The Robert Fisk theory of war crimes

According to this report from Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times (£):

The four US marines filmed apparently urinating on Taliban corpses in northern Helmand may face charges of war crimes amid fears that their actions could derail sensitive negotiations to bring an end to the Afghan war.

They are expected to be court-martialled, she writes, and then continues:

At such a sensitive point the last thing the US needed was footage of its soldiers defiling dead Afghans. Top officials acted quickly to express their outrage. Leon Panetta, the defence secretary, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, and General John Allen, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, all strongly condemned the incident.

Clinton suggested that the men may be guilty of war crimes. "Anyone, anyone found to have participated or know about it, having engaged in such conduct, must be held fully accountable," she said.

Allen's deputy posted a letter on Facebook to troops reiterating how the dead were supposed to be treated. "Defiling, desecrating, mocking, photographing or filming for personal use insurgent dead constitutes a grave breach of the laws of armed conflict," wrote Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti. "We must treat the living and dead with dignity and respect."

The response seems entirely appropriate: a flat condemnation of the act of desecrating the dead, taking it for the horrible outrage it is; and the resolve to prosecute it as a war crime.

But Robert Fisk has what he considers to be a more sophisticated understanding of the matter. In Friday's Independent he mocked this official response to the incident – a response as if to imply that the culprits might be just 'a few "bad apples", rotten eggs'. He, for his part, put their behaviour down to something much wider and deeper – namely, war. War, for Fisk, is about 'the total failure of the human spirit', and '[a]rmies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things'. True as this may be, his mocking reaction is not deeper or better than the sentiments reported in the Sunday Times article as coming from Panetta, Clinton and Allen. It is shallower and worse.

Whatever may be the horrors of war and the tendencies encouraged by war to contempt for an enemy and sometimes downright criminality, it is better that wars should be fought within some moral limits, under some restraints of law, than with none of either. What would Fisk's reaction have been had the official US response to this incident been 'Oh well, it happens'? One can imagine his sneering denunciation in those circumstances. Yet to condemn the perpetrators, to hold US military personnel to some moral standards, this too has to be the target of his patronizing scorn, as though Clinton et al can't have understood that war itself brutalizes its participants.

It does do that, which is precisely why it is necessary not to give the most brutal impulses free rein. Until Fisk figures out a way of putting an end to war altogether, his disdain is misplaced.

[Could it be that what Fisk really thinks (against both the bad-apples and the war-is-hell conceptions of this matter) is a third thing: that the US military in fact has no standards by which it would restrain its soldiers, but merely pretends to? If so, he should say that openly. But he can't, not only because it isn't true, but also because he in some sort, that is minimizingly, acknowledges that it isn't true: see 'the Americans are not the Nazis' paragraphs.]