Discussing the same post of mine as formed Tim Burke's point of departure (see immediately below), Michael Fisher has taken a more severe view of it than Tim does. Michael doesn't think it's open to me to deny being answerable for the torture and other abuses perpetrated against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He writes:
This is not a tenable argument. Throughout history invading armies have routinely expressed their dominating aims and psychology by means of abusing military and civilian prisoners, among others. Today such abuse is rarely condoned and directed by those in political and military authority - but it nevertheless routinely takes place, and will do so again in the future. It is a very likely consequence of all war, involving all parties.It is 'disingenuous', Michael goes on to say, for supporters of the war to attempt to dissociate themselves from 'aspects of the resulting violence which, while not a mechanical inevitability, history tells us are very likely to take place'. He allows, quite logically - though this is my formulation of the point rather than his own - that should he give his support to a war in the future he will accept the same burden of moral responsibility for extra-legal abuses and brutalities that he wants to hold me, and presumably other supporters of the Iraq war, answerable for now.
I can only counsel him against this course. In taking it, he would be simply tossing aside the entire doctrine of jus in bello - in a nutshell, that you are obliged, even in a just war, to fight by just means, that you may not abandon all restraints, that even in warfare there are certain things that you are not permitted to do; tossing aside all the painfully fought-for progress which the world community has managed to make in developing laws of warfare and a schedule of war crimes recognized and punishable under international law.
It's one thing to say that war is a brutalizing human enterprise and that every war therefore produces temptations to cruel or violent excess in contravention precisely of the laws and codes I've just alluded to. It is quite another thing to undermine the force of these laws and codes oneself by casually accepting that such things must inevitably happen and making oneself morally responsible for them. It is just because of the danger of moral abuses and brutalities produced by war that the norms of jus in bello have to be insisted upon, in order to curb them so far as possible; and this in a war you support as much as in any you oppose. To put the thing differently, supporting a war but rejecting the torture and abuse of prisoners of war is not at all the same thing - the same absurdity - as supporting a war but requiring of those fighting it that no one should get killed.
Whatever Michael may come to decide about this matter should the occasion arise that he finds himself in favour of a country or group of countries going to war, I myself did not, in supporting the Iraq war, foreswear or otherwise make light of the legal norms and moral constraints of legitimate warfare.