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04/06/2006:
"The rules of war: too '20th Century'?"
"We need to make people feel the consequences of their actions." Yikes.The British Defence Secretary John Reid has called for changes in the rules of war in the face of "a deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism by our opponents."
He has put forward three areas for re-examination:
-The treatment of international terrorists
-The definition of an "imminent threat" to make it easier to take pre-emptive action
-When to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis.
Perhaps the most controversial element was the first.
Although he framed his speech in the form of raising questions rather than proposing answers, he came close to suggesting that the way to end the "anomaly" of the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was to change international law.
"Anomaly" is the word chosen by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to describe Guantanamo and it has never really been defined. Mr Reid went some way towards doing that.
There are two ways of ending an anomaly - remove the anomaly or change the situation that makes it one. He appeared to favour the latter.
"On the one hand it is against our values," he said during questions after a speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.
"But we need to understand how we got to this unsatisfactory anomaly. It is not enough to say that it is wrong. We ought to discuss how it happened."
How it happened, he suggested in his speech, was 11 September 2001 "proved beyond doubt that, while no one can be sure that the era of war between great powers is entirely over, we certainly now face a new enemy."
Guantanamo Bay: how to end the 'anomaly'?
"We now face non-state actors capable of operating on a global scale, crossing international borders, exploiting the teachings of a great, peaceful religion as justification for their murderous intent."
...Mr Reid said the question was "to what extent we could impose on non-state actors the same constraints we apply to ourselves. We need to make people feel the consequences of their actions."
bbc.co.uk
