Agents: the UN approach and the terrorist approach to warfare

Abstract

‘US Secretary of Defense jailed on war crimes charges in Germany.’ This headline was never printed, but for a few weeks in February 2005, newspaper editors entertained the notion that it might be. The US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was due to give a speech at the security conference held every year in Munich, but his aides said that he would not travel to Germany unless he received assurances that he would not be arrested to face war crimes charges. He was quickly given such assurances and went to Germany without incident. One interesting element in this story is that it was not the German government that made charges against Rumsfeld, but the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights acting on behalf of four Iraqis who claimed to have been abused by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: they invoked German legal statutes enforcing certain treaties on war crimes in an attempt to have the German authorities detain Rumsfeld. This indicates that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, war is no longer a means that a government can choose merely because the use of armed force fits its political ends. In the years since 1945 the ‘UN approach’ to warfare has negated the doctrine by which Clausewitz defined war. War was no longer an uncomplicated means to pursue political ends.