Fatal, Futile and Inhumane: A Commentary on 100 Years of Aerial Bombing

H. Patricia Hynes

July 2009

The great twentieth-century change in warfare has been the power of mass killing at a distance.

Glover

It’s commonly claimed by war planners that they use bombs solely for strategic purposes: to destroy the enemy’s military capacity for war with as little “collateral damage” as possible; to strike terror into enemy citizens and crush their morale; to lose as few combatants as possible and sustain support at home for war; and to win swift victory. For this last purpose, bombing has been defended as an agent of peace.

The use and consequences of bombing in war reveal a different reality, a reality which challenges the lingering humanitarian and moral justifications for war.

Brief History

Even before airplanes were a viable technology, apprehension surfaced about their use in war. This anxiety worked its way into dystopian science fiction where themes of firebombing cities, space warfare, annihilating whole countries with germ warfare, and pulverizing human civilization into prehistory abounded. The threat of aerial war succeeded in persuading all the country participants, except Britain, at the 1899 First Hague Peace Conference to forge a 5-year agreement not to use aerial bombs. This prohibition on air warfare was gutted, however, in 1907 when several of the major powers participating in the Second Hague Peace Conference did not sign an extension of the ban. (1) Shortly thereafter, planes were used as weapons.

Future world efforts to ban aerial bombing recurrently failed, with a consistent pattern: Nations with the technological capability would not agree to such a prohibition. In place of the once-sought goal of preventing aerial warfare, we have international humanitarian conventions and protocols that regulate the conduct of war, many of which hearken back to the Hague Convention of 1907. (2) These conventions purport to govern the context, scale and targets of hostilities (including bombing) in armed conflict. In so doing, they create an impression that war, in general, and aerial war, in particular, can be contained within humanitarian bounds.

The first bombs used in war were dropped from Italian planes in 1911 onto desert oases near Tripoli, to kill Turks and Arabs and to win possession of what would be named Libya. At home, poets feted the pilots and rhapsodized about the sound and fury of the new aerial warfare. While expecting a quick victory against weakly armed “barbarians,” it took Italy twenty years to defeat the desert Arabs. Other colonial powers followed suit against other colonial peoples, who were considered “savages,” “infidels,” and inferior to European peoples. Britain routinely used aerial bombing throughout its empire to control uprisings, with no regard for whom and what were bombed. France maintained order in Syria by bombing villages around Damascus to the point of near total destruction in early 1926. (1) Because the conventions formalize the rules of war between national governments, European powers considered rebellious colonial peoples, organized in clans and tribes, as outside the conventions of war.

Experiments in incendiary bombs and shrapnel bombs – ones with explosives, nails, steel balls and anything that could stick to or penetrate human skin -- rapidly followed. Strategies for dropping bombs with biological and chemical toxins were explored as a potentially more expedient means to quick victory. To curb this ominous trend in warfare, the Geneva Protocol of 1925 banned the use of all forms of biological and chemical warfare. (2)

In 1925 Spain bombed Moroccan villages and, in breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, dropped mustard gas. In a similar quest to liquidate “inferiors,” Japan dropped incendiary bombs throughout the provisional capital of China, Chungking, in 1939 creating massive infernos that consumed wood houses and people. While the specter and likelihood of air warfare grew, Europeans resisted air warfare against each other until the Spanish Civil War. From 1936 to 1939, Germany dropped millions of bombs on Spanish cities, towns and villages to crush the resistance to Franco’s fascism. The devastation of the Basque cultural center and capital, Guernica, with a mix of fire, splinter and high explosive bombs, caught the Western world’s attention. Media coverage of Basque people being bombed and Picasso’s modernist depiction of human and animal agony and terror in Guernica spoke to the West in a way that European and Japanese bombing of colonial peoples had not. It also set a precedent for bombing human settlements in the Second World War. (1)

Bombing in World War II began with the British bombing German cities, an act that the Nazis retaliated with the blitzkrieg of British cities killing an estimated 40,000 civilians. British strategic bombing of German military targets traveled swiftly down a slippery slope to area bombing of whole cities. One night’s air attack on Hamburg killed 50,000 residents. Plans were set in place to kill millions of German civilians through urban bombing, in order to destroy citizen morale. (1) Once the logic of bombing took over – obliterate as much as possible as quickly as possible – the rights of civilians in armed conflict, as defined by international conventions, vanished. Given the moral abhorrence of the Nazi genocide of Jews and the status of World War II as a good war, the Anglo-American bombing of 131 German cities and towns, which killed half a million civilians, has not been scrutinized until recently. (3)

