Two core principles frame the laws of war: the principle of distinction and the principle of proportionality. Under the first, belligerents must distinguish between military and civilian targets. Under the second, belligerents must refrain from attacks on a military target if such attacks result in disproportionate civilian deaths or injuries.

To be sure the US-led forces are dealing with a horrifying opponent. Saddam Hussein's past use of human shields, chemical weapons, environmental destruction, and Scud missile attacks on Israel make him one of history's worst war criminals. Many of these violations have been documented and condemned by the UN, including the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iraq, the General Assembly, and the Security Council.

The laws of war, however, do not suspend the rights of civilians in light of the other side's past or ongoing violations. And, no government participating in the US-led campaign has suggested otherwise.

If anything, commentators have suggested that states engaged in a purportedly humanitarian intervention are under a greater obligation to obey international humanitarian law. As the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, co-chaired by Richard Goldstone and Carl Tham, concluded: "There must be even stricter adherence to the laws of war and international humanitarian law than in standard military operations. This applies to all aspects of the military operation." The Commission also stated "a greater obligation is imposed on the intervening side to take care of the civilian population in a humanitarian campaign."

Regardless of such claims about humanitarian intervention, even if the standard obligations obtain, the Shock and Awe doctrine raises serious problems.

Everything old is new again

Shock and Awe breaks from military strategies of the late twentieth century and, in some respects, returns to pre-Geneva Convention methods. The architects of the doctrine, indeed, contrast it with more recent military strategies like those promulgated by Colin Powell. 

As Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mr. Powell famously crafted a military strategy, which later came to be called the Powell Doctrine. Commentators often characterized the doctrine as calling for the use of "overwhelming" force. Mr. Powell, however, took pains to repudiate that idea. "I've never talked about overwhelming force, I've always talked about decisive force," Mr. Powell explained in interviews with the press.

Secretary Powell was wise to make that point clear. The notion of overwhelming force treads dangerously close to, if not directly over, the prohibition on disproportionate force, a critical pillar in the laws of war and the use of force.

Shock and Awe, however, abandons modern constraints and takes military force to extreme levels. The strategy focuses on the psychological destruction of the adversary's will to fight by deploying a devastating and terrifying display of force at the outset of a war. Harlan Ullman, one of the architects of Shock and Awe, explains that the underlying concept is "to intensely confound through enormous application of force in the right places, to break the enemy's will."             

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is known to be an early and eager proponent of the Shock and Awe doctrine.

Rare expressions of diplomatic disapproval have begun to emerge. On 20 March 2003, the South African Department of Foreign Affairs issued a statement of concern noting: "Under a strategy of 'shock and awe'. It is expected that an awesome storm of firepower will be unleashed. A USA military source is reported to have said, 'it will be the most serious aerial bombardment in history.'" 

Prohibiting indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks

Article 51 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions provides the civilian population "general protection," which includes a prohibition on "indiscriminate attacks." The Article defines indiscriminate attacks to include:

"an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."

Article 57 provides that a belligerent must take "all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack" with a view to minimizing deaths and injuries of civilians.

Article 57 also requires a belligerent to call off certain methods of attack: "an attack shall be cancelled or suspended if it becomes apparent that … the attack may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."

It is difficult to see how Shock and Awe, applied to a densely populated city the size of Paris, meets these international obligations. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," one Pentagon official who has been briefed on the Pentagon's war plans told CBS News. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before," the official remarked. In the book on which the strategy is based, the authors explain that their strategy "provide[s] the ability to control, on an immediate basis, the entire region of operational interest and the environment, broadly defined, in and around that area of interest."

In their book, the authors of Shock and Awe liken the strategy's effect to that of terror bombing preceding the Geneva Conventions of 1949: "the aim of affecting the adversary's will, understanding, and perception through achieving Shock and Awe is multifaceted. … One recalls from old photographs and movie or television screens, the comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I and the attendant horrors and death of trench warfare. These images and expressions of shock transcend race, culture, and history."

In a recent interview with MSNBC Ullman further explained, "Two nuclear weapons, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, caused the Japanese to quit . . . Now, that was shock and awe. And every time I use that analogy people say, well, you're going to destroy Baghdad. No that's not what we want to do. What you're trying to do is in essence is to get an enemy who is suicidal in the extreme to quit, that's shock and awe."

Now, who said the Iraqi military were suicidal in the extreme? On the contrary, the 1991 Gulf War demonstrated just the opposite and current events suggest this strategic environment has not changed.

Electrical power generation

It is generally accepted that "dual-use" targets can be attacked if necessary as long as the harm to civilians is not disproportionate to the direct military advantage. One of the most controversial dual-use targets in the Persian Gulf War involved attacks on "key nodes" of electrical power generation.

It is understandable that the military commanders in the Gulf War may not have anticipated the result of destroying such facilities. However, reliable studies subsequently concluded that tens of thousands of civilians died from loss of electrically powered water purification.

Notably, this strategy was discarded in Kosovo and Afghanistan. In Kosovo, electrical facilities were targeted in such a way as to minimize long-term effects on civilians. And, in Afghanistan, coalition forces did not attack electrical generation or distribution systems.

