Abe Lincoln And Laws Of War: Reposted

I am reposting this in honor of Abe Lincoln's birthday and due to the fact that we have yet to deal with our torturing of prisoners or other Laws of War.

A very interesting article about learning curves, presidents, and war.

Lincoln's Laws of War
How he built the code that Bush attempted to destroy.
By John Fabian Witt
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009, at 6:54 AM ET

One of Abraham Lincoln's little-noted accomplishments has become his most unlikely legacy. He helped create the modern international rules that protect civilians, prevent torture, and limit the horrors of combat, the body of law known as the laws of war. Indeed, he was probably our most important law-of-war president, having crafted the very rules that George W. Bush and his Justice Department tried to destroy.

At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, few Americans had given much thought to the laws of war. Lincoln was no exception. He had never been a soldier of any note. In middle age, he joked about his youthful service as a militia captain, observing that although he had fought and bled in "a good many bloody struggles," all his fights were with mosquitoes. As an Illinois lawyer, his bustling commercial law practice did not bring him into contact with the 19th-century laws of war, either.

When the shooting started at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln became a war president barely a month into his first term in office. As a novice commander in chief, his inclination was to deny that the international laws of war had any relevance to the South's war of rebellion. The rebels were criminals, he insisted, not soldiers. Members of Congress and European statesmen pressed him to take international law more seriously. But Lincoln dismissed "the law of nations," as international law was then called, as a curiosity that country lawyers like him knew little about.

Lincoln's skepticism about the laws of war culminated a year later, in July 1862, in one of the Civil War's most famous early scenes. After weeks of deadly fighting and a demoralizing Union retreat in Virginia, Lincoln traveled to the front lines to encourage more aggressive action by Gen. George McClellan's Army of the Potomac. To win the war, Lincoln was beginning to think, the Union would have to attack the social fabric of the South. But McClellan resisted. The man known as "Little Napoleon" was one of the few Americans versed in the highly idealized rules of war handed down by the professional armies of 18th-century Europe. As McClellan saw it, the more aggressive campaign that Lincoln urged would undermine the European laws that had sought to make war resemble a kind of gentleman's duel.

Instead of embracing Lincoln's new urgency, McClellan lectured Lincoln on the laws of civilized warfare and the sharp constraints they placed on his prosecution of the Union war effort. A war among Christian and civilized people, he told the president, should not be a war against the people of the rebellious states, but a war between armies. He warned against the seizure of private property and especially against the "forcible abolition of slavery." Civilized wars, in McClellan's conception, left the fabric of society virtually untouched.

Lincoln grasped immediately that McClellan's conception of the laws of war would make it virtually impossible to win the war and preserve the Union. Just when a more aggressive war effort was required, McClellan was advocating rules of engagement that would have treated the South with kid gloves. At this same time, Lincoln was encountering a series of excruciatingly difficult problems that led him to reconsider his previous disdain for laws of war. On the high seas, the powerful nations of Europe demanded that the Union adopt a consistent set of predictable rules in its treatment of vessels from neutral foreign states. In the South, Jefferson Davis denounced Lincoln's decision to execute Confederate commerce raiders as pirates and threatened to retaliate in kind against captured Union soldiers. And in the West, guerilla fighting among civilians on both sides threatened to drag the conflict into a war of unremitting slaughter and destruction.

Most of all, Lincoln's increasingly firm conviction that the war needed to be brought home to the people of the South—and to the slave system on which they depended—cried out for new rules. After meeting with McClellan, Lincoln began to think about what advantages new laws of war might offer the Union effort.

The first stage of Lincoln's re-evaluation came in the Emancipation Proclamation. Less than a week after meeting with McClellan, Lincoln confided for the first time to members of his Cabinet that he intended to issue his controversial emancipation order. The proclamation was an utter rejection of McClellan's limited war model. But as Lincoln later explained it, his new view was that the laws of war authorized armies to do virtually "all in their power to help themselves, or hurt the enemy." Lincoln insisted that there were "a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel" that were beyond the pale. But there could be little doubt that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would extend the war effort beyond the battlefield and into plantations across the South.

The second stage came that winter, soon after Lincoln finally fired the slow-moving McClellan. After appalling casualties on both sides at Antietam in September 1862 and in the midst of a devastating defeat at Fredericksburg, Va., in early December, Lincoln commissioned a new compilation of the rules for war. Written by a committee of veteran Union officers led by a professor at Columbia College named Francis Lieber, the code aimed to update the laws of war for modern conditions. It would enable the new, more aggressive war that Lincoln wanted to wage in the spring campaigns of 1863 while preventing aggressive modern warfare from sliding into total destruction.