Napalm was developed by the United States during World War II for use as a firebomb whose conflagrations would incinerate, suffocate, and poison with the combustion by-product carbon monoxide. (4) The first target was Japanese cities whose wood and paper houses and inhabitants were consumed, as planned, in firestorms. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were rendered homeless. (1)

Momentum to bomb grew throughout the Second World War and culminated in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Diplomacy to seek Japan’s surrender, even after Japan’s request for peace, was discounted by the U.S. government; the warnings of American scientists against use of the bomb were kept from decision-makers. After the blast, which killed 100,000 immediately in Hiroshima, the grievous radiation sickness of Japanese survivors was not anticipated, nor was it believed when reported; and the American military censored all documentation and photo images of the two bombs’ unparalleled human devastation. (1, 5) At the time of the bombing, peace negotiations were underway in Moscow (6); and in his diary, President Truman privately acknowledged that the atomic bomb was not necessary for Japan’s surrender. (1) In 1946 the United States Strategic Bombing Survey drew the same conclusion, adding that Allied bombing in Germany and U.S. bombing in Japan did not appreciably shorten or win the war. (7)

Research since the Second World War increased the morbid capacity of napalm to adhere to human skin and burn more deeply. (4) Use of napalm escalated in the Korean and Vietnam wars, with more than 32,000 tons dropped by the United States on North Korea and nearly 400,000 tons of the incendiary bomb dropped on Vietnam. (1) It’s widely acknowledged that the U.S. supremacy of air power and massive bombing of these lesser developed countries did not advance those wars, although they contributed to the death of millions. On the contrary, one ended in stalemate and the other haunts America as a colossal military and societal failure. Many countries in many colonial and internal conflicts since – notably Portugal, Israel, Nigeria, Brazil, and Turkey – have used napalm (1), as has the United States in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Focused lethality

During the Cold War, the annihilation capacity of U.S. and Soviet nuclear bombs and missiles grew to the extent that humans could destroy their entire species (and all others as well) many times over. At its highpoint in 1967, the U.S. had 32,500 deployable atomic and hydrogen bombs; today, the number is closer to 10,000. (8) Constrained from using nuclear weapons because of their mutually assured destructiveness, the United States has pioneered research on “focused lethality” weapons, ones which minimize wide range explosive damage to structures and which maximize lethal wounds through dispersing tiny metal particles throughout the tissue and organs of victims. The damage to the human body is not medically treatable. One such weapon was used by the Israeli Air Force in the recent Gaza conflict, as reported by surgeons examining victims. (9)

Drones

To the admiration of some, the current U.S. administration is moving away from conventional weapons of the Cold War toward forward-looking, discriminating weapons tailored for “long wars” of counterinsurgency warfare – such as, drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which combine surveillance from remote sites and targeted bombing. (Picture pilots in the Nevada desert peering into computers searching for suspected militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan against whom – in buildings or crowds - they instruct the drone to fire missiles.) Not only is the 2009 proposed defense budget larger than the Bush administration defense budget, it sustains the same paradigm of militarism that grew out of the Cold War and has reigned imperially in the past 8 years of U.S. history. The priority on 21^st century new weapons systems, such as pilotless drones (or robot assassins, as they have been called), will generate just as greedy a weapons contractor sector as the larger fighter planes have and just as job- and vote-conscious Congressionals who will lobby for drone contracts in their districts. Research and development will assure that ever more lethal drones, with greater surveillance capacity and larger weapons, will roll off production lines, provoking a new arms race in space. (10) (www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/new-killer-dron/)

Already unintended consequences are mounting: U.S. drones in Pakistan which have missed their targets and killed unarmed civilians are fomenting anger and hatred among people who do not identify as fundamentalists. A June 2009 U.S drone attack on a site in Pakistan was followed with a second attack on the funeral procession of mourners who had gathered for prayer, killing at least 80 overall. These attacks manifest growing U.S. aerial aggression and willingness to kill numerous non-military people for the sake of a single terrorist target (www.alternet.org/story/140895). An even more severe consequence of the U.S. and Pakistan drone war is the massive number of war refugees fleeing without any guarantee of shelter, food, or health services – a lethal outcome of war in Afghanistan/Pakistan that is unacknowledged and ignored by the war planners. (www.alternet.org/world/140900).

