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War and Peace




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Right to Kill vs. the Right Kill

Right to Kill the Right Kill! The organization should focus exclusively on the cases involving the loss of a civilian human life during the military conflict: let the armed men fight the armed men but all the others should be spared. Next step would be bringing the person responsible for the act of violence towards a civilian to justice. It is a very difficult task that may seem to be even unattainable at times but this is a worthy goal or is it not?
It will also re-define the line between the terrorist organizations whose aim is mainly the civilian population and the regular armies whose aim are military targets.
As the first step towards the establishment of such a dialogue between the military and the civil society a network of grass-roots or virtual organizations should be formed to monitor and evaluate the information on the application of military force. For the military people there are some spin-offs as well: It will demand the re-orientation, already underway, from the reliance on the weapons of mass destruction (be it nuclear, bacteriological chemical or conventional) towards the smart weapons' arsenal. It will put an extra load on the development of the comprehensive intelligence networks and thus will enhance the judgment capabilities for the appropriate use of force. The military are to face the civil court procedures for the actions that led to the death of the civilians and not the military tribunals or other institutions of military justice system. The face of war has to be changed, one might say upgraded.
This change would strengthen and enforce the civil control over military. This approach has made its way through the Middle Ages (crusades or Ottoman atrocities, for example), two world wars of the 20-th century, culminating in the nuclear stand-off where disregard for the human life has reached its totality.
My point is that it is time that every civilian loss of life during the armed conflict must be held accountable. Same pattern is employed nowadays when military force is used indiscriminately, be it in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Palestine or Georgia, for example. The problem is that the indifference towards civilians' losses or, indeed, its incorporation into war planning is deeply embedded inside the present warfare mindset taking its root in the early warrior cultures with its slaughter tactics (plunder, booty, enslavement, massacre) when it was an integral part of any military undertaking as such.

One thing that has been more or less clear for some time is that the bombardments of the scale of Dresden and Nagasaki or starving people to death and cannibalism during the Leningrad blockade, to name most recent and outrageous, led to enormous civilian casualties. If we are to acknowledge that humanity (civilization) has made some overall progress in putting a value on the human life we must then agree to remember that along with the technical progress in military means of execution the gradual change towards precise selection of targets follows suit. "The soldier obeyed but didn't salute."
Lieutenant Helmuth von Moltke
I think time has come to re-evaluate the concept of the so-called collateral damage notion i.e. the loss of the civilian lives during the armed conflict of any kind, be it a full-scale war or an isolated military operation. Right to Kill vs. the Right Kill"Right" and "Kill" should never be in the same sentence...





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