we still have some folks coming in but I know that we're eager to hear from our speaker my name is Jane Huckabee I direct the International Human Rights clinic here at the law school and it's my great pleasure and to be moderating today's event they will be hearing from Professor Sam oing who's a professor of law and professor of history at Yale University on the topic humane the politics and poetics of endless war so a quick background this particular event is part of our human rights and pract
ice series here at the law school that is co-sponsored by the International Human Rights clinic and the center for international comparative law given the nature of today's topic and the breadth of interest in having Professor Moyne here at the law school the event also has a number of co-sponsors including Duke Law Center on law ethics and national security lens the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin humanities Institute the Duke Human Rights Center at the Keene and Institute for Ethics a
nd the human rights law society and international law society all that of the event is going to be going to hear from professor Moines and then we're going to have the chance to open the floor out to a moderator Q&A so I encourage you to develop and hold on to your questions and for that time period but for the moment and Sam the floor is yours great hi there thanks to AIA and Jane for organizing this and all the co-sponsors thanks for taking your valuable Friday afternoon to come to this I am g
oing to talk about something I have yet know very little about because I'm just taking some guesses it's starting out a project I haven't researched or started to write so that's selfish and useful for me to put myself out with maximum exposure because I can find out what what parts of my thinking right now primitive though it is you know can't survive your demolition and what parts I might be able to shore up if I work really hard on it so please I'll try to be brief and then you can you know t
ell me where I've gone so dreadfully wrong so a basic question you might ask is what if anything's wrong with the war on terror the so called forever war on which America's embarked and of course lots of people must think nothing and then some people might think a lot of different things and the question is what's the right answer so probably the dominant mainstream answer amongst those who are reformist who think that it needs to be changed or corrected in some way is that the war is inhumane a
nd in particular the toll of civilian deaths even or especially once the war has shifted away from its classic heavy footprint territories of Afghanistan and Iraq and become more a light or no footprint war involving drones or missiles from the air or a light footprint Special Forces operations which touched a hundred and fifty countries last year that's three-quarters of the countries and the dominant answer is that there are there's too much mess too many civilians are dying that was an answer
that we found in a famous human rights clinic report called living under drones that's the dominant criticism of the drone part of the war so the no footprint part of the war you might say and there was an extremely graphic extremely well reported article in The New York Times magazine by a couple of heroic journalists who went out again and tried to show and I think very successfully showed that the Pentagon is embroiled in a syndrome of undercounting reporting the number of civilians who've l
ost their lives in the war so that's the standard answer and I want to flirt with let's say a version of the opposite answer today and see what you think what if the problem with the forever war is that it's too humane or maybe if you want to put it slightly more defensively the trouble is not the way it's conducted since the Pentagon is right that it's the most humane war ever fought in history although of course it's residual inhumanity is there to be decried with you know our our highest voic
es we can muster and especially when the United States makes alliances and engages in proxy warfare like today in Yemen where there's lots more in humanity than when America takes a direct hand but maybe the problem is is not exactly or only or mainly the persisting in humanity but the erosion of limits on the initiation and continuation of war in in international law terms the problem lies on the you sod bellum side of the war on terror not only or so much or or on the use in Bello side and if
you want to get really radical you can worry that the humanity of the war the unprecedented humanity with which America is fighting helps entrench the endless and increasingly in geographical terms also unbound read nature of the war so I want to explore those possibilities just it's it's it's to some an outrageous thing and I think we'll hear from at least one person who thinks it's debatable to say that this is the most humane war ever fought to say that the humanity is actually abetting the e
rosion of scope conditions chronologically and geographically as yet more offensive but let's explore it I was told because this is a law school and because of who's funding this I should definitely talk about international law and that's going to be important to do so along the way but I think we shouldn't get too hung up on what the exact sources of law are we're talking about because of course there is international law governing the conduct of hostilities that use in Bello law so-called that
's branded itself since the 1960's precisely international humanitarian law but it's relevant to the military because there's a statutory version of it and not just because the United States has ratified the Geneva Conventions and then when it comes to the initiation and continuation of war there's a multi-level amount a set of laws there's you know of course statutory like the War Powers Resolution there's constitutional like whatever you think the War Powers Arrangements in the Constitution ar