Tout ca change, tout ca reste le meme. While the 2009 proposed defense budget priorities of the White House and Department of Defense may appear to be forward looking (in terms of future warfare) and unallied with special interest groups to some pundits, the budget priorities do not cap defense spending, do not enhance diplomacy, and do not view force as a last resort.

Patterns in Bombing: Asymmetry, Blowback, and Denial

Asymmetry

Bombing is increasingly used in asymmetric, highly unequal situations of military capacity: War from the air is waged against people on the ground. A major consequence of this is the steady increase in the proportion of civilians killed and wounded in armed conflict. By the end of the 20^th century, 90% of those who died in armed conflicts were civilians as compared with about 65% in World War II. (11, 12) In the Iraq War, hundreds of civilians have died for every U.S. military death (13); while doctors studying data on war wounded and killed in Afghanistan report 93% civilians and 34% children victims. (14) The recent Israeli bombing of dense residential/commercial areas in Gaza resulted in both a high proportion of immediate civilian death and injury and also in severe damage to the health and economic infrastructure, portending higher post-bombing deaths. (15)

Among the estimated 90% civilian victims of war, who, more precisely, are dying? Recent studies of life expectancy in areas of armed conflict have found that unarmed women in countries at war die in greater numbers than men, even while men are the central agents and combatants of war. (16)

Blowback

The impact of killing civilians indiscriminately often generates the opposite of what is intended. It stimulates popular resistance and sows the seeds of on-going conflict, a consequence termed blowback. Two examples amply illustrate this. The intensive American bombing in Cambodia in 1972-1973, which was intended to destroy North Vietnamese bases and supply routes, killed somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 Cambodian people. This seemingly crude and random murder of civilians abetted the growth of the Khmer Rouge, a brutal, authoritarian Communist regime which murdered an estimated two million Cambodians in its “killing fields.” (1) The U.S. “shock and awe” strategy of immense firepower and bombing of Iraq cities in 2003 fostered the rise of terrorist insurgency and fundamentalism in that country and generated a flood of refugees – estimated now at 1 in 6 Iraqis, of which 80% are women and children. The war and the resultant social chaos and conflict have left women and girls prey to kidnapping, sexual exploitation in prostitution and male sexual access in “temporary” marriages. (18, 19) Ultimately, the majority of the Iraqi people have turned against the U.S. military presence. (8)

Public Denial

National governments, museums, and media dutifully ignore and falsify the scale of civilian trauma and death inflicted by their country’s bombing, while they steadfastly venerate and romanticize military victory no matter what its abuses and crimes. A visitor to British aircraft and war museums will not find evidence displayed of the British area bombing of German cities in World War II. (1) The U.S. government censored all media coverage of the impacts of the atomic bombs immediately after they were dropped. No photos or eye witness accounts were permitted. Scientists in the employ of the U.S. government loyally reported, not long after the bomb was dropped, that no traces of radioactive contamination remained in Hiroshima. (1) Even 50 years later, in 1995, the director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum – under pressure from veterans groups and Congress -- had to cancel a museum exhibit which gave critical historical context to the use and the full consequences of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. (1) In 2005, a U.S. reporter’s censored firsthand account of the Armageddon-like state of Nagasaki was found posthumously by his son. No American publisher took interest in publishing it. (20)

Likewise with Japan’s military past. While the Hiroshima Memorial in Japan is dedicated to educating visitors about the human and ecological catastrophe created by the atomic bomb, the Japanese war museum of the Yasukuni Shinto Temple glorifies Japan’s imperial wars and the role of kamikaze pilots as national martyrs. Museum war propaganda blames the Chinese for Japanese military aggression against them and describes the Japanese role in World War II as one of fighting a “holy war” against Communism. The spirits of all Japanese soldiers who died in war for the fatherland since 1853 – including ones who participated in the Nanking Massacre and killed 23 million Chinese during the Second World War, who raped and tortured the women they had kidnapped and made into so-called “comfort women,” who attacked Pearl Harbor, and who were hanged for war crimes after World War II – are venerated here. (1, 8) In recent times, the Japanese prime minister has made an annual public visit to the Yasukuni Temple, an act that is feeding the re-emergence of the Shinto war temple as a symbol of Japanese national identity and further undermining the pacifist constitution which is under challenge from within the Japanese government. (21) A similar softening in Japanese textbooks regarding Japan’s war crimes toward Chinese, Koreans, and the “comfort women” has been documented. (22)

