This is kind of bogus. If we’d have lost the war the Nazis would have won. They’d have executed whoever they pleased. Sure, they might have executed a lot of generals, but they’d have executed millions of civilians as well.
Does that mean that if the enemy thinks it’s okay to deliberately target and kill civilians, then we should have no problem doing the same with our military?
In the context of:
- A nuclear bomb that was not much more powerful than several plane-loads of conventional bombs (Tokyo had more civilian deaths in the week prior to Hiroshima than there were at Hiroshima);
- A war in which military bombing could not be accomplished without large amounts of civilian deaths (remember, we’re well before laser-guided bombs; we’re only barely into visually aimed bombs, here); and
- A war in which “breaking enemy morale” was seen as a valid and acceptable target.
We consider the people who discriminate against people of other colors and religions as ignorant and hateful now, whereas we consider people such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington honorable people to be admired now.
Or, perhaps, you are comparing apples and oranges. Different circumstances, different situations, different tactics, different sets of morality.
The atomic bomb was dropped in the context of two nations throwing everything they had into a war to defeat the other side, and the United States developed a better bomb and used it the same way both sides had been using bombs all along.
9/11 was done by a group of civilians who decided to kill as many humans as possible.
If you accept that Hiroshima and 9/11 are of equivalent moralities, doesn’t that mean that any soldier who landed at Normandy had the equivalent morality of a psychopathic murderer?
I’ve never bought this. Between killing civilians deliberately, and accepting that civilian casualties are inevitable, I don’t see a hair’s breadth of difference. In the Hiroshima context, Hiroshima was blown up deliberately. To say then that civilian casualties are “accidental” makes no sense to me.
People shouldn’t neglect the sense of scale here, either. A suicide bomber, with rare exceptions, will kill a couple dozen people at the outside. Compare that with the hundreds of thousands killed in Dresden and Hiroshima.
Also, throw this into the mix – the suicide bomber pays the same price his or her victims do. The bombers of Dresden and Hiroshima largely didn’t. Does this matter, in the context of the OP’s argument? I don’t know… does it?
That’s why I didn’t say “accidental.” If you know something is going to happen as a consequence of something you could do, and you do it anyway, I don’t think “accident” quite fits. Perhaps you’re saying there’s no difference because death is the result either way; but in general I think that distinction does matter.
Suicide bombers don’t kill comparatively small numbers of people for moral reasons. Circumstances just dictate that that’s all they can do, tactically, in most cases.
I’m not sure that’s a moral decision either.
Even if we accept for fact that they would have executed millions of civilians, the main point is that you are finding one instance in which deliberately targeting and killing thousands of civilians was worth it.
(I’m not saying that it was or not worth it, I’m just saying that you implied that it was worth it)
So, you do not seem to exclude “deliberately target and kill civilians” from the list of available options, if the goal is sufficiently worthy.
If that is the case, how can you exclude “deliberately target and kill civilians” from the list of options that a small group of insurgents have? If that is their only way of achieving their goal, and if their goal is sufficiently worthy in their eyes, then by the same logic you use to justify these acts for our side, they can justify these acts for their side.
As I have said, we do not have to agree to the goals of every, or even most, terrorist attacks. But we cannot invalidate them as a method of achieving a goal if we agree to the deliberate killing of civilians in WWII.
We all recognize that everyone has a moral right to self defense…it is moral to use lethal violence to protect your life against a credible threat of lethal force, or the life of others. But violence has to be proportionate.
So we shouldn’t ask, “Is bombing a bus full of civilians a legitimate tactic of war?”, but rather “Is the violence of bombing a bus full of civilians proportional to the potential benefit?” If bombing a bus full of civilians was the only way to prevent a nuclear bomb from going off, I think many of us would feel it was appropriate. But what exactly do the terror bombings in Iraq, the subway bombings in Britain, or the 9/11 attacks accomplish? The bombers in Iraq want to destroy Iraqi civil society and establish an Islamic theocracy and murder Shi’a, Christians and Jews. The bombers in Britain and the US want to scare us into standing aside while all those things are accomplished all over the Middle East.
Violence for a good purpose can sometimes be good or sometimes be bad, but violence for a bad purpose is always bad. Is it OK to shoot someone? How is it hypocritical to say that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t? Sometimes targeting civilians is OK, almost all the time it isn’t OK. And the suicide bombings are clearly cases where it isn’t acceptable.