e and of course there's the UN Charter and whatever other international law you think governs force and just as a hypothesis let's put out there that the war on terror as just to bottom-line it has been about more and more scrupulous and hereit's to the law at all levels national and international governing conduct of hostilities in a collaborative project between the military and humanitarians though they struggle at the margins over how much humanity is required what's really gotten lost and e
roded are the constraints national statutory and Constitution and international over when the country may use and continue to use force whether we're interested in the War Powers Resolution the the authorization to use a military force which has become in through interpretation authorization for war nearly anywhere perpetually on an installment plan or international law which the United States when it comes to the initiation of force including when it's facing so-called terrorists that adversary
states are unwilling or unable to control the United States generally has ignored far more bluntly than will then law controlling hostilities so this leads me in a very strange place certainly in a law school like this which is reading a novel in particular war and peace the most important novel ever written about war and lo and behold when you read it you find that Leo Tolstoy the author of that novel puts in the mouth of one of his characters the worry that to the extent we make war more huma
ne we risk entrenching it I'm making it harder to end and the question is personal is that true was it ever true is it true now of America's war and if so what's the response so Prince Andrei says I wouldn't take prisoners this is actually written I think in direct response to the earliest law of war project which has to do with European states in the first Geneva Convention legalizing how soldiers would be treated if kept if captured or wounded that change alone he says would alone sorry would
transform the whole aspect of war and make it less cruel if there were none of this playing at generosity and warfare we'd never go to war except for something worth facing certain death for playing it war that's what's vile and playing at magnanimity and the rest of it they talk of the laws of warfare what we now call international humanitarian law and humanity to the wounded and so on that's all rubbish now there's something very debatable in this position which is not clearly Tolstoy because
it's a characters not his and I'm actually much more interested in what happened to Tolstoy when he embraced you know Jesus as his Savior and tried to figure out what it meant to be his follower and yet already in this argument there's something I think quite interesting there's a wrong way to take it I think which is the idea that as a causal matter if we were less humane and war we would have less war that seems debatable it seems that there were all kinds of inhumane wars in the past that wen
t on for a very long time and so it's not obvious we can sustain Tolstoy or Prince Andrei's point in that regard but let's see if there's any way we can sustain it to figure out if there's any moral problem with the dominant view that our task is to make America's endless war more humane so after he became a Jesus Freak Tolstoy broadened out his worry about war to a worry about violence physical violence in general corporal violence in general and he looks at the attempt to make war humane in a
in a comparative light first he looks back to chattel slavery after whose abolition he's basically living in writing and he says remember all of the people who said that either the only hope or the first step was to make slavery humane and it's true actually most of the law regarding slavery that was passed in lots of jurisdictions including in the u.s. south including in this part of it was called a melioration law and its goal was to make masters kinder to their chattel slaves now there were s
ome who believed that if you made chattel slavery more humane we would ultimately abolish chattel slavery because we would be doing so because we recognize the humanity of our slaves but Tolstoy said that was unbelievable at the time it was right for William Lloyd Garrison and the others to protest the attempt to make slavery more humane and demand that it be abolished where it could as soon as it could and so that's his past case and then he looks at the law of war which advances in his time To
lstoy around long enough not just a comment on the first Geneva Convention but also on The Hague regulations which are the kind of a big deal in the law of war not least since the conference's that led to these weapons regulations chiefly were called by his own Tsar and he's facing down a law of war community in Geneva like the founders of the Red Cross that have a similar idea as those who counselled melioration of slavery we actually have good evidence that the founders of the Red Cross believ
ed that making war humane would provide the foundation for its abolition and Tolstoy said don't bet on it what could happen is you make war more acceptable to enough people that it goes on endlessly now I don't think that worry of his whisper very plausible except now it is and I'm wondering if we should pay it some heed he also said very interesting things about some other corporal practices just an interest of time I'll skip capital punishment though of course we've seen in our own jurisdictio
n the United States attempts to struggle with whether to humanize her abolish and we could well worry that maybe we shouldn't tinker with the machinery of death and Justice Blackmun's famous phrase but just the abolitionists of course we could ask you know what happens when we're abolitionists and don't have enough you know of a movement behind us and so forth but Tolstoy is really interesting I think best example wasn't any of these that have to do with humans but with non-human animals he's wi
