The ICRC and the US “war” against terrorism.

We're admired – we've won three Nobel Peace Prices – but we're not liked. The Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington of 11 September 2001, which killed almost 3,000 Americans, changed much in the United States and the world – and also changed a great deal for the ICRC. The attacks themselves were a frontal assault on established humanitarian principles, being a form of total war that disdained universally endorsed norms against attacking civilians. The attacks therefore led to another round in the long struggle to get unconventional forces to observe conventional humanitarian limits. The ICRC repeatedly condemned these and related attacks, as in Madrid in 2004 when almost 200 civilians were killed by bombs hidden in trains by Islamic radicals. But the organization was also to find itself engaged in persistent friction with the United States and its allies. Washington and its friends, like Britain, in their fervent zest to wage “war” against terrorism, sometimes also resorted to a type of total war that disdained traditional legal and humanitarian restraints. Even some initial supporters of the George W. Bush Administration's foreign policy recognized the dangers of seeing the American nation as an especially good people whose government, when attacked, should not be bound by complicating rules of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]