Collateral damage is unfortunate but necessary. The deaths of five are worth to save the lives of 500 or even six.
Well that @#$%^%&@* had absolutly no problem, ordering bombings whichtargetted schoolchildrenin his time
If you wouldn’t kill your own child to achieve your goal, then you have no right to kill somebody else’s child.
You don’t kill children, period. There is no justification. The hell of it is, all those trying to rationalize it as “war” or “collateral damge” or whatever still call it “terrorism” when the other guy does it.
The assertion that it “saves” any lives is complete horseshit.
Even playing along with the premise, how many of you would kill your own children to save 100 strangers? The answer is zero.
“If you wouldn’t shoot yourself in the head, you have no right to shot someone else in a war.”
Sorry, no.
Except the 4th Geneva Convention.
But other than the codified, ratified international laws of war, no, no other justification.
Except the fact that a drawn out ground war can be much more damaging than a surgical strike.
But aside from the cold hard logic of human suffering and codified, ratified international laws of war, no, no other justifications.
Except the fact that even without a war to remove Taliban leaders, they’d do much more damage to numerous people.
But aside from the pragmatics of helping the Afghan government defend itself from theocratic thugs, the cold hard logic of human suffering and the codified, ratified international laws of war? No, no other justifications.
No.
See, yet again, targeting civilians in order to instill fear is terrorism.
Targeting military targets, even if it causes civilian casualties, is specifically authorized by the 4th GC.
Or are we headed for another absurdity where you argue that launching anti-personnel rockets at civilians is only called an attack by nasty lying liars?
Your misinformed righteousness is going to seriously hurt you one day.
Hmm, I could’ve sworn I read that somewhere but google seems to back you up.
So you’d want 200 people dead from a terrorist attack that man was plotting just to save the life of one child?
Just remember, if you wouldn’t cut up and eat your own children you have no right eating a burger.
Savages.
Also, if you don’t want part of someone else’s body in you and you’re a man, you have no right to have sex with a woman.
If you don’t want to be put in a cage and prohibited from going outside you have no right to own a cat.
Let this be a lesson to you.
“Want” has nothing to do with it, but I would not intentionally kill a child for any reason. All attempts to justify it are bullshit.
Attempting to ridicule my point does not refute it. You haven’t even been successful in ridiculing it. Any justification you want to contrive for killing children would apply equally to your own children. There is nothing ridiculous or invalid about that point. You eitrher have to admit you’d be willing to kill your own children under the same circumstances, or admit that your justifications are bullshit. You can’t make arbitrary moral loopholes for yourself.
I make arbitrary moral loopholes for myself all the time. Doesn’t everybody?
Sure, in the unlikely event that I become a genocidal loony bent on taking over Europe, I agree that I would be morally responsible for the deaths of any human shields I may be using, including my children.
Hey, we agree with each other a lot of Zionism/Israel threads.
It’s just when that pesky MJ issue comes up.
To the rest of the discussion, particularly the point that the Taliban leaders’ children are pretty much the next generation of Jihadists & sparing them will just perpetuate the war, I think THAT was the point of the relatively rare instances in the OT when the Israelites were told to wipe out certain (not all) truly depraved Canaanite tribes- two criteria being they practice child sacrifice & ritual prostitution. “If their children & women are not sacred to them, then they shouldn’t be to you.”
This makes no sense whatsoever. If a child’s parents abuse it, then the child does not deserve to live?
I guess I’m going to have to be on the “PC” side and go ahead and say that genocide is evil. I’m sure I’ll probably get flamed for it.
Not trying to be a dick here, but what makes killing a child morally worse then any other collateral damage?
Because someone has to think of the children!!!
When they get a little older it’s okay for them to be collateral damage though.
Maybe unless they have a vagina, then it might still be bad.
You know, I think this is what bothers me most about it, the fact that we can be so callus about killing people in a foreign country, especially when they don’t look/act/talk like us.
I think it was the documentary Why We Fight that focused quite heavily on the guys that dropped the first bombs in the second Iraq invasion. That strike was supposed to kill Sadam, and stop it all before it started, but he wasn’t there, and they kind of missed their targets. The result was that their “surgical strike” took out an apartment complex, killing dozens of civilians. The commentary from the documentary said quite frankly, “we lost the war then and there. The civilian population from that point on was against us.”
I also remember a scene in a short lived TV show called E-Ring, about US Special Forces. At one point they’re in Afghanistan, or Pakistan or foreignstan, and they’re interrogating the mother of a suspected terrorist. This was a really bad guy, responsible for a lot of atrocities, and a lot of attacks on US troops. I remember they were trying to reason with her, teller her that he’s killed a lot of civilians. And what struck me was that her response was ‘so what.’ What does she care if he kills people in America, when Americans have no problem killing people in her country.
Moral-relativism drives me nuts, I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it. People in this thread have clearly stated that they don’t care about civilian casualties in foreign countries. So why should people in those countries care about civilian deaths in the US? We have CIA and Special Forces guys working right now trying to find and route out terrorists, but I can only imagine that is what they face. Why should they care about civilian deaths in America, when Americans clearly don’t care about civilian deaths in their country?
So we killed this guy’s wife and children. Sure we might have prevented future bombings, but on the ground, people there only know us as the side that slaughtered women and children. Did we hurt their cause, or help it?
Isn’t there a word for this? When you kill civilians to strike fear in them, and try to cause an effect? I believe when Islamo-fascists do it we call it terrorism. So what is it when we do it?
Consider this, in the US there is the death penalty. Most people already have taken a side in it, but at the end of the day you’re executing an evil man, someone that committed acts horrible enough to warrant that sentence. But would you still agree with it if his wife also had to die?
No collateral damage is ok.
So, if that’s the case, then wouldn’t war never be ok?