tnessed also to a big campaign to make slaughterhouses more humane if that's the right word it's really unfair that we use brutality to refer to human cruelty but at any rate people talked about being more humane to animals found in humane societies and so forth when humans are the ones who are the brutes if you will and yet Tolstoy worried that those who set out to make slaughterhouses less horrible for the animals involved would make a meat production much harder to challenge and much more mas
sive and on that point he's clearly correct I think I mean that's what's happened that's what's happening in the United States not just the distance but the fact that even within a slaughterhouse were almost no one sees the killing of animals that we eat of our cattle there are still legal provisions and even Department of Agriculture authorities in the slaughterhouse to make sure that the animals aren't killed too horribly suggests that weak that our violence is inflicted humanely but it can ke
ep going so I don't know is this a useful framework for thinking about the forever war let's consider we wouldn't ever want to say irresponsibly that the humanity of our current war for all its faults is the main let alone the only reason why it keeps on going with no anti-war movement in sight although as we'll see later there may well be anti-war sentiment among the American population on both sides of what we take to be the conventional political spectrum lots of reasons some of you might say
well there are terrorists so as long as there are terrorists we have to fight them and it's not it's not the result of the way we're regulating the war that it's going on forever or the legal regime we have either when it comes to initiation or continuation or the hostilities themselves that at fault but the fact that there's an enemy now that's it perfectly you know that's the normal view out and out and out in the world I would say of course we can debate whether that's true and we can debate
whether the war on terrorists is perpetually creating the enemies that then have to be interdicted and so forth but this is an open debate which I can't possibly win right now what I'm more interested in is all these other factors that have been cited I think correctly that are probably more important in explaining why there's broad enough support for humanization to have had one big change to the war on terror in the middle of george w bush's administration when it was legalized including thro
ugh significant court cases like Hamdan V Rumsfeld and the war whatever your criticisms of it was made much more legalized and humane on the conduct of hostilities side of things but on the other side the initiation and continuation erosion of controls including and maybe especially under the last President Barack Obama so I don't have time probably because we want to really I really want to have this attacked to go through other factors that you might cite as the really important ones but then
there's the last on the list is Tolstoy right to whatever extent that the priority we've given as lawyers not just outside the military but within it as much as we might disagree on opposite sides of that divide to make war more and more humane relative to the past counterinsurgencies America's conducted most obviously the Vietnam War does that fact help account for the endlessness of the war and if you want to give it further the expansion of its scope I think maybe so but again just to conclud
e I think we have to take care it's a dangerous hypothesis as you see Tolstoy's implication is almost like you have a forced choice either you give up war or you make it more humane well that's ridiculous to suggest that we have to choose one or the other we could and should do both if we you know are a reformist of a certain kind but maybe there's a way of recuperating his argument maybe more responsibly than the way he made it maybe there are big risks to adopting a reformist project that's to
o focused on making war more humane because you neglect another possible agenda which you might have to balance with your goal of making war more humane now it'll be more controversial you'll have less common ground maybe with the military in in tussling with them over what the Geneva Conventions mean and so forth but it's open to legal reformers to talk a lot more about use ad bellum law or constitutional war powers or that old statute the war power resolution then reformers have been doing and
if they did so they might counteract the risks that come with making war more humane as we've done creating us think something new in the world a new kind of humane war for all it's false now I'll just close since I may have misled some of you by putting the word poetics in the title which is probably a word not allowed in this building and it's true I talked about Tolstoy but I didn't talk about poetics so I'll just say in closing I don't think law makes that much difference in general except
is a lag variable what does change our tolerance for violence abroad well I think the answer is poetry broadly conceived literary artists who can bring home to enough people the realities of war especially and after conscription when our brothers and sons and husbands and now today women too are aren't fighting out on the field especially as the war becomes light or no footprint and I think our poets have failed failed us all the war literature since 9/11 is like Vietnam era literature and reaso
nably enough since there were heavy foot print wars along the way in Afghanistan and Iraq and yet do we have a literature that brings home to enough people this new humane form of warfare fought through drones and Special Forces not to the best of my knowledge so maybe you know you shouldn't drop out of law school but maybe someone should think about the poetics and not just the politics of humane war thanks so much thank you sad mother disappointed when you said you were going to end on poetics
I was hoping for a poem let's go forward as you had foreshadowed um I would raise the question about the definition of the current war on terror particularly after the initial engagement the Bush administration but it is that the most humane and you think and want to hear more from you about how you define the nature and scope of harm in this context it can't be casualties alone right I mean that would exclude non fatal violence it would exclude secondary and tertiary victims and it can't just