The code reduced the international laws of war into a simple pamphlet for wide distribution to the amateur soldiers of the Union army. It prohibited torture, poisons, wanton destruction, and cruelty. It protected prisoners and forbade assassinations. It announced a sharp distinction between soldiers and noncombatants. And it forbade attacks motivated by revenge and the infliction of suffering for its own sake. Most significantly, the code sought to protect channels of communication between warring armies. And it elevated the truce flag to a level of sacred honor.

In the spring of 1863, Lincoln's code was given not just to the armies of the Union but to the armies of the Confederacy. The code set out the rules the Union would follow—and that the Union would expect the South to follow, too. For the next two years, prisoner-exchange negotiations relied on the code to set the rules for identifying those who were entitled to prisoner-of-war status. Trials of Southern guerilla fighters and other violators of the laws of war leaned on the code's rules for support. The Union war effort became far more aggressive than it had been under McClellan's rules. As the Union's fierce Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman put it, Lincoln brought the "hard hand of war" to the population of the South. But this more aggressive posture was not at odds with Lincoln's new code. It was the code's fulfillment.

As the code's Confederate critics noticed immediately, the laws of war Lincoln announced in 1863 were far tougher than the humanitarian rules McClellan had demanded a year earlier. The code allowed for the destruction of civilian property, the bombardment of civilians in besieged cities, the starving of noncombatants, and the emancipation of civilians' slaves. It permitted executing prisoners in cases of necessity or as retaliation. It condoned the summary executions of enemy guerillas. And in its most open-ended provision, the code authorized any measure necessary to secure the ends of war and defend the country. "To save the country," the code declared, "is paramount to all other considerations." Lincoln's code was a body of rules not for McClellan's gentleman's war but for Sherman's March to the Sea.

In the decades after the Civil War, Lincoln's rules went global. International norms become international law only when great powers agree to comply with them, and Lincoln's code seemed to allow the great powers of the world to prosecute war aggressively without descending into wars of total destruction. Translations of the code spread through the armies of Prussia and France and into multinational treaties signed at The Hague. Following World War II, its provisions reappeared in the Geneva Conventions that are in effect to this day. Eventually, Lincoln's code would make its way into the pockets of men and women stationed around the world, in the field manuals and wallet cards that soldiers carry with guidelines for the laws of armed conflict.

Yet if soldiers still today carry around a little bit of Old Abe Lincoln in their pockets, the appeal of his approach to the laws of war has waned in recent decades. Today, the two leading paradigms for the laws of war are a humanitarian model and a war crimes model. The former would base the laws of war in individual human rights, the latter in the criminal tribunals like the one at Nuremberg after World War II.

In 1862 and 1863, Lincoln was up to something very different. His personal passage from law-of-war skeptic to law-of-war reviser in the midst of the Civil War offered him a distinctive vantage point. His code sought to organize the laws of war not around individual human rights or war crimes trials, but around reciprocity and coordination between armies. Lincoln's code set limits on his army's conduct, to be sure. But it also aimed to win a war. The function of Lincoln's laws of war was thus to identify and protect opportunities for cooperative behavior even in the clash of armed conflict.

In our own time, Lincoln's pragmatic model of the laws of war can help us in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little prospect of reciprocity with terrorists, of course. But if one thing has become apparent in the cross-border security threats of the 21st century, it's that cooperation among the decent states of the world will be indispensable to policing against common threats. This is what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meant when she stated in her confirmation hearings, "Today's security threats cannot be addressed in isolation." Combating terror, according to Clinton, requires "reaching out to both friends and adversaries, to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones." Lincoln's laws of war did just that. They were ways of reaching out to bolster cooperation even in the midst of conflict.

For the past seven years, America has repeated the journey Lincoln completed in 24 grueling months. Strong majorities of Americans now call for the dismantling of detention facilities at Guantanamo. Even stronger majorities oppose the use of torture in interrogations. As a nation, we have walked in Lincoln's footsteps, down an uncertain path from skepticism about the laws of war to a rediscovery of their pragmatic mix of toughness and humanity. President Obama, in his inaugural address, pledged to reconcile our interests and our ideals. This is precisely what Lincoln's laws of war sought to accomplish, rejecting lawlessness while relentlessly pursuing threats to our way of life.

The Last Best Hope On Earth

Here is the transcript of President Obama's speech tonight in Springfield. He is impressive, still. Happy Birthday to Abraham Lincoln.

