Crimes of War

October 2001

Introduction
Interviews and Introduction by Marguerite Feitlowitz

The attacks of September 11 conflated traditional categories of crime, terrorism, and armed conflict. On September 20, as he contemplated the U.S. strategy for response, President Bush declared, "The war will be fought not just by soldiers, but by police and intelligence forces, as well as in financial institutions."

We were prompted to ask a range of specialists:

Is there a paradigm shift in the nature of war?
Will IHL be sufficient to regulate the conflict?

Lt. Col. (Ret.) Wayne Elliott argues, "This is nothing new, war has always been fought on numerous fronts." Michael Scharf, a former State Department Legal Advisor," insists that "the paradigm shift happened in 1985, with the introduction of the concept of peremptory self-defense, in response to a terrorist attack by Libyan operatives." Robert Kogod Goldman, first vice president of the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, points to some vexing legal lacunae posed by September 11 and its aftermath . Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University and author of the groundbreaking Toward an Islamic Reformation, says "the paradigm shift, for those who see one, is in the proof of our shared vulnerability, which should encourage us all to take international law more seriously. He argues here, as he has elsewhere, for the abolition of jihad as an Islamic imperative.

We continue to solicit reflections on this provocative question, and welcome comments on the responses currently posted.