be us drone warfare because that would exclude as you mentioned the variety of ways in which the war on terror has morphed into a series of proxy arrangements as well we begin to kind of broaden our sense it you know in this way how do we think differently about harm and just final part of that question when I was reflecting a presentation my work with victims of the US war on terror hum is comprised of the initial violation and there's a lot of that's linked to the injury or the trauma and in s
ome cases of course the fatality depending on the circumstance but a lot of the harm derives from a lack of remedy right a lack of ability to rely on the law to provide an account you know to provide a recognition of harm and if as you say is true that the current meant were in is the moment where there are no legal limit right we're the chance of accountability is so off the table and isn't that the most profoundly harmful situation in which individuals might find themselves if we think about h
armonies only if they're still alive only if they're still alive so III do want to acknowledge like the great force at that point especially the claim you know that the claim that this war is the most humane war ever fought is sustainable only insofar as we neglect the fact that aside from you know this you know various parts of the military that do things like self investigate and then provide these Salah Tia payments which is it actually very important widespread practice nowadays there's an a
mazing book I've just reviewed that everyone should read by Nick McDonald called the bodies in person that is is kind of a detailed investigation of the moral management and and and including when it comes to salah tia payments but clearly that's not accountability and so your point is very forceful as is your point about secondary and tertiary you know victims but you know so i but i would say that many people would would start with the proposition that the worst thing that can happen in war is
is death especially of civilians although I myself think it they focus on civilians although the law privileges them may not make as much moral sense as we think because you know there are lots of soldiers who are human beings too and in fact all of them so uh and and they die and they suffer also lots of grievous harm and tertiary secondary and tertiary arm but if we begin with the proposition that death is the worst thing then I just don't believe that any that you know that my claim can like
really be challenged given the scope of death both to civilians and soldiers in prior war so I also would venture to say that you know if we're advocates and focus on the remaining shortcomings our temptation is then to magnify them which is what you do as an advocate but if that involves us at denying that the US military and allied militaries for whatever reasons instrumental reasons political reasons is is trying to abide by some laws governing the conduct of hostilities to a totally unprece
dented and indeed shockingly unprecedent extent and then we haven't been honest to like a big change and so we're I think you know we're I think I'm I'm sort of wreck really put kind of put back to square one with your question is we do have to have a like a metric for defending this claim is it I mean because you can claim that someone who's immediately killed doesn't suffer and you know as one of my slides says we have a lot more wounded for example in this in this in this form of warfare mayb
e we argue that if you somehow got out your utilitarian tote board it wouldn't be as easy to defend my claim given you know that new kinds of harms psychologists are willing to find and so forth but in the end can anyone really doubt that death is the worst thing the thing that most like to prevent in war and that it's diminished largely because of the self regulation of the military under pressure to a historically remarkable extent I have follow-up so I'm gonna sit on like a few many hands alr
eady or getting too precise and basically what he says when you I'm doing this from memory but whether it's in this article or another article some people say that the reason Germany in Japan we went from militarism and aggression and turned within a few years into almost pacifistic stays was because they have been brought down to bare metal as a society what Freeman talked about in the Iraq war because of the use of precision weapons and that we didn't kill off the Sunni officer corps that set
the stage because the Iraqis never felt they are really defeated there we go you know we have 15 years of war but what the answer to it is I think is that's what you need to explore and some people in the military would say this the problem is not the law of war complying with the law of war is not that difficult it is the policy restraints that are placed up on top of it for example when the president and this is a policy Trunks carrying through announces to the public we're not gonna conduct a
strike if even one civilian isn't the enemy goes to school on that so now as you know they carry around children in those so because they know that the drones looking and and so I think that is is one of the problems and so perhaps the answer is not abandoned law but rather rethinking the utility of these policy driven decisions because I've written about this thing called the moral hazard of inaction because when you don't do a drone strike people think well no civilians around the hill yeah t
hey are actually because the guy you were going to take out he's going to go and do other things so I think you have something here wish I could help you you're more but I think it's worth pursuing so I would encourage you that can carry forward you're gonna get a lot of criticism because people are up and understand what you're trying to do you're they're gonna think you're talking about Cree grace on or something like that and you're not so you're gonna have to ya know that that's a really eno