In an interview on 20 March 2003, one of the two main architects of Shock and Awe, "James Wade, who has continued with the help of a number of former four-star generals and admirals to refine the new doctrine, cited as an example of effects-based targeting the nearly certain U.S. efforts to knock out all electrical power in Baghdad. If this is done with an electronic weapon - rather than explosives - electrical plants would be as disabled as if they had been bombed, but after the war they could be reactivated."

Wade does not seem to account for the prospect of a drawn-out war, prolonging the time before electricity could be restored to the city of five to six million people. Also, the experimental "electronic weapon" (Electromagnetic Pulse and High Powered Microwave weapons) that he describes has not been approved for combat. So, the mechanism for "knock[ing] out all electrical power in Baghdad" would have to be conventional bombing, a form of destruction from which recovery would obviously be much more difficult to achieve.

Amazingly, in a recent interview, Wade's co-author, Ullman, suggests Shock and Awe would be accomplished by directly attacking the water supply itself:

"You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted."

Wade and Ullman's book on Shock and Awe presents similar tactics:

"It will imply more than the direct application of force. It will mean the ability to control the environment and to master all levels of an opponent's activities to affect will, perception, and understanding. This could include means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure as well as the denial of military responses. …

Total mastery achieved at extraordinary speed and across tactical, strategic, and political levels will destroy the will to resist."

Targeting political cronies and popular support

The laws of war strictly prohibit armed attacks directed at civilian morale. Military attacks to undermine the support of the political cadre of a Head of State, or to undermine the popular support for the enemy's war effort, countermand this principle.

Indeed, one of the most controversial bombing attacks in the Kosovo conflict was the NATO strike against Yugoslavia's state-owned broadcasting studio.

Speaking strictly in terms of defining military objectives (not the issue of proportionality), the Prosecutor of the ICTY concluded that the attack involved a legitimate military target on the ground that the studio made an effective contribution to military action. The Prosecutor accepted that NATO's primary goal was to disable the studio's use as a radio relay station for command and control by Yugoslavia's military. The Prosecutor, however, refused to accept as legitimate the "incidental (albeit complimentary) aim" of attacking the studio on the basis of its contributing to the political climate of support for Milosevic and his war efforts. If that aim were primary or if the studio were for civilian and not dual-use, the attack would have been unlawful.

One has to question whether the US-led attacks against "the Iraqi political leadership" violate these rules. First, who exactly is the so-called political leadership in a dictatorship? The US-forces should specify their terms.

Beyond those questions, does the US-led strategy appropriately distinguish between the Iraqi government's military chain of command and civilian administration or elite political cliques? Rare investigative journalism by the Washington Post after the Gulf War suggests that U.S. military planners in that conflict didn't.

The Washington Post documented that in the selection of dual-use facilities and infrastructure "some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself."

"The definition of innocents gets a little bit unclear," a senior Air Force officer told the Washington Post, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. "They do live there and ultimately people do have some control over what goes on in their country."

In discussing the strikes on electric grids, another US Airforce planner remarked, "Big picture, we wanted to let people know, 'Get rid of this guy and we'll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We're not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we'll fix your electricity."

According to the news report, "Lt. General Charles Horner, who had overall command of the air campaign, said in an interview that a 'side benefit' was the psychological effect on ordinary Iraqi citizens of having their lights go off."

The Washington Post noted that then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told reporters that every Iraqi target was "perfectly legitimate … If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing."

A post-Kosovo research brief by the RAND institute advised the U.S. government to use military attacks against dual-use targets due to the "stress, hardships, and costs for members of the ruling elite": "In future conflicts, such attacks may be the most effective -- and in some instances, the only feasible -- way to coerce enemy decision makers to accept U.S. peace terms," RAND stated.

Notably, RAND cautioned that this strategy would mean the U.S. should not ratify any international instruments such as the statute of the International Criminal Court: "[T]he legitimacy of a given target can differ with the eye of the beholder. American decisionmakers and military personnel may be reluctant to order or conduct attacks on dual-use targets if they believe such action could expose them to prosecution as 'war criminals.' Therefore, the United States must not assume binding obligations that could subject U.S. personnel to possible prosecution or conviction by an international court for directing or targeting attacks on targets that responsible U.S. legal authorities had certified to be legitimate military targets." 

Hung out to dry?

A number of the states participating in the U.S.-led campaign have ratified the statute for the International Criminal Court. The United States should have as well. Instead, the US government is preparing to go it alone on prosecutions of alleged war criminals in the present conflict.

On 28 February 2003, the U.S. Department of Defence released a draft text of Crimes and Elements for Trials by Military Commissions. Although the DOD's work on military commissions has recently emerged in the context of trying terrorists such as Al Qaeda members, this most recent text clearly indicates the U.S. is considering broader application.

The draft Crimes and Elements for Trials by Military Commissions includes offences such as using human shields and "improper use of flag and truce," and it refers to protected persons covered by state-to-state conflict under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

The Commission on Human Rights should call on all parties in the present conflict to use an independent, international body to prosecute alleged war crimes that arise out of the war. The United States should not use multilateral coalitions only when it suits it. Part of the price of partnership is genuine cooperation.

By devising the military strategy but exempting itself from international enforcement of humanitarian law, the US threatens to leave its coalition partners out to dry.