It is wonderful to be back in Springfield, the city where I got my start in elected office, where I served for nearly a decade, and where I launched my candidacy for President two years ago, this week – on the steps of the Old State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln served and prepared for the presidency.

It was here, nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, that the man whose life we are celebrating today bid farewell to this city he had come to call his own. On a platform at a train station not far from where we’re gathered, Lincoln turned to the crowd that had come to see him off, and said, “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.” Being here tonight, surrounded by all of you, I share his sentiments.

But looking out at this room, full of so many who did so much for me, I’m also reminded of what Lincoln once said to a favor-seeker who claimed it was his efforts that made the difference in the election. Lincoln asked him, “So you think you made me President?” “Yes,” the man replied, “under Providence, I think I did.” “Well,” said Lincoln, “it’s a pretty mess you’ve got me into. But I forgive you.”

Update: Whole speech now on 2 videos, post-expando!!

It is a humbling task, marking the bicentennial of our 16th President’s birth – humbling for me in particular, I think, for the presidency of this singular figure in so many ways made my own story possible.

Here in Springfield, it is easier, perhaps, to reflect on Lincoln the man rather than the marble giant, before Gettysburg and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Bull Run, before emancipation was proclaimed and the captives were set free. In 1854, Lincoln was simply a Springfield lawyer, who’d served just a single term in Congress. Possibly in his law office, his feet on a cluttered desk, his sons playing around him, his clothes a bit too small to fit his uncommon frame, he put some thoughts on paper for what purpose we do not know:

“The legitimate object of government,” he wrote, “is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves.”

To do for the people what needs to be done but which they cannot do on their own. It is a simple statement. But it answers a central question of Abraham Lincoln’s life. Why did he land on the side of union? What was it that made him so unrelenting in pursuit of victory that he was willing to test the Constitution he ultimately preserved? What was it that led this man to give his last full measure of devotion so that our nation might endure?

These are not easy questions to answer, and I cannot know if I am right. But I suspect that his devotion to union came not from a belief that government always had the answer. It came not from a failure to understand our individual rights and responsibilities. This rugged rail-splitter, born in a log cabin of pioneer stock; who cleared a path through the woods as a boy; who lost a mother and a sister to the rigors of frontier life; who taught himself all he knew – this man, our first Republican President, knew, better than anyone, what it meant to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. He understood that strain of personal liberty and self-reliance at the heart of the American experience.

But he also understood something else. He recognized that while each of us must do our part, work as hard as we can, and be as responsible as we can – in the end, there are certain things we cannot do on our own. There are certain things we can only do together. There are certain things only a union can do.

Only a union could harness the courage of our pioneers to settle the American west, which is why he passed a Homestead Act giving a tract of land to anyone seeking a stake in our growing economy.

Only a union could foster the ingenuity of our farmers, which is why he set up land-grant colleges that taught them how to make the most of their land while giving their children an education that let them dream the American dream.

Only a union could speed our expansion and connect our coasts with a transcontinental railroad, and so, even in the midst of civil war, he built one. He fueled new enterprises with a national currency, spurred innovation, and ignited America’s imagination with a national academy of sciences, believing we must, as he put it, add “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery…of new and useful things.” And on this day, that is also the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, let us renew that commitment to science and innovation once more

Only a union could serve the hopes of every citizen – to knock down the barriers to opportunity and give each and every person the chance to pursue the American dream. Lincoln understood what Washington understood when he led farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers to rise up against an empire. What Roosevelt understood when he lifted us from Depression, built an arsenal of democracy, and created the largest middle-class in history with the GI Bill. It’s what Kennedy understood when he sent us to the moon.

All these presidents recognized that America is – and always has been – more than a band of thirteen colonies, more than a bunch of Yankees and Confederates, more than a collection of Red States and Blue States. We are the United States of America and there isn’t any dream beyond our reach, any obstacle that can stand in our way, when we recognize that our individual liberty is served, not negated, by a recognition of the common good.

That is the spirit we are called to show once more. The challenges we face are very different now. Two wars, and an economic crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime. Jobs have been lost. Pensions are gone. Families’ dreams have been endangered. Health care costs are exploding. Schools are falling short. And we have an energy crisis that is hampering our economy, threatening our planet, and enriching our adversaries.

And yet, while our challenges may be new, they did not come about overnight. Ultimately, they result from a failure to meet the test that Lincoln set. To be sure, there have been times in our history when our government has misjudged what we can do by individual effort alone, and what we can only do together; when it has done things that people can – or should – do for themselves. Our welfare system, for example, too often dampened individual initiative, discouraging people from taking responsibility for their own upward mobility. With respect to education, we have all too frequently lost sight of the role of parents, rather than government, in cultivating a thirst for knowledge and instilling those qualities of a good character – hard work, discipline, and integrity – that are so important to educational achievement and professional success.

