Has there ever been a war without war crimes? Try as he might, columnist ROBERT MACKLIN can’t think of one. 

HAS there ever been a war without war crimes? This is not to excuse or minimise the gut-wrenching horror of Putin’s barbaric murderers and rapists in the invasion of Ukraine. But let’s not forget all the others.

Ancient history is full of them – mass slaughters and rapine, with slavery of both sexes for the defeated. Same goes for the colonial era in South America, Africa, Asia and North America. And let’s not forget our own Frontier War where, only now, the extent of the massacres is being uncovered, with the attempted genocide and ethnocide of an ancient people and their culture tossed in for good measure.

The 20th century saw the Nazi blitz of Britain where bombing raids on cities killed indiscriminately from Portsmouth to Coventry and all in between. And in revenge, the much-admired Winston Churchill ordered the fire bombing and utter destruction of Dresden and all its people when the war was already won. 

In our part of the world there was Changi, the Burma Road, the “Death March” of Corregidor and the war-crime trials that followed. Oh, and the atomic bombs dropped on the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that, we’re told, was in a good cause.

Then there’s the sheer awfulness of Vietnam where we went “all the way” with US President Lyndon Johnson, author of the Agent Orange chemical warfare. Anyone who’s visited that country in the last 20 years will have been witness to the maiming it caused… to say nothing of My Lai, the Nixon-Kissinger “secret” bombing of Cambodia and their millions of mines that don’t discriminate for age or gender. 

I used to think the 20th century was the worst of it, until along came Dick Cheney and his malleable President George W Bush to give us the “shock and awe” of Baghdad, Abu Ghraib, and – with his successors – the long, horrific grind of Afghanistan and the court case now being played out in Sydney.

But that was then. In response to the Ukraine horrors, the ABC posted a little lecture from a recently retired Australian major-general, Mick Ryan, “who served in East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan and as a strategist on the US Joint Chiefs of Staffs”. 

Mick says that over the last three decades, “I loved being a member of the profession of arms because it imposed a professional discipline that made us better soldiers, better citizens and better servants of our nation”.

By comparison, he says: “The Russian officers who commanded the forces in and around Bucha were negligent, ethically corrupt and criminal… they have shown throughout their disastrous campaign a lack of the vital mindset of the professional.”

Oh, Mick, if only the human psyche were not so easily manipulable. Truth is, all wars between nations are barbarous. And once you’ve been given the okay by your political leaders to kill some of the enemy, the ethical structures of the combatant totter and fall as night follows day. 

The real criminals, Mick, are those politicians who beat the drums of war, who use the differences of governance in other countries to bolster their own standing at home. They protect each other in the name of “leadership” and “defence of values” to pour their national treasure into ever more terrifying killing machines – men like Vladimir Putin. 

They’re the ones who should be dragged to the courts of justice.

Luckily, our politicians would never do such a thing.

We’re the good guys. 

robert@robertmacklin.com