rmous ly helpful you know if you go back to the 19th century you know when Tolstoy was living I think there were three broad options on the table about what to do with war I mentioned to humanize it or end it you know that so there was a big pacifist movement unlike anything we've seen since the Vietnam era but there was also the school of intensifiers who wanted to make war more intense and extreme and and a lot of Germans theorists through the 19th century hewed to this view some of them justi
fied their argument in a sense by appealing to both the humanitarians and the pacifists and said if you let me get impose shock and awe it will be more humane in the long run and peace a stable peace will come so you're kind of maybe not surprisingly kind of reminiscent of that old school of thought I think the trouble that many of us would find is that is is that you know there have been a lot of intensifiers who have made things worse not more durably peaceful with lots of civilian arm and and
that's why the humanization project became so appealing so what I want to say is what happened to pacifism and you know Tolstoy and war and peace you if you read as quotas is actually sort of close to the intense vacation view but I think as time passed and he took Jesus more seriously he he virtue is ambassador with respect to the war on terror and I'm wondering why there aren't more people of that sort I've got a bunch of hands I'm so really interesting talk and I was thinking through Sam of
other analogies right so you mentioned the death penalty and I was trying to think about are there other situations where we do have a total prohibition and does it stick and so the things that came to mind some of them are you know use in Bello things like nuclear war or chemical weapons and I guess the prohibition on torture could go in there too and I'm just thinking through how that so we we have not had a nuclear war other than if you put aside and a little bit sort of murky right I mean yo
u can't you maybe you can't use them but you can probably stockpile them if you haven't joined onto certain treaties but at least we haven't completely forged a chemical weapons we used to think okay we've kind of finally gotten rid of them and now they're making it come back and there doesn't seem to be very much at all that at least in this one area of the world but we deter it so I always trying to think well weird as to these kinds of examples place within what you're talking about and I gue
ss with respect to say the death penalty or a particular kind of awful armament or weapon you can engage in the basic activity without that right you and similarly for the death penalty you can you can punish you could put somebody you know you pose really serious deterrent punishments without by getting and still get rid of the conduct you find most offensive it's not clear to me that we can really ever get rid of and I think you alluded this we're never gonna really get rid of war and then the
question is what's the baseline if the baseline question is this conduct is going to happen then what's the second best option that we can get to so with certain things I think it's fair to say and maybe it depends on how you slice it certain kinds of conduct it's fair to say we actually could get to zero right so our first best option potentially is there and then we have just a means question but if we you take is a different baseline you know that there's gonna be some of this conduct so tor
tures another example I can keep we're still torturing right notwithstanding any prohibition so I'm just wondering if that helps to sort of yeah quite a healthy cute I was gonna I'm sort of add a few more questions in a name wall I'm professor Michael's not so much so far in defining the work defining what what what do you mean by war oh I say speak up this for you speak up in endless war I learn about the endless war from Mary Judea who makes the point that the distinction between war and non M
oore has become much blurrier than it was before which would suggest that the more war becomes like peace peace also becomes more like war and if you focus only on a certain sub part that you define narrowly as well you may miss some of the bigger picture of what should or should not be so narrowly I think I'd want you to define what you mean by war what you're looking at and broadly I want you to take that type of consideration into the I'm also just wondering how this paradigm works with like
the economics of Bohr and how do you factor in the fact that there are you know institutions outside of the military and you know the parties of war that profit off of war and that you know have an interest in maintaining war okay those are all amazing insights I mean I have thought a bit Larry about about your challenge actually one thing you said at the very beginning I think should be you know underline because it's quite insightful which is that you know within what what I was calling the hu
manization of war there are some abolitionist impulses like with respect to particular practices and presumably what we call Hague law is partly like abolitionist movement with respect to certain kinds of weapons but the baseline issue is I think fundamental to you know this idea of Tolstoy and comparative abolition so his point is that lots of people thought for it for eons that slavery was you know not possible to edit out of the human experience the best that could be done was to make it more
humane and that you know proved incorrect although we could of course argue that it's functional equivalence remain you know alive and well it still was meaningful to be an abolitionist with respect to slavery and then face down you know the functional equivalents I would I would say you know this central task in in international law was the Pacific resolution of disputes for most of modern history and there was a huge amount of labor and success on that front and so to call call call a defeat