But in recent years, we’ve seen the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. It’s a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all. Such knee-jerk disdain for government – this constant rejection of any common endeavor – cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges. It cannot refurbish our schools or modernize our health care system; lead to the next medical discovery or yield the research and technology that will spark a clean energy economy.

Only a nation can do these things. Only by coming together, all of us, and expressing that sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility – for ourselves and one another – can we do the work that must be done in this country. That is the very definition of being American.

It is only by rebuilding our economy and fostering the conditions of growth that willing workers can find a job, companies can find capital, and the entrepreneurial spirit that is the key to our competitiveness can flourish. It is only by unleashing the potential of alternative fuels that we will lower our energy bills and raise our industries’ sights, make our nation safer and our planet cleaner. It is only by remaking our schools for the 21st century that our children will get those good jobs so they can make of their lives what they will. It is only by coming together to do what people need done that we will, in Lincoln’s words, “lift artificial weights from all shoulders [and give] all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

That is what is required of us – now and in the years ahead. We will be remembered for what we choose to make of this moment. And when posterity looks back on our time, as we are looking back on Lincoln’s, I do not want it said that we saw an economic crisis, but did not stem it. That we saw our schools decline and our bridges crumble, but did not rebuild them. That the world changed in the 21st century, but America did not lead it. That we were consumed with small things when we were called to do great things. Instead, let them say that this generation – our generation – of Americans rose to the moment and gave America a new birth of freedom and opportunity in our time.

These are trying days and they will grow tougher in the months to come. There will be moments when our doubts rise and our hopes recede. But let’s always remember that we, as a people, have been here before. There were times when our revolution itself seemed altogether improbable, when the union was all but lost, and fascism seemed set to prevail. And yet, what earlier generations discovered – what we must rediscover right now – is that it is precisely when we are in the deepest valley, precisely when the climb is steepest, that Americans relearn how to take the mountaintop. Together. As one nation. As one people. That is how we will beat back our present dangers. That is how we will surpass what trials may come. And that is how we will do what Lincoln called on us to do, and “nobly save…the last best hope of earth.” Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless America.

Quote Of The Day: Abraham Lincoln

Hey Middle-Class! Lincoln and Obama got yer back! Go read the article at Newshoggers that shows how Obama will give America back to us workers!

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor.
...
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Eric Martin Learns From Hitchens!

I especially liked the last line of Eric's post. Expand and read it. Apparently Marx and Engels admired Lincoln!

We Got Ideas to Us that's Dear, Like Capitalist, Like Communist

by Eric Martin

Christopher Hitchens reviews Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention by Gary J. Bass in the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs. As one might expect given the title of the work reviewed, Hitchens is pretty near insufferable in this piece - still brandishing the same haughty sense of moral superiority by dint of his support for Bush's invasion of Iraq that many liberal hawks have since abandoned, or at least had the decency to soft pedal. For Hitchens, though, it's still late 2002 and war opponents are still belittled as people that want to "leave...Saddam alone." He even suggests that we have an obligation to call Russia's bluff - or at least that even if such an act will not be "rewarded with pragmatic results" there would be a value derived eventually.

Despite his shortcomings, Hitchens' recounting of this bit of Civil War-era history was something of a revelation to me:

Many also forget that the international campaign in solidarity with the Union under the Lincoln presidency rallied at a time when it was entirely possible that the United Kingdom might have thrown its whole weight behind the Confederacy and even moved troops from Canada to hasten the partition of a country half slave and half free. This is often forgotten, I suggest, because the movement of solidarity was partly led by Karl Marx and his European allies (as was gratefully acknowledged by Henry Adams in his Education) and because the boycott of Confederate goods, the blocking of shipbuilding orders for the Confederate fleet, and other such actions were to some degree orchestrated by the founders of the communist movement -- not the sort of thing that is taught in school when Abraham Lincoln is the patriotic subject. Marx and Friedrich Engels hugely admired Lincoln and felt that just as Russia was the great arsenal of backwardness, reaction, and superstition, the United States was the land of potential freedom and equality.

I had no idea that Marx and Engels were such admirers of Lincoln, or that they were influential in keeping Europe on the side of the Union in that conflict. A nod to Hitchens for teaching me that. I guess even a blind drunk squirrel finds a nut every now and again.

This Is Not A Dream

By Mike Luckovich