This isn’t a game where both sides play by rules we all agree to in advance, and any deviation from those rules is cheating. This is a struggle where people are willing to kill and die to accomplish certain goals, the only rules they are bound by are self imposed rules. The US wants to turn Iraq into a pro-western liberal democratic state. To do that we are willing to kill and die. The insurgents want to turn Iraq into an Islamic slave state. To do that they are willing to kill and die. This isn’t a case where either both sides are moral or both sides are immoral, it is clearly possible that one side could be moral and one side immoral even if they use the same tactics.
OK, now we’re getting somewhere.
Here is where you lost me. How can you say that all suicide bombings are cases where it isn’t acceptable?
What about Palestinian suicide bombers? Their goal is the creation of a Palestinian state and they seem to be close to achieving it. Even if it doesn’t happen in the next decade or two, how far do you think the Palestinians would have gone (would anyone even know they existed and had a problem) if it wasn’t for the suicide bombings?
Of course, the suicide bombings have now started to become a problem for the Palestinians, but the earlier ones helped bring the Palestinian problem to the world stage. So, the “potential benefit”, as you mention, of the bus bombings was large: the creation of a homeland for the Palestinians.
Of course the Iraqi terrorists at the moment, and many other terrorists in history, had bad goals, and we should condemn them for their goals. But we cannot condemn their method. We cannot simply state that deliberately killing civilians is bad, because we condone it for our side.
I agree.
However, what I disagree with is the fact that we paint not only the goals of the Iraqi terrorists as bad and immoral, but we paint their methodology as bad.
“Look at these animals, they kill innocent civilians!”
But that’s what we do too, when the need arises.
If we are not animals when we do it, then they are not animals when they do it. (Again, don’t think of the specific case of the Iraqi insurgents, who have bad goals, but think of a theoretical insurgent, who may or may not have a moral goal to achieve.)
Let me give a give a small example:
- Assume “our side” uses guns and “their side” uses knives
- our side used knives in the past, but it was for a good reason
- their side is using knives now, and is doing it for a bad reason.
We should just be saying: “They have bad goals”, and not “Look at these animals, they use knives”, since we used knives in the past and we will use them again for a good enough reason.
Just because all people currently using knives are doing it for reasons we consider bad, that doesn’t invalidate using knives as a method. Also, it doesn’t make them bad simply because they are using knives: they are bad because they have bad goals.
It is OK for US to bomb civilians. It is not OK for THEM to bomb civilians or our military or our vacant buildings.
Cite (or explain) how killing innocents is an acceptable and proportional means to reach that goal?
Has it been worth the price they’ve paid?
Several countries have killed civilians during their struggle for independence. Have those cases been worth it?
Yeah, that’s actually correct. If it was OK for THEM to kill our military, why aren’t we doing it ourselves? Why don’t we shoot our own soldiers for them? Because you are correct, it isn’t OK for them to kill our soldiers or destroy our buildings, and we’re killing and dying in an attempt to prevent it.
What exactly is so hard to understand about that? We fought the Nazis, the Nazis fought us, so we’re hypocrites? Fuck that. The insurgents in Iraq are doing horrible evil things in order to accomplish other horrible evil things.
If the insurgents really want an independent self-ruled Iraq that isn’t a puppet of the US the best thing they could do would be to put away their guns and stop driving car bombs into crowds of children and stop hacking off the heads of journalists with butcher knives. Iraq becomes peacefull. Now the Iraqis demand the US leave. Eventually we’ll leave. It’ll never happen? Bull. Look at Kuwait. Look at Saudi. Look at the Phillipines. Our soldiers will leave. If the insurgents really just wanted the US to leave they could organize peaceful protests, advance anti-US candidates, work for a favorable constitution, etc, etc, etc.
And I firmly believe that the situation is exactly the same in Palestine, that the suicide bombers didn’t accomplish a damn thing. The suicide bombing campaign wasn’t started to convince the Israelis to grant the Palestinian’s self-rule. It was to make a peaceful settlement impossible, the bombers didn’t want a peace settlement, they wanted extermination of Israel. The bombing was carried out to prevent peace and provoke Israel into retaliating against Palestinian civilians in order to radicalize Palestinians even further. A despicable tactic carried out for despicable ends.
