tim's experiment

The death of Muammar Gaddafi, as well as offering relief to hordes of insecure journalists who are not sure how to spell his name, seems on balance a Good Thing. Though difficult to take seriously, the late dictator had a great deal of blood on his hands. So why, one wonders, is so much international angst being expressed at the possibility that the captured dictator was unceremoniously shot, rather than being paraded before a trial of some kind?

Actually his end was of his own choosing. If he had gone while the going was good, while he still controlled most of the country and had something to haggle with, he could have arranged a comfortable retirement in some friendly country with immunity from prosecution and access to at least some of his ill-gotten gains. If he had negotiated a surrender of Sirte formally with the surrounding government forces he could have been sure at least of a safe trip to the Hague and a fair trial. If he held on to the bitter end the chances were always that his eventual capture would be an informal affair.

Traditionally, at least in movies, this would involve someone saying “come out with your hands up” and the defeated combatant being conveyed politely to the rear. Actually this is not very realistic. People who have studied the rather undocumented matter of surrender on the battlefield reckon that about half of attempts to do this are successful. This, at least, held for the Western fronts in the two world wars. It was generally much harder to surrender on the Eastern front and in the Pacific extremely rare. As Winston Churchill pointed out, a man who surrenders in a tactical situation is someone who was trying to kill you and now asks you not to kill him. Sometimes the answer is no, or as they used to put it in the British Army, “Too late, mate”.

This holds true only for the infantry. When naval warfare shifted to long ranges in the 1890s it became difficult to “strike the colours”, or signal an effective surrender in any other way, so enemies were generally bombarded until they sank. Submarines had no practical provision for prisoners or prizes, so the only attempted concession in the early days was the convention that the crew of a ship should be invited to take to the boats before it was sunk. This arrangement did not last long. As for the airmen, of course, it is simply not possible to surrender to an aeroplane, even in the rather unusual event that it is bombing an entirely military target.

Unfoirtunately this has meant that successful surrenders have become increasingly rare, a problem exacerbated by the bloodthirst of some civilians. I still remember Donald Rumsfeld saying on television, a propos of some Afghan city, that “America is not in the business of accepting surrenders”. Indeed it isn’t. It is rather in the business of hi-tech assassination. Whether you approve of this is I suppose a matter of opinion. But as nobody seems to think it worth complaining about drone attacks it seems a bit hypocritical to lament the summary justice administered to the Lybian dictator. Goodness knows he had it coming.