Loving the Battle of Blackwater week, Steven!! Do you consider Tyrion’s use of the wildfire to be a war crime?

poorquentyn:

racefortheironthrone:

Maybe. I take PoorQuentyn’s point that it was a purely military strategy aimed at purely military targets. But that doesn’t necessarily mean something isn’t considered a war crime. Weapons that cause “superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering” are considered war crimes, sometimes depending on how they are used. At various times, this has included crossbows, weapons with barbed or serrated edges, explosive or expanding bullets, poison, biological or chemical weapons,  nuclear weapons, and incendiary weapons. 

Now, whether Westeros includes that in their conception of the laws of war, I don’t know. But if Stannis had won the Battle of Blackwater, I could see him prosecuting Tyrion for murdering thousands of helpless sailors on both sides. 

Totally fair points. My only rejoinder is this wasn’t a case of armies meeting on a battlefield; as he says before his fateful sortie, Tyrion’s acting in defense of the KL civilian population which will suffer tremendously from Stannis’ forces. Admittedly, Tyrion’s fighting on behalf of a monarch that regularly and egregiously violates the social contract to the detriment of that same civilian population, and as we see at the Wall, Stannis takes post-battle atrocities seriously and punishes violators harshly. Still, I think there’s a case to be made that Tyrion has a moral imperative to utterly destroy Stannis’ army in order to spare the city another Sack, a clusterfuck of war crimes.

To put it another way: it’s the difference between Aerys turning the wildfire on the city to spite Robert and a hypothetical AU in which the alchemists somehow deploy it against Tywin’s army. The latter is still horrifying, but given what that army was about to do to King’s Landing…it’s ambiguous, but I think we’re supposed to feel the horror of Davos’ POV without quite condemning Tyrion’s, especially (again) given how his own heroic ride frames his actions as a defense of the masses that hate him. (Not entirely unjustifiably, given the burning along the quays and whatnot.) 

That’s all true, but as I mentioned in Sansa IV, the reason the city is going to be sacked is that Tyrion has made the decision to fight rather than surrender, so I don’t think Tyrion’s defense of the civilian population is entirely uncomplicated.