Look, principled pacifism has its place. So does a pragmatic recognition that this particular war is going to cost more and cause more suffering than avoiding the war. But this emphasis on “rules” is simply stupid. We signed the Geneva conventions because they help both sides in a conflict and hurt neither side, war isn’t a zero-sum game, it isn’t just killing and causing suffering. It is an attempt to use violence to get the other side to do what you want them to do.
So yeah, we are outraged when our enemies don’t “play fair”, we’re also outraged when our enemies “play fair”–because they are OUR ENEMIES and they are fighting for evil. I’m not going to bother claiming that therefore we must be fighting for good. The cop who shoots a guy waving a gun isn’t neccesarily a good guy…maybe he beats his wife, maybe he takes bribes, maybe he eats too many doughnuts, maybe he beats confessions out of “obviously” guilty perps, or whatever. It isn’t neccesary to define the cop as the “good guy”, just that he’s using neccesary and proportionate violence to accomplish a neccesary task. He did good–in this case. The other guy with a gun was doing bad–in this case. Doesn’t matter that both were using a gun, it doesn’t make them equal morally, and it doesn’t make the cop a hypocrite.
Oh yes - but I’m not proud of the fact…
Who said we were hypocrites for fighting the Nazis?
In any case, you make some good points, but unfortunately they have nothing to do with the OP.
If country A attacks country B and a war starts, most of the world considers country A as being bad for doing so, but do not consider them despicable human beings, because it seems that starting a war is “acceptable” to some degree.
It seems that it has become somewhat acceptable (i.e. a country can start a war and still be considered a civilized and respected country), because people realize that at one point or another every country has started a war and it is illogical to de-humanize other countries for what we all do.
If someone carries out a suicide bombing, though, most of the world considers the bomber a despicable human being. But that is illogical if you think that it is OK for your side to deliberately kill civilians.
The “but the suicide bomber’s method is not an efficient way of achieving his goal, and results in too many deaths given its potential impact” excuse is not valid. How efficient were the carpet bombings of cities in Germany and Tokyo? Could the same goal have been achieved with *much *fewer deaths?
I meant much fewer civilian deaths.
I can’t read your mind, but if your comment is in reference to my support for Iraq invasion, refresh your memory.
Iraq invasion was 12(!) years in the making. There were many attempts to resolve the situation through diplomatic efforts. For 8 years the affairs were in the hands of Democrat White House. All to no avail. By 2003 we were still in the dark about what Saddam was hiding and what his game was. You may agree or disagree with the invasion but don’t pretend it happened on Bush whim.
The idea with this quote is that they would have had a legitimate ground for prosecuting and sentencing them, from the own admission of one of these generals. IOW, he himself thought that he had ordered what amounts to war crimes.
It reminds me of a quote from “The battle of Algiers” : “Give us your bombers and we’ll happily give you our baskets full of explosives”. Indeed : circumstances, and available means. IOW, would a western country resort to terror bombings if they had too? I strongly suspect they would. Would the Hamas wage a formal war with Israel if they had tank regiments and an airforce? I suspect they would too.
I still think that defining war crimes, deeming acceptable or not certain means serves a purpose as it limits the willingness to resort to very unsavory actions, in usual circumstances, especially as long as the public opinion is supporting these views (and has a voice in the matter, of course). But in extreme circumstances? Hmmmm… I’m dubious.
If you reversed the circumstances entirely, yes, I could see an occupied Western country producing suicide bombers. I’m not sure about your second example. If Hamas had a real military, that alone might be enough of a threat to Israel to let them achieve their goals. Depending on what you think their goals are and such.
I disagree. I don’t believe for a second that the primary objective of dropping A-bombs was to destroy infrastructure. It was clearly done as a display of military might, with full knowledge that there would be high numbers of civilian casualties. The residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were no more “suspecting” than passengers on a bus in Israel.
Now I’m not necessarily saying that no distinction can be drawn between the two situations, but I don’t think you can draw the distinction along the lines that you are suggesting - not as a blanket statement.
That’s not really a fair statement. Granted, you might be able to look at Palestinian propaganda about pushing Israel into the sea and what not, but propaganda is not necessarily the same as the stated goal of the movement. If we were to cherry-pick some of the nastier propaganda from WWII, one could easily come away with the impression that the goal of the United States was to “kill all the Japs”, which of course it wasn’t.