photo: human-shield. The Challenge of Asymmetric Warfare
Tsvi Bisk
We are serializing this article by our friend and colleague Dr. Tsvi Bisk, PHD.
Western powers, led by the United States, must work for a Fifth Geneva Convention; this time pertaining to Asymmetric Warfare. At present there is no international legal framework for conducting a war in which the primary tactic is terror committed by persons or organizations rather than a state-sanctioned military force. The terror tactic is treated as a crime rather than an act of war, even though its perpetrators openly declare they are at war with western civilization. Killing ones enemies and own citizens who are actively involved in planning, carrying out, and encouraging terror activities has been branded as “extra-judicial executions” as if the terrorists should be Mirandized and granted due process.
This is equivalent to the British assassinating Hitler and his British propagandist William Joyce (the infamous Lord Haw Haw) and being accused of committing a crime rather than engaging in a legitimate act of war. The same charge could have been levied against the US if they had targeted and killed American citizen Tokyo Rose. The Fifth Geneva Convention for Asymmetric Warfare would enable a state to declare war on a non-state entity and treat that entity as if it were an enemy country. Its supporters would be considered enemy combatants and therefore legitimate targets on the asymmetric field of battle (whether the combatants be citizens or not).
The lack of a legal framework for Asymmetric Warfare is a conundrum that the USA has had to deal with in regards to rendition and the prison at Guantanamo. Those incarcerated have not been charged under civil law nor have they been treated as prisoners of war – they are in legal limbo. In some ways this has been tactically convenient for the USA, but has harmed the moral clarity of America’s cause by tarnishing the constitutionalist fundamentals of American civilization thus damaging its greatest grand strategic asset in the war on totalitarian Islamism.
There is no question that if the incarcerated are treated as prisoners of war they will have certain rights and this will elicit opposition to my proposal. But I would counter that the legal and moral clarity gained by creating an international legal code for asymmetric war would be a grand strategic asset far outweighing the temporary tactical convenience of the ‘neither here nor there’ limbo that Guantanamo represents.
Click here for the previous part I
Tsvi Bisk is an American-Israeli futurist. He is the director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking (www.futurist-thinking.co.il/) and contributing editor for strategic thinking for The Futurist magazine. He is also the author of The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century.
Tsvi is available as a lecturer, a scholar in residence, and consultant
If you just can’t wait for the rest, go here
Tsvi Bisk
