So, I’m not arguing that it’s OK or that the effects aren’t bad, just that I think that the primary bad effects are differently located.

I mean to say we’re stepping, and we have stepped, towards a world without any kind of universal, generally globally accepted norm of conduct. It’s not that when there has been something akin to that (straight through 20th century, in large part) everyone followed it, but we had at least something to point to, and a basis to try them on, when they ran afoul (that was part of the point of it). And even the big powers feared for their moral and diplomatic capitol enough to prevent most kinds of systemic abuses.

But now we’ve polluted the well, we’re muddying the waters (needlessly, I might add). We can still force other countries to adhere to it sans our example but with our demand for a good long while, and it’ll probably be the legal facets of it that go last, but eventually they’ll go too.

Look at it like this. If we began a practice of occasionally shooting, sans cause, people who lay down their arms and surrender to us, if we began a framework wherein that could be excused, what do you think would be the result? In 1991, when we went into The Gulf, we saw whole Middle Eastern armies just give up, almost happily. That wouldn’t have happened if we were the Iranians. What’s the difference?

The difference is those armies knew we lived under a certain code of conduct, that we adhered to it (or had a strong reputation to, anyway), and that even we, in some way, were accountable to someone. They knew, or at least had damn good reason to believe, that they would have an umbrella of protection. They didn’t get that with their previous wars, both from their enemies or their own government. They were almost happy to give up to it when whey had a chance. For a lot of those guys, it was a relief to be able to surrender to the United States.

Now, if we went in there on the basis of a 20-year reputation of wantonly shooting people who surrendered to us, maybe torturing a good chunk of them too, and they knew that we considered ourselves to have no code we lived by, no specific or objective one anyway, if we were accountable to no one, do you think we’d have rolled into the desert to see scores of soldiers already with their weapons laid down the white flags up?

We’re not only creating, but demanding on, a culture of subjectivity and relativism as it pertains to barbarousness and deceit. We tried an experiment for awhile (roughly the life of the Geneva Conventions) where relativism wouldn’t stand, and where we tried to have some measure of objective standards of basic human decency in warfare. And it’s now us leading the charge to get out from under that.

I am not sure of the amount of increase there will be in reciprocal behaviour used against the US or allies as a result, but it’ll certainly be justified by the people that do it with examples of the US doing it and it’s hard to argue against that; when you get into a “yeah, but that was different” analysis, even though it’s often going to be a defensible way to approach it, you’re going to lose the attention of most people, I would say.

That sort of thing rarely gets noticed or reported. My guess is it probably happens as a matter of regular course a lot more often than even those few who are paying attention know about. We don’t really care anymore. It’s one of the least “shock the conscience” types of Geneva violations, but also perhaps one of the most pernicious.

My guess is, though nobody will think to make the connection, that there will be a real correlation between our unwillingness to abide by our code of conduct, and everyone else’s willingness to do the same.

From this point, the hostages, agents, and about 60 real rebels made a 90-mile march through the jungle to a spot where, agents told their unsuspecting comrades, an “international mission” was coming to check on the hostages. On schedule, an unmarked white helicopter set down and Colombian security forces posing as FARC rebels jumped out. They told the rebels that they would take the hostages to the meeting with the “international mission.” All of the captives were handcuffed and placed aboard the helicopter, along with two of their FARC guards, who were quickly disarmed and subdued after the helicopter lifted off.

Not stated in that is, from some accounts, the “Red Cross” name was bandied about by the government infiltrators (I still can’t tell if, according to the more bland reporting, they were instructed to said “international mission”, or if that’s just what the reporting is using instead of reporting that they said “Red Cross”; either way the principle is the same), and as you said one solider at least was “flying the false flag” of the Red Cross specifically.

I don’t know that it’s a lot to do about nothing. I would say that this situation, specifically, doesn’t deserve a war crimes tribunal or anything like that. Some official investigation and a big of finger-wagging would be in order, however.

What is not a lot to do about nothing is I think this is pretty emblematic about a larger issue, that being how seriously we (and by “we” I mean “the civilized world”) take codes of conduct for combat and warfare. You can tut-tut any specific instance, but we’re doing that these days with every specific instance, to the point where we’re creating and instantiated a new framework for how we view these things. That framework being “fuck that; there are no rules”.

I think it’s worth pausing and at least reflecting on what we’re abandoning, and why we once deemed those rules important, even if we, as a whole, consciously (or unconsciously, which is how we’re doing it now) decide we’re okay with the present course.