Mainstream media, with few exceptions, serve as the prime source of their government’s war narrative. A former war reporter framed his essential charge in covering his country’s wars: to entertain as if war is a sports event, to manufacture heroes and sustain the national myths supporting war, and to ignore death, blood, destruction, and sexual exploitation in keeping with good taste guidelines for family TV. (22) In the spirit of these prescriptions, a Florida newspaper instructed its staff not to open stories on the war in Afghanistan with news of civilian casualties and not to carry photos of civilian casualties on the front page. (8)

Humanitarian and Moral Considerations

…the carpet of bombs is tightly woven, with no holes for compassion…

Anonymous

Inevitability of Deliberate Civilian Death

Two of the purported goals of military bombing -- eliminating targets of strategic military value while minimizing “collateral damage” and crushing the morale and resistance of enemy citizens with dense destruction -- vie with each other. Generally the latter wins out, justified by another aim - the phantom goal of quick victory. Thus, bombing in war ineluctably escalates from targeting military sites, such as munitions, industry, and supply routes, to use against human settlements destroying homes, schools, hospitals, stores, food and water supply. War accounts reveal that bombing generates a momentum to bomb more intensively; and it, unfailingly, results in immense, indiscriminate civilian death and injury. Given the goal to win and the pressure to win quickly, aerial warfare inevitably targets enemy populations and their means of survival. The logic – or is it fog? -- of war and the nature of fighting with bombs, quickly drive conflicts beyond the bounds of international conventions on the humanitarian conduct of war.

Detached and Distanced Killing

When you drop bombs from six miles…in the sky, you do not hear screams or see blood. You do not see children torn apart in the explosions of your bombs…

Zinn

According to one historian of 20^th century war and genocide, the moral barriers against the mass killing of civilians were weakened by the British economic blockade of German cities during the First World War. This act of killing from a distance slowly starved 800,000 citizens to death and blazed the path toward mass bombing of cities in World War II. (17)

Bombing nullifies the sense of individual responsibility for killing civilians and destroying their means of survival. Those designing, deciding, and doing the bombing are remote, absent even – by physical distance; by the inert, neutral nature of computers and software; by the numbing insulation of bureaucracy -- from those they kill and maim. Desktop and cockpit murderers (to improvise upon Hannah Arendt’s term for Eichmann and others who routinely and mindlessly kill by job assignment) cannot see, cannot hear, do not feel, and are not provoked to think about the pain of their victims. (17) By its distant, detached, and fragmented nature – bombing snuffs out the light of conscience.

One of the mechanisms used to insulate those responsible for bombing from the morality of their acts is humor or more precisely, the “cold joke.” For example, the 1972-1973 American bombing campaign of Cambodia was called MENU, with the target areas assigned the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT. (17) Bombs as food, pilots as waiters taking orders and delivering meals and snacks, murder as sitcom. How different an impact than “My Lai Massacre,” frank language whose honesty and agency speak to the moral reality of war.

World of Human Settlements

We are now a world of cities on all continents, such that industry, infrastructure, commerce, schools, hospitals and homes are clustered together in dense agglomerations. Because of this demographic and geographic trend, war is and increasingly will be urban in its target and strategy. It has become, then, less and less possible to separate military targets from urban settlements, as ethical codes of conduct in war envisage, no matter how “smart” or “focused” the lethal weapons. Thus the decision to bomb urbanized areas carries a growing risk of bombing citizen populations, even when the primary target is a military one. Moreover, many military targets in urban areas are vital urban infrastructure necessary for civilian survival. For example, in the 43 days of bombing Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, the United States intentionally destroyed most electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems as strategic targets for the purpose of generating a citizen uprising against Saddam Hussein. As a result more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens died from drinking contaminated water, and infant mortality doubled. Delayed effects killed many more. (8)

The Futility of Regulating War

War is cruel and you cannot refine it.

General George Sherman, from Lindqvist

War cannot be humanized, it can only be abolished.

Albert Einstein, from Zinn

International Conventions on the Conduct of War

The late 19^th century anxiety about aerial warfare has borne out, while the prescient efforts to ban bombing failed early on. In their place, we have legal protections for civilians (and prisoners) trapped in armed conflicts, provisions on paper which perpetuate the hope that war can be contained within legal and humanitarian bounds.