in advance in in especially when we have these statutory constitutional and international limit on initiation and continuation of force seems like you know we wouldn't want to give up too soon and prematurely conclude that we're dealing with an inevitable inevitable phenomenon to humanize you know Ralph makes really I mean that's a fantastic point I mean I I really like Mary's work but it's still the case that for all the the move to proxy warfare with a horrible toll for the world that a Americ
a undertook between Vietnam when it was forced off the battlefield and 9/11 when it was allowed to get back on it that move after 9/11 was still very significant and so I think we're on firm ground even if we want to talk about you know proxy violence and so forth and the you know you could argue that the endless war goes back to 1947 or 41 or 1492 but it still could be legitimate to talk about ending this form of it or this version of it now I think we talked about this last night we'd have to
contend with whether that would send us back to a form of proxy war just as bad or worse is that really plausible well first of all we already have proxy war in Yemen so it's not like that we don't we aren't already doing that and it's hard for me as with Larry to to worry too much about you know cleaning up the residual forms that violence might take once we target the war itself let's try that at least and see what happens a judge the risks in advance but you know why not and and and and you'r
e right of course the a big thing driving this is arms procurement arms sales you know Dwight Eisenhower a great Republican warned us about that and and we're living it I mean that I think came home to us when we saw images from you know the yemeni battlefield of our company's shells lying on the ground and that's that so you know a quite a big question is is what would a pacifist movement were there ever to be one again concern itself with and presumably it would have to take this on to i'm mac
kie kramer I'm a 3l at Duke had and I guess what I'm wondering is that your your idea that as war grows more humane we become more comfortable with it I'm wondering where you draw this distinction between humane and really visibility great because I feel like visibilities are the much more important factor than the idea of like humanity or being okay with casualties rather it's just that we've shifted that our exposure to those casualties and then our own exposure of our own soldiers and I don't
think that's uniquely modern phenomenon you've been talking some about you know the Vietnam War which was very visible because of a lot of exposure of US soldiers on the ground but we also dropped an incredible amount of bombs on Laos all throughout in a shadow war that was never formally declared and that doesn't get any real attention or you know poets haven't written about it it doesn't have the same modern so isn't it that war is just becoming less and less visible to the American public ra
ther than humane I really like this project I think most of it seems absolutely right to me I just had a couple of thoughts though the first wasn't I was surprised not to hear more about the Cold War and mutual assured destruction because it seems like that's the ultimate example for you that's the ultimate intensification of war and then suggest at least under certain conditions if you take it to the limit you know a global suicide then didn't inspire the right the other thought was as a domest
ic constitutional lawyer you got me thinking about the rules for initiating contact and it does seem to me that those rules in an our society are in large part of function of a unique historical moment and a unique correlation of forces if you will because we are a weak country we are amid superpowers we are in a legalistic period where there's a real concern with giving any just cause for more right and so anything you do it gets on the wrong side with the British or the friends who you know ar
e lusting after your territory anyway is likely to bring you into a potentially existential conflict right and so we have a very strict rule that anything you do that initiates a state of war even in the smallest way has to be a three by the Congress that's not our situation now and the idea of low-intensity conflict is a lot more thinkable to us now I would submit that the rules the old rules about conflict being hard to initiate constitutionally are much more honored the closer we get to a sce
nario where these consequences for the nation are likely to be real and so for any major commitment whether it's even legally required or not the president tends to go to Congress important for the Iraq war the president goes to Congress with the initiation of the war on terror the president goes for Congress I think it's interesting that FDR goes to Congress after Pearl Harbor when he doesn't have to as a matter of law because the state of law of war actually already exists right and so I wonde
red one implication and there may not be friendly to your project is we need as a matter of these rules of initiation we need more than one category and maybe it needs it maybe it ought to be easier to initiate conflict if it doesn't have those kind of existence okay so I'm just wondering where you draw the line or how intense you should allow this intensification to be it seems like you're doing some sort of utilitarian calculus here and what it sounds like you're saying to me is if you had a t
rolley problem where you had the fat man to save the five and you're something pushing off the bridge so is there a limit to how intense you think it could be and how would you draw that line great okay wonderful so with respect to the first question you know that's that it was profound it's just that we have a very large literature on war at a distance which is the name of one of the great books on the topic and and it illustrates indeed that the relation of domestic publics to the war their em
pires fight in that was the British Empire in the case of that book is indeed very old you know another book you know you might know about is Susan Sontag a book regarding the lives of others and and it's fundamentally about you know the distance and the way that images might be able to lessen it for us in certain circumstances but as a phenomenon it's significant I just think that the human humanity adds something new not that it displaces the distance or is even the major factor but is a new o
