing whole new categories of law that increase their odds of winning. Would that be a legitimate way of thinking of this? Yeah, and will this opens up the puzzle of what the heck are the laws of war in the first place? Why is it that we see strong countries around the world to this day, from Lincoln and Lieber's time to this day, adopting rules that seem to constrain them? And one longstanding hypothesis that I take very seriously is the idea that these rules are just designed to serve the interests of those strong states in moments of crisis. The Lincoln administration is not trying to tie its hands behind its back. It's not trying to constrain itself. It's trying to issue these rules in an effort to win the war. On the other hand, upon issuing these kinds of rules, they have feedback effects. That is, there are unanticipated consequences that come back to bind the union army in any number of ways. Perhaps you could tell us some of this.

So the first year and a half of the war sees regular prisoners' changes, which were a regular feature of warfare in Western Europe and North America. There are prisoner of war exchanges in the American Revolution. We see prisoner of war exchanges in the War of 1812. And they continue in the Civil War and then break down once the union decides on emancipation and the army of Black soldiers. And that breakdown helps to produce the acute prisoner of war crisis at places like Andersonville. And this breakdown occurs because President Lincoln is in a box. He wants to continue to exchange prisoners because that's better for his own soldiers. But the Confederates will not recognize African-American men as legitimate prisoners of war and so the exchange system breaks down. Can you give us a sense of the extent of this crisis? So there are about 55,000 deaths, both sides combined in prisoner of war camps during the Civil War. And almost all those deaths happen after the breakdown of prisoner exchanges. And certainly something the Confederates would have said is that these deaths in Andersonville are entirely on your shoulders, President Lincoln.

That it's you changing the rules halfway through and this inhumane policy of saying that formerly enslaved men can pick up guns and shoot their masters. You're reckless playing with the threat of servile insurrection. This is you're doing because you think yourself above the established European civilized rules of war and are trying to rewrite the book. Is that right? And what would he have said as a result? Well, that was the Southern position and one of Lincoln's problems is that there were people in the North who held a similar view. I mean, even people like Walt Whitman were outraged by the decision not to engage in prisoner exchanges just on the behalf of relatively smaller number of black soldiers. So in some ways, this seems like the South says, yes, we are a civilized Western nation. We are playing by the rules of the great Christian powers. It's just that we do not accept that slavery is wrong and therefore anything that damages slavery is a violation of a higher law. Would that be a fair way of characterizing their response?

I think that's right. The South doesn't innovate in the laws of war. They insist on the longstanding tradition. They said and Davis sound time and again like Washington corresponding with his British counterparts during the American Revolution. They're insisting on a longstanding tradition and that's why it's the union order in the spring of 63 that transforms the laws of war for the modern world. It's the union that has to innovate in the middle of the war and it's why Lincoln's order becomes the basis for the international laws of war that we have today. John Fabian Witt is the author of Lincoln's code, the laws of war in American history. One provision of the Libra code that doesn't get a lot of attention is its prohibition against sexual assault, the code made it punishable by death. This may have been overlooked because historians have not tended to see rape as a big problem in the Civil War. Current research is challenging this view. It's becoming more and more clear that there was a culture of rape among both Confederate and Union soldiers.

Some of it can be seen through official army documents. One union order declared that women and New Orleans would be considered prostitutes if they mouthed off to occupying Union soldiers. Another advised women in Tennessee to sew up the bottoms of their petty codes. But even there the pictures incomplete because the women most affected by those orders tended to be elite whites. And historian Crystal Feemster has found that most sexual violence during the war was committed against poor white women and even more so against black women. We have overlooked black women, particularly because we've been committed to a narrative of the Civil War as a gentleman's war between brothers, right? There's this understanding that the Union in some ways was coming down and they were allies of black folk, which actually wasn't always the case, particularly for everyday soldiers who saw black slaves as unworthy of freedom in a sense. And what the Libra Codes do is that it creates a pathway for black women to make claims for legal protection or to seek legal justice when they become victims of sexual assault.

And do you think the authors of the Libra Codes had this in mind? I don't think that when the Libra Codes were written that they were necessarily thinking about black civilians, but we can't underestimate what it meant for African Americans. White soldiers understood that prior to the Civil War that black folk couldn't testify against white people in a court of law. And that didn't matter if you were in the South or you were in the North. And for the first time you have black women testifying, you have black men testifying as witnesses of sexual assault. And so you'll have a case and a soldier will say, well, actually, she's a black person or a molota. She can't testify against me because I'm white. And you'll see it in the court, Marshall notes, court adjourned to discuss whether witness could testify.

