Civilian casualties are unavoidable in war, and this one is no exception.
"People are going to die," General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this month before the invasion of Iraq began, preparing the public for some of the consequences of the campaign.
That is the reality despite intense efforts to avoid civilian deaths. Compared with much of the world, the US military is vigilant about training its soldiers on the rules of war and the importance of avoiding needless civilian deaths. The Defense Department's lawyers are constantly consulted about military strategy and targets when time permits; and the military has invested huge resources in developing precision-guided weapons to reduce the loss of innocent life.
"It's an embedded and intrinsic part of American military culture, post-Vietnam," said William Arkin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic Education at Johns Hopkins University and senior military adviser to Human Rights Watch.
Still, civilian casualties inevitably bring anguish and outcries. That is particularly true now, when war's face can be instantaneously broadcast and magnified to millions all over the globe. Indeed, there was even discussion of charging NATO officials with war crimes for the 1999 bombing of Kosovo, which killed about 500 civilians, although justified on humanitarian grounds. (The charges, brought before the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, were ultimately dropped by prosecutors.)
The 20th century's experience with war has produced a web of international treaties setting out detailed rules of armed conflict. When it comes to non-combatants, there are two overarching principles that everyone seems to agree on.
The first is that the military can't intentionally make targets of civilians. The second is that if commanders know that striking a legitimate military target will kill civilians, causing so-called collateral damage, they must weigh the importance of the military target against the loss of civilian lives.
Just how to interpret those principles, though, and how to weigh the loss of civilian life against other factors, like the lives of American soldiers or the success of the entire military campaign itself, is vigorously debated.
The divisions have become so severe that over the past two years, the Carr Center for the Study of Human Rights Policy at Harvard has sponsored a project that brings together representatives from the military, international lawyers and human rights groups to consider each other's vastly different legal interpretations.
"The human-rights community is absolutist at its core," said Sarah Sewall, program director at the Carr Center and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance in the Clinton administration. "From a military mind-set, civilian casualties are one of the trade-offs."
She added, "It's inherently more complex than the human-rights community approaches it."
The most widely accepted rules derive from the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, which govern a range of humanitarian issues arising in wartime, from aiming at civilians to the treatment of prisoners of war.
In 1977, protocols were added to elaborate on the conventions, and that's where bitter disagreements have arisen, particularly with the Americans. (Although more than 150 nations have ratified the protocols, the US has not.)
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