Yes, suicide bombers don’t care who they kill. But Tagos is saying he doesn’t care who he kills either - so why do you support that?
In case you haven’t studied the facts, there are millions in the Islam religion. Very very few are in Al-Qaeda. (It’s like saying that Harold Shipman represents Christianity, so we should bomb England.)
The reason that there are troops in Afghanistan is that we think Osama Bin Laden is hiding there. There is no massive conspiracy by the population of Afghanistan to send suicide bombers all over the World.
However if we start killing loads of random civilians as you suggest, there will certainly be a world-wide recruitment campaign to kill Western murderers.
Having someone executed for distributing information on women’s rights is not “indiscriminate killing”. And bombing campaigns that have “collateral damage” is totally business as usual.
glee, the predator is actually an armed remote aircraft and, while American designed, the RAF has them in operation.
If I might be permitted to rephrase tagos’ question without the calls for collateral damage:
“Why, precisely, are British politicians sacrificing the lives of British soldiers to safeguard the existence of a society as thoroughly primitive as Afghanistan’s?”
The way I see it, we are fighting for two reasons. The first is to sustain Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy. The second is to ensure that Al Qaeda doesn’t regain a foothold in Afghanistan. Now if, as seems to be the case, the Afghanis are simply using democracy as a gangplank to theocracy, the whole project is doomed from the start. We’ve got to leave sometime, right? And if these people haven’t wised up by that time then whatever government we leave behind isn’t likely to provide much resistance to Al Qaeda anyway. Are we expected to stay until they’ve banished every mad fucking mullah from their law courts, recognised the benefits of a fair trial, and generally ditched their bronze age approach to life in favour of something we could perhaps get along with? Because if that’s the game plan then we’re going to be in for a very long wait. It’d be cheaper just to let them rot in their God boggled cesshole until such time as we need to start bombing again.
So where does deliberately advocating a strategy that will maximise collateral damage fit in with this lovely moral relativism? How cavalier does one have to be before the damage ceases to be “collateral” in any meaningful sense?
Well, the OP simply didn’t say that. Mosier gave the old cold war T-shirt slogan “kill em all, let god sort them out” but I thought he was being ironic.
My favorite part of threads like this is that almost every single time the victim of the regime that’s being lambasted is not a foreigner, but a member of that society. What’s more, that person is usually a member of the religion being torn to bits.
So when the OP gets all upset on the victim’s behalf and advocates “fuck 'em all” attitude towards everyone in that country or every member of that religion, he is advocating the death of the victim he was just defending.
They reversed the death penalty because of international pressure, your quote said. And you wonder why we’re trying to help?
Imagine for yourself the outcome if we weren’t taking an interest in their country. The poor sap would already be strung up, done deal.
Sure, we’re pissing off millions and billions and killing thousands to save one guy, perhaps. But that is — at least, I imagine it is, based on what our beloved President has claimed — why we’re there. We’re putting the spotlight on those so-called barbaric practices, and we’re struggling to shift the pendulum in the Middle East from the 12th century up to at least the 19th.
Plus the oil. And the strategic military positioning. And the oil. Did I mention the oil? But yeah, it’s about freedum. And dumocracy. And oil.
The OP. It explicitly advocated a cavalier disregard towards said damage, which to me implies no concern whatsoever. Any stronger a statement, and it would no longer be “collateral damage”, it would be deliberately attacking civilians. Which was my point. Your handwavy dismissal of collateral damage as “business as usual” would appear to grant moral carte blanche to take as many civilian lives as seems expedient, assuming of course that it’s “accidental”. Or perhaps you don’t think this - it’s rather hard to tell, since you’d apparently rather pick nits.
As a person who had the opportunity to live in Kabul during the '70’s, I found that the average Afghan was a pretty decent person. Sure, they’ve got some fundies who want to rework the world to fit their ideology, but guess what? So does the rest of the world.
Here, we have abortion clinic bombers because their work goes against a twisted world view based on a narrow theological interpretation…not so different than the Taliban, are they?
If you want to hate on some one, may I suggest the Pakistani’s? Now that lot I found to be completely useless…and proud of it too!
No I’m not picking nits, you are pouring nits all over the thread. You and Not That Bright should just argue with what he actually wrote instead of desperately trying to make it sound even worse- there really is no need.
The Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were lost as soon as those idiots, Bush and Blair, agreed that such provisions were acceptable. The fact that it was probably done on the advice of their brain dead experts in the US State Department and UK Foreign Office respectively does not excuse the culpability of those fools.
As far as I’m concerned, all the thousands of lives lost, particularly by the US, the UK and numerous other allies have been pissed away for nothing by those two fools and their brain dead advisers simply to establish a few more Islamic theocracies.
We shed blood for these savages in the hopes that we can actually influence them to work on modernizing their judicial system so that journalists can read about feminism without being put to death.
Hah! You think State Department experts have any say in what Bush does? From everything I’ve read, actual area experts are more marginalized than they have ever been. Bush only listens to his buddies, who don’t trust experts.
What wrong did the Afghanis do to us.? The training camps were populated and financed by foreigners. (Saudis). They were allowed by segments of the population. Want to get a real enemy go after the Saudis. Prevent them stop funding and populating the “insurgency” in Iraq.