Sawing off heads worse than pushing buttons?

[Odesio]

@Don't Call Me Shirley

And if you drop a bomb in a civilian area, you are not trying to avoid civilian casualties, and if you say you are, you are lying.

I disagree. Clearly we have the ability the level entire blocks but instead we choose to target specific buildings. Seems to me that we’re trying to avoid civilian casualties.

That’s all I’ve ever said. You’ve been arguing against a phantom, I’ve never said that no civilian casualties are acceptable, all I’ve ever said is that when you drop bombs, you can’t truthfully say you tried to avoid civilian casualties.

That’s all you said?

@Don't Call Me Shirley

No, the question is did you do absolutely everything you could to avoid the civilian casualties. If you drop bombs in civilian areas, and then say that you did everything you could to avoid civilian casualties, you are lying.

Pardon me for taking your statement at face value. If you’re saying that you must do absolutely everything you can to avoid civilian casualties, then I ask, how can you ever conduct war? Because to do “absolutely everything” you can to avoid civilian casualties means you can’t ever attack. No matter what method of attack you use there is always a chance of civilians getting killed.

If you train soldiers well, impress upon them very deeply that no civilian casualties are acceptable, provide them with the very best intelligence possible, and always use the minimum amount of force necessary to ensure destruction of the enemy, then you can say that you did everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.

Please tell me, do you really know what the minimum amount of force is necessary for every single situation? If a group of soldiers is taking fire, the commander doesn’t have the luxury of taking the time to evaluate every possible option. Do you think the commander knows what the minimum amount of force necessary is? He may be able to make an estimation but I doubt he can be absolutely sure.

Dropping a bomb on a civilian compound and then saying you try to avoid civilian casualties is laughably, demonstrably untrue and undermines our goals in the GWOT by providing perfect recruiting propaganda for the enemy.

Given that we could turn the entire neighborhood into rubble I’m going to have to disagree with you. We are trying to avoid civilian casualties but realistically it’s going to happen.

Marc

[Don_t_Call_Me_Shirley]

I disagree. Clearly we have the ability the level entire blocks but instead we choose to target specific buildings. Seems to me that we’re trying to avoid civilian casualties.

What a ridiculous, morally bankrupt argument. How about this argument instead: “clearly we have the ability to nuke the entire country and kill everyone in it but instead we choose to drop daisy cutters all over the place. Therefore, we are trying to avoid civilian casualties.”

Please tell me, do you really know what the minimum amount of force is necessary for every single situation? If a group of soldiers is taking fire, the commander doesn’t have the luxury of taking the time to evaluate every possible option. Do you think the commander knows what the minimum amount of force necessary is? He may be able to make an estimation but I doubt he can be absolutely sure.

Truly, you are skilled at the “death by a thousand nitpicks” style of arguing, far more skilled than I. Too bad you’re not so skilled at addressing the main point.

[Odesio]

@Don't Call Me Shirley

Truly, you are skilled at the “death by a thousand nitpicks” style of arguing, far more skilled than I. Too bad you’re not so skilled at addressing the main point.

The main point of any argument is built off of one or more premises. If your main point has a premiss that is faulty then the main point is faulty as well. Welcome to Logic 101.

Marc

[Revenant_Threshold]

@MGibson

The first. I agree that there’s a line but I’m not really sure where to put it exactly. I also want to note that I’m not cavalier about “collateral” damage. These are human beings we’re talking about, they may be killed or permanently maimed, and those who survive will bear physical, emotional, or both types of scars for the rest of their lives.

Let’s look at the argument from the other side. We use bombs and weapons of indiscriminate lethality in order that our troops don’t get killed - so an area may be bombed because it means the least loss of life for our troops, whilst still being within acceptable collateral damage. But just as collateral damage is inevitable, so are casualties among our own troops; wouldn’t the argument of inevitabiliy also suggest we should be more willing to spend the lives of our guys?