The fourth Hague Convention (1907) was unsuccessful in achieving a ban on aerial warfare. However, it does prohibit “…bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended…” The 1907 Hague Convention has been incorporated into the Geneva Conventions of 1949 on humanitarian considerations in war. The 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 further prohibit acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population, attacks which cannot discriminate between military targets and civilian objects and targets, and the removal or destruction of the necessities for survival of civilian populations in conflicts, including food, water supplies, and other infrastructure, for any motive. (2)

In all cases, the international conventions on the humanitarian conduct war contain the presumption that war can be waged with discipline and ethical restraint in order to minimize harm to civilians and their settlements.

Yet, historians are hard put to identify any war of the last 100 years that did not spill over into excessive violence; deliberate environmental degradation; and indiscriminate victimization of civilians, especially women and children. In particular, bombing in war has always contravened UN conventions on war because the purpose of bombing is to destroy as much strategic infrastructure as quickly as possible and to crush citizen morale for war by making their lives a living hell. Unarmed citizens become the ultimate strategic target and victim of these goals. Statistics on war tell the story: By the 1990s, 9 of 10 victims of war were civilians; the trend continues and has worsened, in some cases, in wars of the 21^st century.

Bombing in wars of the 20^th and early 21^st century has increased the percent of civilians killed in war and post-war from ruined infrastructure and economies, even though evidence has not shown bombing to be instrumental in winning wars. With few exceptions, bombing has not brought swift victory; it has not crushed the morale of the “enemy” combatant or civilian; and it has not resulted in an enemy unable to continue fighting - all the purported goals of bombing. It has often resulted in blowback, an unanticipated worsening of the conflict situation.

On September 11, 2003 a handful of men took over planes at gunpoint and steered them into highly symbolic buildings. They used the airliners as bombs have been used throughout the 20^th century, to kill thousands of people in a matter of minutes. One hundred years of air warfare likely cultivated the sinister imagination for this crime.

Just War Principles

…war corrupts everyone who engages in it...poisons the minds and souls of people on all sides...I and others had become unthinking killers of innocent people.

Zinn, about bombing towns and cities in World War II

Just War principles can be traced in the Christian tradition to Augustine. He stated that the purpose of war is peace and that the evil of war can be pursued for the good of peace. [Why is war exempt from the Catholic axiom, the end does not justify the means?] Though the timbre of statement is different, Pope John Paul II upheld the just war perspective sixteen centuries later, when, on the eve of the current war in Iraq, he pronounced ruefully, “War is not always inevitable, it is always a defeat for humanity.”

Just War principles apply to the waging and conduct of war. A just war is one that is a war of last resort, waged by a legitimate authority with a good chance of success, fought to redress a wrong suffered, and which wins a peace that is preferable to one achieved without war. The force used in war ought to be proportionate to the wrong suffered and not greater than is needed to achieve an adequate military result. Weapons of war must discriminate between civilians and combatants; and all efforts must be taken to avoid killing civilians, the only exception being when they are unavoidably killed by attacks on military targets. (24, 25) In their protections for civilians caught in war, Just War principles mirror the Geneva Conventions.

These principles have many flaws. The first has to do with the criterion of winning a peace through war which is preferable to one achieved without war. How can anyone compare a peace that could have been achieved without war – a hypothetical peace -- to one attributed to a real war? Why would any country, operating out of national self-interest as they do, ever admit that a peace won through war could have been achieved through nonviolent means? If anything, winners revisit their wars to document their victorious military strategies in order to enlighten future wars; and losers revisit the conduct of failed wars in order to learn how not to fail in the next war. A second flaw of Just War principles is the mismatch between the idealized framework for the moral conduct of war which the principles (and also the Geneva Conventions) presume and the reality of war. Using proportionate force in war in order to keep war just and humanitarian militates against winning war. Weapons of war – particularly aerial bombing – can barely discriminate between civilians and combatants; and they have always killed and are increasingly killing civilians. The lethality of weapons systems and the fact that war is no longer waged on battlefields between armed combatants and is increasingly waged in cities and human settlements nullify the realizable ideal of war as potentially just, noble or humanitarian. Finally, there is a fallacy in logic embedded in the Just War principles. The principles presume that if an enemy has wronged a country, then the protagonist declaring war has a just cause. (14) In fact, the protagonist may have a corrupt cause for declaring war against a corrupt regime, to wit the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.

