We'll only know the ultimate U.S. strategy for the takeover of Baghdad after the war dust is settled. But we can be reasonably certain that the commanding generals took into consideration, before their attack, the rules of war. It was something they have spoken about frequently.

General RICHARD MYERS (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff): Our policy of doing all we can to spare civilian lives stands in sharp contrast to the Iraqi regime's constant violations of the international laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions, let alone decent human behavior.

SEVERSON: The American news media have underscored Iraq's disregard of the rules of war. Foreign media have been critical of American and British war actions especially because of civilian casualties.

If the ultimate defeat of the Saddam Hussein regime goes according to the rules, civilians will not have been targeted and civilian casualties will have been kept to a minimum, and the amount of destruction to property will be proportional to the military benefit even if it puts American forces at greater risk. And that has happened, according to Rutgers University religion professor James Turner Johnson, who is also co-editor of THE JOURNAL OF MILITARY ETHICS.

Dr. JAMES TURNER JOHNSON (Religion Professor, Rutgers University): There has really been an effort in this war thus far to take risks in order to avoid harm to civilians. Sometimes these have been very substantial risks. When the first Apache helicopters were used, they were told to fly very low ... in order to identify their targets and to hit the targets more directly from the low height. As a result, they got very badly shot up.

SEVERSON: Avoiding civilian casualties has become a much more attainable goal with the precision weaponry U.S. forces employ today. Consider how impossible it was to avoid civilians during the Second World War.

Dr. JOHNSON: If you had a particular target, you had to drop about 900 bombs on it. And that's just [an] enormously costly, destructive kind of thing.

SEVERSON: The rules of war actually go back at least 1,500 years, to St. Augustine. But it wasn't until the Civil War, after the bloody battles at places like Bull Run, that President Lincoln had the rules defined and put into American military manuals. The rules were eventually incorporated into the1949 Geneva Conventions, universally recognized as the rules of war.

Over the years, the rules have been modified to meet the changing times and technology. One of those times was the Vietnam War, in particular an ugly incident in a village suspected of being a Viet Cong stronghold, called My Lai.

Colonel WILLIAM ECKHARDT (University of Missouri at Kansas City Law School): My Lai was an unfortunate incident that occurred in Vietnam where American soldiers basically got out of control and in a two-hour period killed 500 people.

SEVERSON: Former Colonel William Eckhardt helped prosecute and convict Lieutenant William Calley for the My Lai massacre.

Col. ECKHARDT: Soldiers aren't ethicists; neither are they lawyers. They are very practical people and the way we, in a system that believe[s] in the rule of law, take care of those sorts of things is with training.

SEVERSON: Even though the rules of war were originally crafted from the tenets of Christianity, Professor Louay Safi, with the International Institute of Islamic Thought, says the Qur'an also defines the rules of war quite explicitly.

Dr. LOUAY SAFI (Professor and Scholar, International Institute of Islamic Thought): If you are an Iraqi, is war justified under the current conditions? I would say yes, a war to repel an outside force, an occupying force, can be justified from an Iraqi point of view.

SEVERSON: But there can be no doubt that Iraqi soldiers have blurred the lines of ethical warfare. Consider -- Iraqi soldiers raise a white flag and then attack U.S. forces. Deception is acceptable when it's crafted to mislead an enemy, but not this kind of deception.

Dr. JOHNSON: To come out under a white flag or come out dressed as civilians with your weapons hidden, these are both illegitimate means of destruction, and the reason is that these kinds of action essentially put noncombatants at risk.

Dr. JOHNSON: This dangerously erodes the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. You don't know if there are patients in that building. If fire is coming from that, it's a legitimate target for you to hit.

SEVERSON: After a suicide bomber posing as an Iraqi taxi driver blew up four soldiers and himself, U.S. troops found themselves in an ethical dilemma. They fired on a van full of women and children after it failed to heed a warning, killing several.

Dr. JOHNSON: It's extraordinarily tragic. The blame really lies with those who eroded the combatant/noncombatant distinction in the first place. I am sure it weighs heavily on the hearts of those soldiers involved in this.

SEVERSON: Historically, underdogs have often felt justified in breaking the rules of war.

Dr. SAFI: There are a number of religious leaders or scholars of Islam today [who] have justified using that tactic, particularly if there is an invasion and Muslims don't have the force to match the invader. So you can use all under your control to fight back. So that has been justified.

SEVERSON: Iraqi soldiers reportedly fired on fleeing civilians, and have used others as human shields.

Dr. SAFI: It would be against the Qur'an. You cannot use a human as a means to protect soldiers, that's a human shield, and you can't target civilians. These are very clear rules.

SEVERSON: The Iraqis, of course, have complaints about the war the U.S. and British are waging. They say the U.S. was in violation by bombing the Iraqi TV complex. The U.S. claims it was, in fact, a command center for the army. And it's unclear who turned off the water in Basra, although the Iraqis say the British did.

Dr. SAFI: That would be a violation because the consequences in a state of war -- 1.8 million people in a city without water -- is troubling. That would trouble me, truly.

SEVERSON: The Iraqis charge that hundreds of civilians have been killed by U.S. bombing. But that would not necessarily be a violation of the rules, if the U.S. tried its best to avoid civilian casualties.

Dr. JOHNSON: If you are doing something with a good intention and its direction is for the good, then if there is a secondary, unavoidable bad effect, that this does not render the action bad.

SEVERSON: Nowhere are the rules of war more explicit than with the treatment of prisoners of war. And we learned from Gulf War I that the Iraqis treated prisoners ruthlessly. No one knows that more than retired Air Force Colonel David Eberly. He was injured by the shrapnel that downed his F-15 plane, and then shot at again by Iraqi soldiers on the ground.

Colonel DAVID EBERLY (Retired, Air Force): I couldn't believe that I couldn't feel the pain of being perforated by that fire -- my mind was running wild. At that point all those things were blotted out of my mind and my mind was flooded with the words of the 23rd Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley [of] the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."

SEVERSON: This is a diagram of one of the prisons he was held in, including one that was bombed four times by Allied jets.

Col. EBERLY: You know the old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes? I can tell you that there are no atheists in enemy prison cells either.

SEVERSON: But the bombing wasn't nearly as frightening as the constant physically and mentally abusive interrogation.

Col. EBERLY: We actually reached a point when they put a 9-mm to my temple and said, "If you don't start cooperating, we are going to pull the trigger" -- when they wanted me to make some statement against the war and against the country, and that was my line in the sand, and I decided that I was willing to have them pull the trigger. I could picture in my mind blood splattering against the wall. I kind of wondered if I would still be conscious momentarily after hearing the gunshot. They pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.

 SEVERSON: Eberly thinks he was spared so he could serve his maker in other ways. And he prays those who are being held captive in this war are being held by soldiers who have heard of the Geneva Conventions.
 

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