In the previous post, Jim Rogers asked what can morally be done about enemies who use innocents are human shields?  That’s a difficult question, but I’ve found Daniel Bell’s discussion helpful ( Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State ).

Bell takes issue with Paul Ramsey’s analysis.  Ramsey argues that the blame for the deaths of innocents used as human shields lies with those using them, not with those who kill them while intending to kill enemies.  Bell agrees that terrorists who use human shields are responsible for their deaths, and even concedes that they may be more blameworthy than the soldiers who actually kill.  But this “passing the buck” doesn’t, Bell thinks, give just warriors leave to ignore the principle of discrimination; “two wrongs don’t make a right.”  The fact that the enemy is using innocents for cover doesn’t create “a kind of moral ‘free fire zone’ where the shoeshine boy or the woman with a gun to her head are simply declared combatants because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

What is to be done, then?

Rather than relaxing the demands of discrimination, these conditions require a response that is “more discriminate. Instead of using air power, one might have to send in ground forces.  Instead of using a tank or artillery, one might have to use infantry.  Instead of using an M-16 or hand grenade, one might have to use a sniper.”  He admits that this rigorous standard might mean that a military target will have to be left intact for the time being, until it’s possible to mount a discriminate attack, and he would also admit that, despite all precautions, innocents get killed.  But Bell takes the standards of jus in bello as rigorous demands that cannot be simply dispensed with when they get difficult to apply.

Bell disputes Ramsey’s argument that “granting the enemy immunity from attack because he had the shrewdness to locate him missiles bases in the heart of his cities.”  He argues that just war “does not grant the enemy immunity from attack even when installations are surrounded by noncombatants; rather, in obedience to their Lord, Christian just warriors refrain from making indiscriminate attacks.  The enemy is granted no immunity from discriminate attacks.”  If an enemy hides in a neighborhood, bombs and artillery cannot be sufficiently discriminate but “snipers and door-to-door searches” might be.  Those sorts of operations, of course, put more of our troops in harm’s way, which is why they are unpopular (though door-to-door searches have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan).  But Bell’s point is that the standards of jus in bello need to have teeth, or else they are just providing moral cover for whatever we want or think we need to do.