[Odesio]

@Revenant Threshold

But just as collateral damage is inevitable, so are casualties among our own troops; wouldn’t the argument of inevitabiliy also suggest we should be more willing to spend the lives of our guys?

While I argue that such deaths are inevitable, I do not argue against reasonable steps to avoid or lesson the amount of casualties. I suspect some of us might disagree on what’s reasonable though.

Marc

[intention]

@Der Trihs

No, they didn’t. They used cluster bombs and napalm; those are not low-civilian casualty weapons. They also have a tendancy to shoot people rather indiscriminately.

Say what? I’ve set off explosives myself, but that doesn’t mean I killed civilians.

Mr Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003. They were used against military targets “away from civilian targets”, he said. This avoids breaching the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which permits their use only against military targets.

SOURCE

I’d need a cite for the use of cluster bombs in the Iraq war, I can find nothing on that.

Also, I’d need a cite for the claim that there was a “tendancy [sic] to shoot people rather indiscriminately” during the Iraq war.

w.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@MGibson

While I argue that such deaths are inevitable, I do not argue against reasonable steps to avoid or lesson the amount of casualties. I suspect some of us might disagree on what’s reasonable though.

What i’m having trouble getting is that you seem to be willing to accept any level of reasonable steps - it seems like as long as there’s something worse than it, it’s fine. In your conversation with Don’t Call Me Shirley, it looks like you’re saying that bombing a specific house that contains civilians is a reasonable act, because we could go one worse and bomb a neighbourhood. By not going on worse, we have taken steps to prevent collateral damage.

And that’s true, as far as it goes. I just don’t think “having taken steps” is enough. You should take* all * possible steps to lessen casualties, while still leaving good odds you’ll accomplish your goal (clearly a tricky line, but “bombing a building is ok, because we could have bombed the whole block” isn’t exactly a nuanced view). If you came to me and said “To stop that guy from stealing your wallet, I cut off his hand - but it could have been worse, I could have killed him, so really it’s ok” I don’t think i’d accept that.

[Odesio]

@Revenant Threshold

In your conversation with Don’t Call Me Shirley, it looks like you’re saying that bombing a specific house that contains civilians is a reasonable act, because we could go one worse and bomb a neighbourhood.

Actually, I used the fact that the military refrains from leveling the entire block, taking care to hit specific targets, means that they’re making efforts to avoid casualties. It might not be enough of an effort in your opinion but clearly some effort is being made.

Bombing a house that contains civilians may be a reasonable act. It depends on a lot of factors, and as I admitted earlier I don’t know exactly where to draw that line, but I do agree that there is a line.

You should take* all * possible steps to lessen casualties, while still leaving good odds you’ll accomplish your goal (clearly a tricky line, but “bombing a building is ok, because we could have bombed the whole block” isn’t exactly a nuanced view).

As I said earlier, I have no objections to taking reasonable steps to avoid civilian casualties. Now if only we could come to a concensus on what is reasonable.

Marc

[Der_Trihs]

@intention

I’d need a cite for the use of cluster bombs in the Iraq war, I can find nothing on that.

:rolleyes: Link Link Didn’t you even try googling ? It’s hardly obscure; we don’t even deny it. We did deny using napalm for a long time, however; eventually, we claimed that it wasn’t really lying because we used an updated version and not classic napalm. I’m sure that made a difference to the people who burned.

@intention

Also, I’d need a cite for the claim that there was a “tendancy [sic] to shoot people rather indiscriminately” during the Iraq war.

I’m talking about the occupation, although I’m sure we killed plenty of random people during the conquest.

[intention]

Thanks, Der Trihs, I did google the question, but the links I found didn’t contain those or any others … maybe my Feng Shui is getting in the way of my Google Fu …

I don’t like the use of cluster bombs any more than mines, both remain lethal long after the dust settles.

One part I don’t understand is why “5 to 20%” of the bombs don’t explode … IANARS, but surely making a bomb explode can’t be rocket science … or is it intentional? Either way, it sucks.

w.

