Individual and Collective Moral Responsibility for Systemic Military Atrocity*

THERE are two kinds of killing in war: intended and unintended. Soldiers intend to, and may under the laws of war, kill those who pose a threat to them. Soldiers may not intentionally kill innocents. Indeed, soldiers ought to try, as much as they can, to avoid even accidentally killing non-combatants. Thus, perhaps as much as soldiers are trained to kill they are taught to avoid unnecessary killing of innocents. Limited, unintended killing of non-combatants (collateral damage) may be excused in the just war tradition and by the laws of armed combat if those deaths were the result of “necessary” military operations and efforts were taken to avoid unnecessary killing. Intentionally killing non-combatants is considered an atrocity for which actors are morally responsible and legally culpable. When an atrocity is planned it is genocide, ethnic cleansing or terror bombing. Moral responsibility here belongs with individual perpetrators and commanders. Sometimes atrocities are isolated and limited, the act of an individual or a small group of soldiers who “lose it.” In the early morning of 19 November 2005 a twenty-year-old marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, Iraq. In response, US marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including children aged 14, 10, 5, 4, 3 and 1 over several hours as members of a thirteen-man unit, the 1st Squad of Marine Company K, Third Battalion Marines attacked and killed people in three houses and a taxi carrying four college students. Here, moral responsibility clearly belongs to individual perpetrators. “Only a man with a gun to his head is not responsible.”