Discourses of difference: Civilians, combatants, and compliance with the laws of war

Introduction Why have President Bush and his administration consistently, and publicly, stated their commitment to fully comply with the laws of war protecting civilians while, simultaneously, refusing to fully comply with the laws of war protecting prisoners of war? How do we understand President Bush and his administration's unquestioning acceptance of the protection of civilians, but the rejection of the same for prisoners of war? Are the strategic and normative costs of each so dissimilar as to justify this difference? Considering the recent expose of abuses and torture of prisoners of war held in both Iraq and Cuba, the answers to these questions are not merely academic. I contend that an understanding of this difference in compliance is to be found through a close analysis of the persistence and influence of discourses of civilisation and barbarism invoked by the administration. First, these discourses of barbarism and civilisation facilitate the construction of a barbarous enemy akin to ‘fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism’, against which ‘civilization’ must be protected, which, in turn, legitimates the suspension of the laws of war extending rights and protection to those detained. Second, what marks President Bush and his administration as the right defenders of ‘civilization’ is their claim to protect ‘civilians’. Indeed, insofar as the war on terror can claimed as war in defence of civilisation, it must be constituted as a war in defence of civilians. Thus, discourses of barbarism and civilisation enable the particular construction of categories of violence - detainee (combatant) or civilian - the treatment of which iterates the fundamental opposition of civilisation and barbarism by which the war on terror proceeds.