Who is Isis?

http://pando.com/2014/06/16/the-war-nerd-h...-qaeda-i-s-i-s/

We are once again involved in war in Iraq: yesterday the UK parliament approved air strikes in Iraq with an overwhelming majority. It is not at all clear what good this will do, and although it is claimed that this is confined to Iraq it was obvious that there is built in "mission creep" because in the course of the "debate" it was said that ISIS must be defeated in Syria as well. Since there is no evidence I know of that air strikes are effective by themselves it seems likely that eventually there will be ground troops too

According to the UK government this action is legal because the democratic Iraqi government has asked for it: but it is interesting to note that Mr Cameron claimed that it would also be legal to take the same measures in Syria: which certainly has not made such a request. It was reported that there is no need for a UN mandate - we have heard that before- and the argument appears to be that there is no need for one because it would not be granted. A number of countries might veto it, and it now seems that if you cannot get your own way through the mechanisms provided by international law it is legitimate to ignore that law. Nothing new there, of course, but as a justification it lacks logic and legitimacy, surely? It is rather chilling to find that this is presented as a moral decision: apparently Mr Cameron believes that our moral action cannot be determined in Moscow or Beijing. Have a serious think about what that means.

The linked article is an interesting account of who ISIS are and it makes a number of points about the reality of such groups as opposed to the familiar narrative of demon leaders and their influence. It is perhaps not surprising that there is tendency to see charismatic leaders as the cause of war, at least to the extent that Westerners believe in individualism and leadership as the driving force of history: for those who take the view that structural and social forces produce the man that is not so clear at all, and this author makes a good case for the latter tale, I think

A second thread about this decision to make war in Iraq again was drawn to my attention by a friend of mine and I think it is worth thinking about. It concerns the legitimacy of such action and how it can be justified in moral terms (if war can ever be justified, which is itself the subject of a great deal of debate over centuries)

We are told that ISIS are a rebel group: that is they have no legitimacy as an army, since they have no state. What does that make them, then? My friend contends it puts them in the same sort of position as pirates, which makes some kind of sense. But then the question arises: if one is fighting pirates what is the moral justification for killing innocent civilians?

In conventional war that question is addressed through the concept of "proportionality". In essence, the civilian casualties are weighed against the importance of the military objective. It follows that there is an "acceptable" number of deaths of civilians, though there is no formula to work that out, for any given military action. So far as I can see that is predicated on the fact that conventional war is between nation states and so in some sense the populations of both states, even when civilians, can be said to be at war. It is true that often the population does not have much say: but that is the essence of the matter, I think.

But is that true in the case of pirates, or of groups like ISIS? Obviously not. What, therefore, can possibly justify the inevitable civilian deaths? I can see that if there is civil war or insurgency against a legitimate government that government can justify such deaths in defence of what they will claim is the majority, against those who seek to take power in face of the will of the people. Arguably they, too, are involved in the dispute directly. But I struggle to see how that can be sufficient to justify civilian deaths at the hands of a foreign power. In the case of civil war it is not at all clear how one can determine which side is actually representative of the people from the outside. And thus we get the Westphalian doctrine of non intervention in civil war. That is not to say that the true representatives will always win: but it is to argue that the people within that country must settle their internal disputes without "help" from outside. And of course the way such wars are presented to foreign populations is never pure objective assessment of the merits of each side's case: there are always vested interests, both corporate and national, and they manipulate the information we can have.