But I figured, why beat around the bush and not just debate what we’ll all inevitably think: would you kill Hitler if you knew his wife and children would also die? In the end, it’s probably better this way, start with the most despicable example, and then work our way back to high level terrorists and then down to low level grunts.
I find I’m personally torn with the moral ambiguity of it. Hitler is evil in part because he rounded up and slaughtered millions of innocents and civilians. bin Laden is evil because he targets civilians. So how do we remain not-evil if we ourselves kill civilians.
Can we right if off as “for the better good?” Can we make the cliched, “some must die so others may live.” “The needs of the few out weigh the needs of the many.” But how do we remain morally superior to the evil-doers that use the same justification?
Assuming for the sake of this exercise that Hitler was married with children…sure. How many civilians died in the bombing of German cities? Until very recently, the idea of minimizing collateral damage to the degree we try to do today was ludicrous. War is going to involve civilian casualties. Period. If blowing the Wolf’s Lair to get Hitler means killing a few bystanders, so be it.
The difference lies in whether or not the civilians were targeted. In war, it is impossible to avoid civilian casualties. There is no such thing as a war with zero collateral damage, and attempting to ‘criminalize’ collateral damage is simply a back door method of outlawing war entirely (which cool as it may seem, is just a band aid over the problem until the root causes of war are actually dealt with).
Attempting to attack a valid military target while doing the smallest amount of civilian damage is a different action from attacking a civilian target while not even attempting to do any military damage.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but in an unconventional war where there are no formal bases, uniforms, etc. then I think you have no choice. Same as when Israel bombs civilian areas that shoot rockets. You can’t just let people kill you because they hide among their own people. At some point civilians need to take responsibility and not let this happen.
I don’t think it is justified for a one-off type offense, but if there is a continuing threat against other civilians then I think it is the only thing you can do.
There’s a bit of debate now (and certainly then) as to whether the death of Hitler during the war would be a good thing or not; Operation Foxley (an SOE operation to assassinate Hitler during 1944) ran into this very problem;
“The plan was submitted in November 1944, but was never carried out because controversy remained over whether it was actually a good idea to kill Hitler. Hitler was by then considered to be such a poor strategist that it was believed whoever replaced him would probably lead a better war-effort.[1] Additionally, Thornley argued that Germany was almost defeated and if Hitler were assassinated, he would become a martyr to some Germans, as well as giving rise to speculation that Germany might have won if Hitler had survived. Since the idea was not only to defeat Germany but to destroy Nazism in general, that would have been a highly undesirable development”
You can well imagine the grief at the end of the war and German cries of “If only our Fuhrer had been here…”.
Would it be different if we had poisoned the water they all drank instead of dropping a bomb on Mehsud and his family?
It’s hard to pick a side in this. On one hand, we killed four children. On the other hand, should people be allowed to get away with murder just because they hide in a room full of innocent people?
Another hypothetical. What if he had been at a McDonalds in Boston when we dropped the bomb, and it killed four unrelated children playing in the ball pit? I’m pretty sure we would all agree that would have been unacceptable, but I can’t see any real difference between that and what actually happened.
This amounts to positing that, in war, we should be able to treat military targets in exactly the same way as we treat civilians in our own country. There would be a point if our police had free reign in Afghanistan, but we don’t.
The difference is non-trivial.
And even in the case of hostages in a McDonalds, or what have you, we’d accept that if in the process of storming the building some hostages were shot in the crossfire that such things tend to happen and while horrible/regrettable/bad, they’re to a very real degree unavoidable.
Well, I have absolutely no doubt that he would have happily dropped a bomb on Obama and his wife and kids. Tit for tat.
I am sorry there is collateral damage among civillians, but to be perfectly blunt the command structure of the terrorists has absolutely no problem killing our civillians out of hand. If we have to kill civillians, then we need to kill civillians but minimize the collateral damage. We have to get our military target and as was said upstream in the thread the military does not exist in a vacuum, it is intermingled with civillians.
Fire away, I say. If you want to be realistic about eliminating the Taliban, you’re going to have to specifically target their many, many wives and children, right in their homes and compounds, sparing no one. Theirs is a self-perpetuating faction of rabidly fundie Islamist warlords and militants, in which children are cynically bred to replace their parents in the great cause. The sons will grow up to be militants; the daughters will be married off to cousin or closely aligned militants, and at a very young age.
Yes, I recognize that my statement endorses genocide, of a sort. So be it. I’m just being honest and realistic about this, and that’s the ugly truth of the matter as I understand it. If you really want to wipe out the Taliban, you have to wipe 'em all out – men, women, and children.
Go ahead – bring on your PC, holier-than-thou, self-righteous flames.
But if we were to follow the OP’s logic, we would never have dropped those bombs – at least, the way I’m reading it. Or any other bomb, for that matter.
(That being said, I don’t think nukes should be used except in extreme circumstances. I do wish, however, that Hitler had been alive when we had dropped them. God, can you IMAGINATION what he would have thought? He’d have choked on his mustache!)
I’d be happy that the collateral damage was limited to four children and wives. They guy is making war on us and has been since the Taliban decided that it would be cool to give bin Ladin a cave to hide out in. Until they start making really clear that they will not support our enemies I say keep dropping bombs on them.
Incidents like this are quite common, and they are not accidents. A calculation is made as to whether the “value” of the primary target offsets the cost of the collateral damage, both in terms of the negative publicity that inevitably ensues, and the cost of monetary compensation that is sometimes required.