The war of rules  

Haggai responds (in comments, which unfortunately don't have permalinks) to my post on decapitation strikes and the rules of war:

Our moral outrage over civilian deaths is also dramatically improved from the past. Almost no one in this country was bothered by the massive bombing of German cities in WWII, unlike today where our armed forces take great care to avoid killing non-combatants. Of course it still happens sometimes, as is unavoidable in war, but we certainly aren't targeting them.

Apparently there's some clear reason why civilian casualties are worse than military casualties, but I don't see it. Maybe you could argue that military personnel know what they're getting into, but how do you deal with drafts? I'm guessing not all Iraqi soldiers are fighting because they choose to. Yet it's morally acceptable to kill them, and morally reprehensible to kill civilians. Why?

From a tactical standpoint, it makes sense to concentrate on those who pose a threat. So we're left with a gentlemen's agreement between warring powers, an agreement that it's better to limit the destruction and death to a specific portion of the population. We put on uniforms, wave flags... basically, it's a way of making war more organized. And as we've seen in Iraq, it's a prisoner's dilemma - each side has ample opportunity and incentive to break the rules anyway. Stigma and international law serve as counterweights, but they aren't entirely effective.

The obvious historical explanation for the development of these rules is the monarchies that populated Europe for hundreds of years - since the general population didn't have a stake in government, widespread civilian casualties were extremely dangerous to the leadership. I'm not suggesting the rules that developed were always followed, but I want to point out that they were shaped by a different set of political circumstances than we have today.

What brought all this up was the DoD's targeting of Saddam as part of Iraq's command structure, and the legitimacy of such decapitation strikes. As I mentioned before, the American command structure includes the American people. Does this make them a legitimate military target? The argument that we should only attack those who pose a threat doesn't apply here - citizens in a democratic society are to a great degree responsible for the actions of their leadership.

I don't really have any bold conclusions to draw here, but I do think it's important to be critical of apparently moral institutions like the rules of war.