Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
[I]t strikes me that if "justice" is going to be applied to incidents, then from a purely IO+PSYOPs stance, it should be applied to the Taliban and AQ as well. Now, that probably sounds somewhat wacky, but I suspect that some of the tensions are coming from that "hey, why can they do this and we can't?" feeling relating to the enemy. If the laws of war are supposed to "govern" conduct in the field, holding a double standard, whether it be from nation to nation or force to force will inevitably create resentments.
Marc,
Back when I taught just war theory issues at a small military leadership academy on the banks of the Hudson River in New York, my students would routinely ask me the same question. We discussed it, for example, with regards to differing application of standards in regards to POW abuse by our opponents in WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. My response was and will always be along the lines that we, as the military representatives of a civilized nation, need to take the moral high ground, that we cannot apply a consequentialist approach (the end justifies the means). Our only recourse is to be moral absolutists in our conduct on the battlefield simply because that is the right thing for civilized folks to do.

More to the point of your post though is the following. How do you propose to apply the same standard to the other side in the GWOT? By classifying them as terrorists, we have already placed them outside the bounds of the law of armed conflict (LOAC). We cannot expect them to conform to the rules because of how we have labeled them. All we can really do is try to show how morally bankrupt the opponents are and use the court of public opinion to try to undermine their popular support. The bad news is that fear and coercion seem to be much more effective for garnering support in the short term. Additionally, every time our side slips from the moral high ground, those we are trying to convince lose a little more faith in the truth of our proclamations about our noble motives.