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Neta C. Crawford, Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America's Post-9/11 Wars (Oxford University Press, 2013), 486 pages, ISBN 978- 0-19-998172-4.
Michael Walzer warned in 2004 that the growing use of humanitarian rhetoric by military officials threatened a
certain softening of the critical mind, a truce between theorists and soldiers. If intellectuals are often awed and silenced by political leaders who Invite them to din- ner, how much more so by generals who talk their language? And If the generals are actually fighting just wars, If inter arma the laws speak, what point Is there In anything we can say?1
Neta Crawford's exhaustive study of accountability for the collateral killing of civilians in America's post-9/11 wars rises to Walzer's challenge. The book is an extended reflection on the ethics of war at a time when the US military seems genuinely committed-as a matter of pragmatism, if perhaps not principle- to minimizing the number of innocent people it kills or maims.
Crawford makes three core arguments. The first has to do with the norms and laws that govern the conduct of war. Reel- ing back the layers of responsibility-of soldiers, commanders, military organiza- tions, the US Congress, and the American public-she finds a gap between "moral grammar and military vocabulary."2 The problem is that the terms of restraint are also instrumental terms of engagement: "military necessity," "discrimination," "proportionality," "collateral damage." In place of fixed rules, we see a permissive process of weighing and judging which allows a great deal of violence as long as it is deemed necessary, discriminant, and proportionate. This framework of moral reasoning constitutes harm to noncom- batants as the tragic but inevitable result of normal military conduct.
The second argument is that the emphasis in Western law on individual responsibility promotes a "bad apple" theory of atrocity. We tend to define atrocities as those instances when soldiers go off the rails and deliberately massacre civilians. This kind of carnage commands media headlines and is investigated and often prosecuted. But focusing on the bad apples obscures the moral reality of war as a bureaucratic enterprise. Crawford instead wants us to "add up" individual cases of killing and injury in order to see the patterns of "systemic atrocities" or "systemic collateral...