Fighting Fair and Foul: 'Asymmetrical warfare' in the Land of Saddam.

We feed and heal Iraqi prisoners; they shoot ours -- and sometimes their own who surrender. NBC and CNN reporters hector coalition generals in public press conferences; Ba'athist officers run coerced televised interrogations of our captured soldiers. American planes seek to avoid bombing civilians; Saddam Hussein uses them to shield his military targets. Our bombs are deliberately programmed to miss non- military targets; Iraqi silkworm missiles are launched indiscriminately into Kuwait City. We wear chemical-protection vests; the Republican Guard does not -- secure in the knowledge that we will not do what they would. Our soldiers are careful to respect the lives of those surrendering; Iraqi irregulars feign submission to shoot their would-be captors. Marine checkpoints are designed to allow civilians to navigate the battle lines; Iraqi suicide taxis are used to blow apart the Marine sentries. What is going on?

Such asymmetrical notions of a "fair fight" derive not just from an invader's confidence in its overwhelming military superiority versus a defender's desperation and impotence, but also from conflicting philosophies of war.

Coalition soldiers draw on an entirely different tradition of what armies can and cannot do. Where do these sometimes frustrating restrictions on our warmaking come from? The ancients believed that warfare was inherent in the human experience. Rather than undertaking the impossible and naive task of outlawing conflict, they preferred to moderate the inevitable bloodletting -- in hopes that civilians and soldiers alike could count on some common humanity in the chaos of killing.

This legal and secular idea of "Rules of War" is an original Western concept that began with the Greeks' efforts to define the way soldiers should fight. Indeed, almost all of the military's present notions of moral warmaking -- formal declaration and cessation of hostilities, armistices, treaties, respect for noncombatants, and the prohibitions of particularly odious weapons -- derive from the Greeks and Romans. Sophocles' Antigone, for example, rebelled against Creon's edicts to leave her slain brother unburied on the grounds that such an outrage violated "the Laws of the Greeks," which sought in addition to protect prisoners, heralds, and the sanctity of religious sites and civilian centers. While such protocols were often ignored or broken -- especially during the 27-year-long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta -- they still provided the foundations for everything from the Christian principle of jus in bello ("just war") to the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War adopted in 1949.

The evolution in moral thinking about the conduct of soldiers has accelerated in Western societies in the last few decades, partly as a result of the horrors of the 20th century, partly as a reflection of a vast, affluent consumer class that assumes a level of civility, security, and sheer comfort not dreamed of by earlier generations. Thus, revelations of occasional battlefield atrocities on the part of GIs in Korea or Vietnam convulsed American society in a manner that did not arise during the savage -- and sometimes more macabre -- island fighting of the Pacific theater in World War II.

How do such deeply entrenched ideas about war's proper conduct affect our soldiers in the field? Do they limit the military's daily efficacy or long-term operations? In the short term, yes; over the long haul, not necessarily. We have already suffered dozens of casualties due to our reluctance to shoot Ba'athist terrorists in civilian clothes or to pulverize deadly Republican Guard tanks parked at hospitals. That being said, the other half of the equation to the Western way of war -- that is, our singular ability to kill the enemy -- is actually enhanced by such rules and protocols, which tend to allow overwhelming force to be unleashed without restraint against recognized combatants.

Ironically, the existence of such protocols has not always ameliorated the brutality of war. Westerners, it seems, if war was ratified by a representative government, if the enemy was notified that a state of war existed, if men in uniform attacked in a "fair fight," often have placed no limits on the degree of force used to achieve military victory. Thus while the U.S. military treated Japanese prisoners fairly and humanely -- unlike the imperial government's own vicious torture and summary execution of American captives -- the Western notion of military protocols still permitted the firebombing of Japan and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All were nominally legitimate targets by virtue of their military industries and troop concentrations.

Collateral damage -- whether in the March 11, 1945, Tokyo fire raid or in the American bombing reprisal against Muammar Qaddafi's acts of terror -- is not usually condemned in the same moral terms as the execution of American GIs in enemy prison camps. In the Western view of warfare, morality hinges not on the number killed but on the manner and conditions under which they are slain.

So the very nature of our military protocol -- humane treatment of the captured, avoidance of deliberate targeting of civilians, and efforts to feed and protect noncombatants -- historically has offset the unease that arises from the use of tremendous force. In other words, because we treat civilians and noncombatants in Iraq humanely, the world grudgingly accepts our use of the bunker busters, daisy cutters, and cruise missiles that obliterate Saddam's forces in a way that can be horrific. Aztecs who skinned and ate Spanish captives were met with brutal charges of mailed knights and harquebusiers. Zulus who tortured and executed the British survivors of Isandhlwana were eventually mowed down in a series of battles by cannon and volley fire. Acts of savagery against captives usually draw a much more terrifying response aimed at soldiers.

What frustrates our enemies in the Arab world -- and many elites in the West -- is precisely the openness and transparency of American society, which demands a code of conduct of our soldiers and thus legitimizes the frightening damage we do on the battlefield to enemy soldiers. And, in light of the enormous hurt our military can inflict on the enemy, further moral evolution in Western military jurisprudence is perhaps inevitable -- even the questioning of not how we kill the enemy, but whether we should.

For example, in 1991, televised images of the so-called "Highway of Death" may have led to a premature end to the Gulf War. Hysterical cries that we were butchering "tens of thousands" went up across America, prompting calls to end hostilities -- even though many of the fleeing were guilty of war crimes in Kuwait and went on in the weeks after to butcher innocent Shiites and Kurds. Postbellum analysis suggested that the Iraqi dead actually numbered in the hundreds; "thousands" of casualties there eventually were -- but they were Iraqi civilians and insurrectionists whom we, in our own misplaced sense of humanity, failed to protect.

In the current war, the Iraqi propagandists sometimes inflate their combat losses; apparently they are willing to acknowledge military impotence to win world sympathy. Thus the danger of adherence to the Western military legal tradition is not the inconvenience and occasional endangerment it poses to our troops in the field, but its allowance for the use of overwhelming force against enemy soldiers. It is our very success at killing enemy soldiers in such numbers that will ultimately provoke moral outrage -- are they not blameless teenage Iraqi conscripts? Cannot they be convinced by shock and awe, rather than death, to cease their opposition?

Such thinking is already starting to appear as Westerners question the need to bomb military targets in Baghdad, not just out of concern that there will be collateral damage, but because we are killing so many enemy soldiers. The ultimate evolution in our thinking, drawing on secular Socratic ethics, the religious tradition of turning the other cheek, and our own affluence and occasional naivete, may well result in the belief that some of our own should die so that others who seek to kill them should not. And that would be a frightening -- and ultimately suicidal -- development indeed.