They always come back and say she can testify. She has a right to testify. So this is huge, not just for black women, but black folk generally. In these military courts, they get to testify against white people for the first time. And I argue that this is in many ways a rehearsal for reconstruction. Black people begin to understand their citizenship and that they have legal rights and what those rights look like. They move through the Friedman's Bureau during reconstruction, but they start exercising those rights through the military court. Crystal Feemster is an historian at Yale. It's time for another break. When we come back, we'll consider the red line between conventional and unconventional weapons. How did that line get so red anyway? You're listening to backstory. We'll be back in a minute. We're back with backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. I'm Ed Ayers.

And I'm Peter Runoff. Today on the show, how Americans have sorted through what's legitimate and what's illegitimate when it comes to fighting wars. Two years ago under pressure from the U.S. and other foreign powers, Syria agreed to dismantle its chemical arsenal, even as the Civil War in that country raged on. But chemical weapons are still a source of controversy in Syria. Last month, news reports alleged that President Bashar al-Assad's troops had sprayed chlorine gas over a rebel village. Here's Assad responding to that charge in an interview with Charlie Rose. It's very important. This is part of the malicious propaganda against Syria. First of all, the chlorine gas is not military gas. You can buy it anywhere. But it can be weaponized. No, because it's not very effective. It's not used as military gas. That's very self-evident. Traditional armament is more important than chlorine. Sinic, though he may seem, does Assad have a point? The UN has confirmed the role of illegal toxins and just a tiny fraction, less than half a percent of the 220,000 people killed in Syria's war. So what is it about chemical weapons, in particular, that's so clearly and for so many people crosses the line?

For answers, we turn to Richard Price, a political scientist in British Columbia who wrote a book called The Chemical Weapons Taboo. His story begins in 1899, when delegates from the world's most powerful nations got together in the Hague and hashed out a list of things that would make war fighting more humane. Things like banning bullets that expand on impact and explosives fired from balloons. And yes, the use of projectiles designed to spread is fixating gases. Here's Price. It would be a mistake to single out what we now know as chemical weapons is being kind of a highlight of that conference. My sense was it was a decidedly minor issue almost to throw away because the delegates kind of said, well nobody has this anyway, so sure. It's not going to harm any of us to go ahead and come up with this ban. So they're banning something that had never been used before. Isn't that kind of the opposite of what usually happens here? That's exactly right. Typically what you see is the introduction of a new weapon in warfare and whether it was the crossbow or the first firearms, submarines.

Well, almost always see reactions that, oh, this is a new horrible thing. Surely we can't go there. What was different about this one was before you got there, you had people saying we shouldn't go there. Right from the get go of this weapon, it was tagged as having this moral sensibility around it. A little over a decade later, World War One didn't call the Great War, broke out in Europe. And while that moral sensibility may have been the thing that kept chemical weapons from being used against civilians, it didn't keep them off the battlefield. By the wars in, some estimate that 40% of artillery shells were being deployed with chemical rounds. Again, people worried about how this now very real weapon might be used in the future. And sure enough, we get another international agreement banning chemical weapons, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, a protocol that was greeted with a whole lot of skepticism. Everybody expects World War Two is going to be a chemical war.

The curious thing, though, is because of this ban, there are these thresholds and these lines that were drawn that didn't apply to other weapons. So you make allocation requests. Well, President Roosevelt in the US said, we're not supposed to use these things. So you don't get appropriations. So then you feel while we can't really initiate this kind of work as we're probably not as well equipped as our opponent. Ironically, that's what the Germans felt. They thought the exact same thing. So this really precarious threshold somehow survived even as virtually every other boundary in World War Two is exploded. 35 years after World War Two had ended, that threshold was crossed. Throughout the 1980s, Iraq used chemical weapons in its war with Iran, mostly against enemy soldiers, but also against civilians in the Kurdish region of Iraq. But price argues that even this outbreak of chemical warfare underscored the power of the taboo against it. When the Germans first used chemical weapons in World War One, what they eventually argued was, why are we concerned about this anyway?

This is actually a more humane method of warfare than bait-edding people or blowing them to pieces with shells. Fast forward to the Iran Iraq War and out of Syria, nobody argues that. In fact, in the Iran Iraq War, the Iraqis refused to admit that they'd used chemical weapons, even as abundant evidence emerged to the contrary. They wouldn't acknowledge it. So they actually contributed in a curious way to the notion that the use of these weapons is aberrant, even as they use them. Today, all but six of the world's nations have signed the latest ban, the chemical weapons convention. But for price, the strength of the taboo is more a product of history than of international law. Over the course of the 20th century, he says, we never got accustomed to images of civilians choking on poison gas, the way we did, unfortunately, to images of civilians killed by aerial bombardment. The longer chemical weapons existed but were not used, the more people believed they should never be used.