[GomiBoy]

@msmith537

A sword rarely causes collateral damage.

History disagrees with you rather strongly. Many many cities were sacked and and burned and all inhabitants put to the sword long before the advent of cruise missiles.

Warfare, as executed by the United States and our allies, is more humane to non-combatants now than at any point in history.

[GomiBoy]

@Der Trihs

No, they didn’t. They used cluster bombs and napalm; those are not low-civilian casualty weapons. They also have a tendancy to shoot people rather indiscriminately.

Cluster bombs and napalm are legal weapons according to the Geneva Conventions for specific purposes. We didn’t use either in civilian locations. Our targets were always military for everything we hit - ‘civilian infrastructure’ in a place like Iraq is a misnomer because everything Saddam built was firstly for military purposes. Mistakes might have been made, or errors in judgement in the case of the 2000-lb bomb into the family home, or malfunctions may have occured, but the intent was always to hit military targets with area dispersal weapons. This does not compare to driving a car bomb into a crowded market or walking into a big line of people looking for jobs with a vest made by DuPont, either with the intent of murdering civilians.

We have had a ***few ** * incidents of soldiers shooting civilians; nearly always at checkpoints where the civilians rushed the soldiers manning them and the soldiers responded as they had been trained, or else where a few rogue elements within the Army / Marines on duty have gone horribly wrong and killed civilians in retaliation or otherwise. Guess what - the criminals in those cases have all been punished if they did anything wrong. See the insurgents publicly punishing the idiots chopping off heads? Or denouncing the fools sacrificing themselves in suicide bombings against purely civilian targets?

Failure in training? Possibly. Failure in deployment? Possibly - we should have deployed more military police and a fewer paratroopers and front-line combat units for occupation after the invasion IMO. Intentional targeting of civilians? No way in hell. Could the troops have been better trained? Yep, as always.

You make our soldiers out to be indiscriminate (at best) or intentional (at worst) murderers of civilians. That simply ain’t so.

***intention * ** - The 20% feature of cluster bombs is unfortunate, but it is purely a failure of manufacturing, not intentional. Cluster bombs come in 3 types - APU, ATU, and MDU - stands for Anti-Personnell Unit (looks like a softball; each 266 bomblets per Cluster Bomb Unit (CBU), Anti-Tank Unit (look like a lawn dart with a Depleted Uranium penetrator for taking out tanks), and Mine Dispersal Unit. The APU ones have the 20% failure rate, but it’s purely the fact that much of the detonators malfunction. They’re supposed to explode on impact with the ground, unfortunately some don’t. The ATUs don’t have the same problem, as they are mixed-seeking heads that search out tanks. As for MDUs, they are pretty much out of service as it turns out we don’t need aerial mine-dispersal capabilities in Iraq; as far as I know they’ve not been used since Viet Nam.

As for mines, you should keep in mind that the US make mines that disarm themselves after a set period of time; they decompose right there in the ground and are rendered harmless after a set period of time - that’s why our big mine fields between N and S Korea and around Gitmo need to be constantly maintained. Nobody else builds mines that disarm themselves.

I refuse to agree with the premise that the United States, or our allies, are acting as a terrorist state. Our weapons aren’t used that way, our troops aren’t trained that way. While our leadership may use the military as a tool for whatever wrong-headed interventions they might order, the military themselves are not to blame.

[Der_Trihs]

@GomiBoy

We didn’t use either in civilian locations.

:rolleyes: Baghdad isn’t a civilian location ?

@GomiBoy

Our targets were always military for everything we hit - ‘civilian infrastructure’ in a place like Iraq is a misnomer because everything Saddam built was firstly for military purposes. Mistakes might have been made, or errors in judgement in the case of the 2000-lb bomb into the family home, or malfunctions may have occured, but the intent was always to hit military targets with area dispersal weapons.

Really ? And why should I believe that ?

