National Security Law

More Targeted Killing …

Re the Volokh post to which Kevin refers below. Fear not, I was not trying to withhold content from OJ readers, but it did seem to me that I was days late in arriving at the issue that Ben and Kevin had already been discussing, whereas my VC post went into a lot of other stuff that didn't strike me as relevant to OJ readers.  Although we are pretty eclectic in our tastes here, as my personal drone post shows, I've sometimes had email complaints from readers wondering what the connection to international law is re some post of mine.  Am I wrong about that among our readers?  But anyway, my fundamental motivation in posting it to VC and then linking back to the OJ discussion was blog-strategic - drive some traffic over to OJ from Volokh.  I'm not trying to deprive OJ or its readers of my 'invaluable' thoughts. Very quickly as to substance in one matter of Kevin's response.  Kevin says I'm offering a caricature of Nils' view on territoriality and armed conflict.  Maybe.  But what Kevin calls caricature, I'd say is a reasonable statement in a couple of paragraphs on a blog of the center of Nils', and the ICRC's, views.  That's not a criticism.  There is a lot to be said for the view that armed conflict has geographical limits on it.  The ICRC, if I may summarize, or caricature, as you will, reached this view on the perfectly sensible and understandable grounds of its alarm over the Bush administration's Global War on Terror claims.  I think that the GWOT reached too far - as I have said many places, in my view - once again, a summary or caricature, as you will - what the Bush administration sought was the tail of law wagging the dog of war, the ability to use the law of war anywhere in the world with or without actual hostilities. The ICRC unsurprisingly became alarmed at this, and has - including through Nils' work - moved to a largely geographically based view of armed conflict.  I understand and sympathize with the reasons, in part because I share them and in part because even where I don't share the final conclusion and come to a different view, I do try to start with a sympathetic view to the argument and understand it on its own terms.  The sympathetic read of that argument is that the Bush administration wanted a global war in order to invoke the law of armed conflict anywhere, at any time, but without any connection to actual hostilities.  As I say, I reach a different view - different from the GWOT view or Nils' view, but I think I am starting from a position of seeking to understand it.  And for that matter, one of the reasons I think I understand it as a "large" view in the law of war is that some of the senior ICRC staff deliberately reached out to me for exactly the same reason - they heard what Koh was saying, what I was saying, what different people were saying, and they were admirably trying very hard to understand the positions and how they differed from their own.