What started as a kind of dotted line at the turn of the 20th century had by the turn of the 21st century coalesced into a solid red line. Richard, you've obviously thought about this a great deal. In your mind, is there anything about chemical weapons that makes them worse, substantively, inherently? You know, it's really fascinating just on a very personal level after I'd written my book on the subject. It was only after I finished the book that my mother informed me that her father, my grandfather, had in fact been gassed at EEP in the trenches in World War I and somehow survived the attack. And you then went on to explain, don't worry, it's no different than any other weapon. Well, exactly, right? So I have delved into this material. I say, you know, how could I say this? But I read the diaries. I read the popular novels at the time and all quiet in the western front. Did they single out gas? No, actually what they singled out were the tanks.

They said, oh my goodness, this is this new mechanized monster. What kind of era have we entered into? And so there were different reactions to this. And that just led me to say, it's not that people don't feel horrified by this weapon. What's really fascinating to me is how other things that we ought to also feel horrified at are put into this category we call conventional weapons. Which, you know, it's sort of soothing. It sounds kind of in gentler, doesn't it? Exactly. So the whole point of this project was less to say these aren't horrible. It's to say these are the things are horrible. But we've put them in this category of so-called conventional weapons, which means it's okay to get burnt to death, to get blown up to death. All these other, you know, horrible ways in which warfare is conducted. So I actually kind of turn that around. And I hope that that's the message is to get people to think, wow, why is it that we accept it's okay to blow people up or burn them to death? Richard Price is a professor of political science at University of British Columbia. He's the author of the chemical weapons taboo. Thanks so much for joining us today, Richard. My pleasure.

If you're just joining us, this is backstory. And we're talking today about the rules of war and American history. We're going to replay for you now a couple of calls we took from our listeners back when we first produced this episode. Hey guys, gather around. We got a call from the West Coast from LA. It's Robert. Robert. Welcome to backstory. Thanks so much. After watching US forces conduct an operation into Pakistan to kill bin Laden and basically or essentially invade one of our allies, I was wondering if there have been other instances where we have invaded or attacked our allies and how we've justified it. Yeah, I think the status of nations we engage with or the words we fight, it's unclear. Given the way Americans have thought about their place on this continent, for instance, what kinds of claims they have to the hinterland. And there's always been an assumption that this is suggested by the idea of manifest destiny in the 19th century that other powers all over the hemisphere, for instance, Spain are there only temporarily they must recede because old empires must give way to the New Republic.

And it's that way of thinking about the world that I think fudge the distinction between friends and enemies because you're inevitably going to be the dominant power in the hemisphere and that's a powerful American idea going back into your century. Yeah, it's not really that we're the dominant power. We're on the side of universal rights and justice. And so, especially in our hemisphere and you think about back in the 19th century, it's okay for us to go into Panama. It's okay for us to go to Nicaragua. It's okay for us to go into Mexico because we're not doing out of any selfish purposes. We're doing it to say open an international shipping lane or we're doing it in order to create a new home for the expansion of slavery. Or, you know, we're doing it to free people from the yoke of the archaic Spanish. So I think there's actually a pretty deep tradition of this that is based on an idea that we are the agents of a more universal kind of freedom and autonomy.

So I think that actually ties into the bin Laden story, which is that this is not really about Pakistani American relations. This is about making the world safe for democracy. What do you think, Robert? No, actually, I think there is a really interesting one that you guys bring up that we are fighting to just war. And it's interesting. We don't really look at it. We're invading Pakistan. We're going after bin Laden and evil guy. Yeah, you know, that old phrase might makes right. You might say that the mighty are blinded by their conception of their rights. And what American policy makers would say this is not really our right. It's our obligation. And it's a burden, not an opportunity that we have the capacity to get rid of of some of bin Laden. And therefore, we must. And even if that has the unfortunate cost of alienating our allies, that's a short term cost for a long term benefit. Thanks a lot, Robert. Thank you so much. I love the show.