ne that hasn't been effectively commented upon which is all I mean all I can do is write books and that's why I made a special point of saying even in the slaughterhouse when there's a distance imposed on the sight of killing the cattle even from the workers in the slaughterhouse 99% of them there are these new newer supervening rules that those people in secret have to kill the cow humanely and um that's what's happening in war too since Vietnam and so I'm not claiming I don't want to make a st
rong causal because maybe the distance would do the job without it maybe if in the slaughterhouse those rules were lifted and the distance were all that all that we needed to keep doing it you know it would turn out to be human humanity made no difference and the same could be true in war but I doubt it I think we know that our that were fighting this and at least some of us especially the more liberal we get can take solace in the fact that it's being a thought increasingly within the confines
of of these of this humanitarian law now there are some who want to add human rights law which we could get into those were fantastic comments I would just note that there wasn't a one-time-only history for War Powers you know where there was a fledgling country that then became a superpower although of course basically that's that's that's got to be the main narrative because there was the post-vietnam moment and you know all of us teach you know Jonny Lee's democracy and distrust were the idea
s therein and Caroline products and all that but his great book was warned responsibility which was about this moment of opportunity to revisit War Powers you know and and actually as predictions about the War Powers Resolution and why it's been gutted including by the latest administration and one of my own colleagues working in it it is actually like in that book from the early 80s so I would say you know maybe we relaxed things a bit and and asked whether there's more play in the system even
for a superpower with respect to some of these statutory regimes and and maybe even constitutional understandings and especially like deference to prevailing understandings of international law outside the country so do we have to live in a world where like a university professor coins a theory that allows you to intervene in a country if there the country's unwilling or unable to control its terrorists and the u.s. takes it on board even though most international lawyers outside the country thi
nk it's bunk No so that seems like a plausible change I do you know you said something very important about like the probable factual conditions under which Congress dysfunctional it is might assume a role of oversight and obviously we're not near that the question is what was going on could we have the functional equivalent of the conditions that prevailed not so much at the founding that after Vietnam which in the end was a counter insurgent war abroad like the one we're fighting now probably
we're nowhere near those conditions whatever they are but still it's worth thinking about I'm not an intensifier Tolstoy I think flirted with that idea and professor Dunlap even more but then it's on them to say like how do we know when like especially since we're engaged in prediction that the shock and awe we perpetrate is going to be worth it in terms of the durable peace it creates or the lives saved given that the shock and on the short term is going to be ghastly in its consequences that's
why I reject intensification in favor of pacifism but of course others do not neither then nor now no time for one more question miss Karen Huber I'm a 1l and also associate professor of history at Wesleyan College so two hats I'm really interested in something that didn't come up in your definition of what is humane which is the role of what is possible and in particular technology the things that we are able the decisions were able to make today are so radically different from for example the
period I study in World War one or if we go back in this country's history back to you know the horrific things we saw during the conflicts with Native Americans or the civil war you just see a a very different amount of possibility total I'm clearly I mean that's the case but maybe we should an overstate the the idea that like the technological deterministic approach to which that might lead that like you fight the wars you can clearly you know we can be more humane because we have the tools t
o do it as imperfect as they are but I mean I would argue that the United States fought the war on terror one way from two thousand one to three and pivoted first of all it legalized the conflict and it just engaged since then in a new approach to it now it turned out that the rise of drones made that moral choice feasible in a way that that that wouldn't couldn't have been imagined even in 2003 but you know no reason a drone you know under the regime of 2001 through three can't you know be impr
ecise in order to cause shock and awe and maybe you know intensify conflict in the name of you know the future good so it really depends on what our moral approaches and the ends to which we decide to put the technology though of course it matters what it can do that's why I would say you know let's be aware of of over emphasizing drones and under emphasizing special forces in our current form of war given their deployment and the three-quarters of the countries I mentioned and and their major p
ersisting role in global order I regret that we have to bring out conversation to a close it was it was an engaging presentation and back and forth in the Q&A so thank you very much I'm firstborn for being here and we look forward to seeing many of you at our future events in our human rights and practice series thank you [Applause]
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