People like Hegseth like to think that the rules of warfare are woke gay bullshit designed by losers to hamper the natural winners (i.e. them), but they don’t understand that prior to being codified by the Geneva convention, the rules of war were customary, and existed for reasons other than purely humanitarian ones.
For instance, when surrendering a city or fort, the defenders would be typically given something called honours of war, in which they would be permitted to march out bearing their arms and waving their flags, thus avoiding humiliation. They would then surrender their arms and be taken as prisoners of war, or, supposing that the attacking army doesn’t have the facilities to keep POWs, would be granted free passage. Now you could simply let them march out and then massacre them, thus avoiding either having to care for POWs or having a bunch of enemy troops that you have to deal with in a future battle, but you can only pull that trick once - the next time, the defenders will fight to the death rather than be massacred. So you pull a dirty trick to win this battle, but it makes every future battle harder, and it also means that they will not be likely to take you prisoner. Even the Mongols would typically honour the surrender of a city (provided no resistance was offered after the ultimatum), because besieging or storming a city is much costlier than making it surrender.
You see this effect in action in the present war, where the US twice used diplomatic talks as cover for suprise attacks, and thus Iran no longer has any reason to see any diplomacy with the US as legitimate, so even as Trump wants to pull out, he can’t.You can assassinate their civilian leaders, but now you have to keep your head on a swivel as you’re also suddenly a legitimate target. You can sink their defenceless ship and leave the survivors to drown, but now they have no reciprocal obligation towards your crews. You can strike their embassies, but now your embassies are struck in return. You can launch attacks on them from nominally neutral countries, but now those countries are legitimate targets.
They’re just play acting at being generals.
Kegsworth is a piece of shit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he honestly didn’t know what “quarter” actually meant or even that it was a legally defined term under damn near every single military treaty.
They’re not just evil, they’re evil idiots.
Occams razor: the simplest explanation is probably the correct one
Hanlon’s razor: do not attribute to malice what could be equally well atributed to stupidity
Trump’s razor: when dealing with these assholes, the explanation that is both malicious AND stupid is probably the correct one
Hopefully we live to see them have to argue for their own stupidity as a defense in a criminal war crime tribunal.
They’ll have ChatGPT argue it, I’m sure we can see the approximate output ahead of time.
I’d really appreciate people stop pretending that the “rule of law” is being violated. There is no “rule of law”. The US is a rogue state and has been the main beneficiary of the “rule of law” since WW2. It was always a means of punishing non western states “crimes” and ignoring very real crimes of the west.
International law has always been an illusion. But, come on, can we stop pretending it even exists? I think the Palestinian Genocide showed us that the world does care about it.
The only difference with the US now is that it does not care to pretend anymore. It’s foreign policy and actions are just more blunt and come with less baggage of concent.
Pretending international laws exist is literally only serving the interest of those that will violate them. They are nothing more than a false sense that “someone will do something”.
Read about the “League of Nations” prior to WW2 if you want to see how useful “pointing” to the violations were.
We need blunt and obvious language that explains the threat.
The US is a fascist rogue state that will sacrifice the lives of its citizens to murder the citizens of other countries unless it is stopped.
Its like telling an Alien invasion from outer space that they are “violating our laws”. They don’t care and we are wasting time pretending that they matter at all.
Wait so the guy with iron crosses and a drinking problem being in charge of war want alarming before. Got it.
Look, you can’t force Jesus to come back by following the rules.
The bible is fairly explicit no one will know when. I’m no theologian but trying to pick the day yourself seems like mortal sin territory to me.
He probably doesn’t even know what that means. But regardless of that. He’s still a POS.
If you’re hitting the subscribe-wall: Archive link (using Wayback Machine).
LegalEagle put out a video (Alternate: Invidious instance or selector) recently covering the “no quarter” comment, missile strike on Minab school, and sinking of the IRIS Dena. Their thumbnails can be a little clickbait-face-ish for my liking but the content is good and they cite their sources well.
Second the Legal Eagle video on this
It alarms me, and I’m but a poor layman.
