Steve Russell: War on indigenous peoples lasted the longest

The current unpleasantness in Afghanistan is said to be “the longest war in U.S. history.” I beg to differ, while still admitting that 2001 to 2015 is a long time to fight a country living in the 16th century.

Counting only the shooting part, the U.S. war on the indigenous peoples of North America began when the states united as a nation in 1788 and ended with the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.

What they called massacres in the Indian wars we call war crimes today. There have been customary rules of war since Biblical times. Treaties started working on it with the first Geneva Convention in 1864 and continued all the way to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.

It’s not hard for those of us in the Chairborne Corps to make up rules from the cheap seats. It’s harder to get any regard for rules in the exigencies of combat and it’s not even a sure thing to get enforcement against the losers after it’s over.

One of those shining moments of history when the U.S. lived up to American exceptionalism was the aftermath of WWII, when FDR, over the objections of both Stalin and Churchill, engineered the Nuremburg Tribunals, actually putting people on trial for, among other things, war crimes.