Introduction

Abstract

War is a purposeful act of lethal force on the group level. It causes, and is intended to cause, death, misery and destruction. Whatever its ends, war is fought using people as instruments: their suffering, incapacitation and death are the means to its military and political ends. Yet not all people are to be so treated. For many centuries in the Western world, the targeting of some people has been deplored and it remains the case in our own time that the harming and killing of ‘innocent civilians’ in war is thought worse than the harming and killing of soldiers. When NATO went to war against Serbia in 1999, US Secretary of State William Cohen assured the world that ‘we go to extraordinary lengths to reduce the risks to innocent civilians’ and British Prime Minister Tony Blair boldly declared that ‘we take every single measure we can to try to avoid civilian casualties’.² NATO did indeed make efforts to avoid civilian casualties and Pentagon officials claimed that the fear of civilian casualties was a key factor in virtually every aspect of war planning. Instead of attacking ‘area targets’, it sought precision in its bombing; when smoke or clouds obstructed laser-guided bombs, strikes were cancelled. NATO’s concerns to minimize civilian casualties were matched by Serbian efforts to draw worldwide attention to incidents where NATO air strikes had killed Kosovar or Serbian civilians.

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought when such things are possible. It must all be lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out…

E. M. Remarque¹