Have we any evidence that the Geneva Conventions on the humanitarian conduct of war and Just War principles have limited a declaration of war or constrained the behavior of combatants and governments in war? Likewise, where is the evidence that waging war – even one with some moral core to it – has curbed or diminished the likelihood of future war? Finally, the nature of war is such that the justice of the cause (when there is a just cause) is negated by the injustice of disproportionate civilian injury and death; by the indiscriminate and overkill nature of war technology; and by the social chaos, sexual violence, and corruption that war engenders.

Conclusion

Rape in civil society and, more so, in war – was once accepted as normative. So also were killing heretics, child labor and slavery. Today these are crimes prohibited by international and national law. War, on the other hand, continues to be normative, even while it is widely recognized as a ruinous response to within-country and between-country conflict.

Conducting war within humanitarian and ethical guidelines seems increasingly to be a contradiction in terms, given the goals and nature of aerial war. International humanitarian conventions cannot prevent the inevitable social and economic breakdown and chaos that is endemic to war, breakdown and chaos which are accelerated by aerial warfare because of its speed, scale, and use in densely populated areas. Like dueling to the death and other blood feuds; like sexual violence, slavery, and child labor, war must be acknowledged as the intrinsically violent, socially ruinous and inhumane activity that it has always proven to be. Reform of war has been tried for more than 100 years; it’s time for abolition.

Sources

1. Sven Lindqvist. A History of Bombing. New York: The New Press. 2001.

2. www.genevaconventions.org Accessed April 27, 2009.

3. Mark M. Anderson. Crimes and Punishment. The Nation. October 17, 2005. pp.31-38.

4. www.u-s-history.com/pagesh1859.html

and www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/napalm.htm

Accessed March 15, 2009.

5. Peter Wyden. Day One: Before Hiroshima and After. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1984.

6. Martin Van Creveld. The Transformation of War. New York: The Free Press. 1991.

7. John Kenneth Galbraith. A Journey Through Economic Time. Boston: Houghton Mifflin company. 1994.

8. Chalmers Johnson. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 2006.

9. Conn Hallinan. Israel Treated Gaza Like Its Own Private Death Laboratory. http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5862 Accessed February 15, 2009.

10. Tom Engelhardt. Filling the Skies with Robot Assassins: The Drone Wars Have Begun. http://www.alternet.org/story135594/ Accessed April 24, 2009.

11. Michael Renner. Ending Violent Conflict. Worldwatch Paper 146. Worldwatch Institute. April 1999.

12. Richard M. Garfield and Alfred Neugut. The Human Consequences of War. In Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel (Eds.), War and Public Health. Washington DC: American Public Health Association. 2000.

13. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a Cross-sectional Cluster Sample Survey. Published online, The Lancet, October 11, 2006.

14. Howard Zinn. Just War. Italy: CHARTA. 2005.

15. R. Ramachandran. WHO’s Warning. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20090130260201800.htm

Accessed January 18, 2009.

16. Thomas Pluemper and Eric Neumayer. The Unequal Burden of War: The Effect of Armed Conflict on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy. http://ssrn.com/abstract=692503 Accessed November 15, 2006.

17. Jonathan Glover. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2001.

18. Hannah Allam. “Muta’a” Temporary Marriages Appearing in Iraq. http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/6623752.htm

Accessed March 27, 2003.

19. Katherine Zoepf. Desperate Iraqi Refugees Turn to Sex Trade in Syria. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/world/middleeast/29syria.html

Accessed May 29, 2007.

20. Amy Goodman and David Goodman. The Hiroshima Cover-Up. http://www.baltimoresun.com

Accessed August 6, 2005

21. Akira Kawasaki. Article 9’s Global Impact. Foreign Policy in Focus. http://www.fpif.org/fpiftx4426

Accessed July 26, 2007.

22. Rumiko Nishino. How did the Final Judgment, Handed Down at the Hague, Adjudicate the Issue of the “Comfort Women”? Women’s Asia 21. Voices from Japan. No. 10. Winter 2002. 44-51.

23. Chris Hedges. War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor Books. 2002.

24. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/justwar.htm

Accessed March 19, 2009.

25. Peter S. Temes. The Just War: An American Reflection on the Morality of War in Our Times. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2003.

Quotes

Anonymous. A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City. A Diary. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Picador Edition. 2006. p.29.

Jonathan Glover. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2001. p.64.

Howard Zinn. Just War. Italy: CHARTA. 2005. pp.6, 33, 37.

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