Thank you very much. We got another call and it's Randolph from San Francisco. Welcome to backstory. Thank you very much. So I'm kind of a student of American colonialism in the Philippines. Right. And I know that during the the Philippine American war when the Filipino soldiers who fought against the Spanish turned around and fought against the Americans. And it changed into a guerrilla war. Right. The combatants from the Philippine side, the Filipino fighters didn't wear uniform. You know, they could blend into the population very easily. And it sort of spooked the American military. And so I was wondering, did the rules of engagement change as a result of this encounter with a guerrilla style warfare? So what Randolph is getting at is when you can't distinguish combatants from civilian population, then it seems like it's very hard to follow the laws of war. American soldiers were shown to have been committing atrocities or cruelties, something like our modern waterboarding, pouring water into people that were being interrogated. What was the impact of all that?

I think a striking thing looking back on the American occupation of the Philippines is how racialized it was. They made up any kind of name that they could think of, you know, racist slang that usually applied to black people. They called them Indians, anything that justified behaving toward them in ways that the military felt was necessary to triumph. Randolph, if you ask a question, this is Brian 20th century guy, you ask a question at the beginning of my century, I'm left with no alternative, but to move forward rather than back in history. And to move forward, we declared victory shortly after this started in July 4th, I think, of 1902. And the problem became one of the Philippine government fighting these indigenous brigands as we put it. And the reason I talked about moving forward is I think that this foreshadows the central strategy for Americans dealing with what we considered to be unconventional war. That was to make it the war of the proxy governments that we supported, and what I have in mind specifically is Vietnamization in Vietnam.

We simply never came up with a terribly effective set of rules of engagement to deal with those tactics, and what we did come up with was withdrawing Vietnamizing, if that is a verb, the war in Vietnam and pulling out. We also take advantage today of our global alliances and in the global war on terror against the global enemy as we put it, we use techniques like rendition, sending prisoners, prisoners in the war on terror to foreign countries and letting countries that are not as burdened by constitutional niceties, deal with getting information. If there are things that we are uncomfortable doing that don't quite fit within Geneva protocols, we'll then let's contract out. Well, you know, that's kind of what's striking about, you know, the American military action in the Philippines at the turn of this 20th century, and that's it was done by Americans.

And, you know, in particular, this is one guy that stands out, his name was Jacob Smith, Army General Jacob Smith, he called him Howling Jake. You know, he gave a command, which to my mind is one of the most atrocious commands by a US military officer, and that's he told his troops after 48 American soldiers were massacred in retaliation. He ordered his troops to kill everyone over the age of 10. He also said, the more you kill and the more you burn, the more you'll please me. So, he was eventually court-martialed for that command, but it ended up being just like a slap on the wrist, and it's kind of curious how, you know, why that wasn't more of a big deal. You know, because it was clearly a violation of, at that time, the rules of engagement, even for that time period. Yeah, well, Randolph, we haven't talked about public attention to all of this. And in the case of the Philippines, we do know that it was letters from soldiers, American soldiers themselves back to their family and loved ones who sometimes in passing and sometimes because they were concerned, mentioned the cruelties to the indigenous people there.

A lot of people back home got pretty stirred up about this, some even protested. That's from my opinion, the good news. The bad news is that the attention to that, the ability to sustain interest in those folks halfway around the world, really was very limited. But the key variable is the degree to which the public puts pressure on its government in order to comply with the rules of law. Yeah, but the pressure works two ways, Brian, as you will know, and that is the mantra, support our troops. This is a test for patriots. Are you going to support them or not? That is, of course, the savagery start with the other guys. So public opinion is a, well, is a many splendid thing. I think you're right. It's the glare of public opinion in the long term that brings atrocities to our collective consciousness and some rulemaking may result from that.

I don't think that the Philippines constituted a big learning experience, however, it's a complicated thing when you extend your power and your rule across the oceans and as Americans discovered it was a kind of a loss of innocence. Though there wasn't much innocence to be lost after the history of the Indian Wars of the 19th century. On that exceedingly gloomy note, we thank you for stirring the pot. Thank you, Randolph. Well, thank you all guys. Bye. That's our show for today. We have a bunch of links to source material and all sorts of legal documents about the laws of war at our website. Backstoryradio.org. You'll find all our old shows there, as well as descriptions of the shows we have in the works. Thanks for listening. Don't be a stranger. Today's show is produced by Tony Feele, Jessica Bretzen, Chokai Anson, and Eric Mennel.

Jamal Milner is our engineer, and we had help from Alan Chen and Emily Charnock. Backstories executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks today to Patrick Malone, Paul Kramer, Bill Kistle, and Kelly Libby. Major support for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by a history channel, history made every day. Brian Ballot is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, Peter Ona of his Professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and Senior Research Fellow at Monicello. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.