@GomiBoy

This does not compare to driving a car bomb into a crowded market or walking into a big line of people looking for jobs with a vest made by DuPont, either with the intent of murdering civilians.

It’s less honest, true. Dead, however, is dead, whether you kill by intent or indifference.

@GomiBoy

We have had a ***few ** * incidents of soldiers shooting civilians; nearly always at checkpoints where the civilians rushed the soldiers manning them and the soldiers responded as they had been trained, or else where a few rogue elements within the Army / Marines on duty have gone horribly wrong and killed civilians in retaliation or otherwise.

Or killing people who step out of their home as an American convoy goes by, or don’t see the sign warning that they will be killed if they approach too close, or step out of a care at the wrong time, or get shot while trying to take wounded to safety, or machinegunned while trying to flee Fallujah, or being one of the men or boys we turned back into Fallujah because they were male, and therefore evil terrorists.

@GomiBoy

Guess what - the criminals in those cases have all been punished if they did anything wrong.

Then the entire “coalition” army would have been imprisoned or executed; it hasn’t. They are all doing wrong.

@GomiBoy

You make our soldiers out to be indiscriminate (at best) or intentional (at worst) murderers of civilians. That simply ain’t so.

I’m supposed to believe conquerers and torturers would balk at killing innocent people ?

@GomiBoy

I refuse to agree with the premise that the United States, or our allies, are acting as a terrorist state.

Our victims no doubt disagree.

[GomiBoy]

@Der Trihs

:rolleyes:

Roll your eyes all you want - I’d like to see proof from any source other than Al Jazeera and Islamists web sites of any of your claims. Just because you believe something to be true don’t necessarily make it so.

We didn’t cluster bomb Bagdad, no matter what the Arab news says. We don’t indiscrimiately machine-gun civilians, not even in Fallujah. And our enemies certainly don’t seem nearly as squeamish as we are when it comes to targeting of their weapons - they use children as shields to attack us.

We’re not conquerors or torturers, by policy or by intent or even by the actions of our soldiers. I’m not saying those things didn’t happen, I’m saying they’re not policy and when they did happen, those responsible were punished. Our soldiers and first and foremost Americans. Are you saying all Americans are inherently war criminals?

You’re probably one of those hard-left jingoists that say that the recent Israeli-Hamas war was an act of aggression by Israel and involved the Israeli military targeting civilians intentionally. Of course you ignore the intentional targeting of civilians by Hamas, as well as the locating by Hamas of command and control in civilian apartment buildings and using their own populace, the ones they’re supposed to be fighting for the freedom of, as a human shield, because clearly the militarily superior power is to blame for all evil in the world.

And I’d like to see cites that our soldiers are indisciminately killing civilians as our convoys drive by, like some sort of South Central LA gang war.

Accidents happen in war. My premise is that this war, in spite of some horrible accidents and other mistakes, is still one of the most disciplined wars ever fought and has one the lowest number of civilian fatalities caused by our soldiers in history.

[tagos]

@GomiBoy

Roll your eyes all you want - I’d like to see proof from any source other than Al Jazeera and Islamists web sites of any of your claims. Just because you believe something to be true don’t necessarily make it so.

We didn’t cluster bomb Bagdad, no matter what the Arab news says.

Cluster bombs kill in Iraq

BAGHDAD — The little canisters dropped onto the city, white ribbons trailing behind. They clattered into streets, landed in lemon trees, rattled around on roofs, settled onto lawns.

<snip>

The strange objects were fired by U.S. artillery outside Baghdad as U.S. forces approached the Iraqi capital. In the span of a few minutes, they would kill four civilians in the al-Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad and send al-Qaisi’s teenage son to the hospital with metal fragments in his foot.

<snip>

A four-month examination by USA TODAY of how cluster bombs were used in the Iraq war found dozens of deaths that were unintended but predictable. Although U.S. forces sought to limit what they call “collateral damage” in the Iraq campaign, they defied international criticism and used nearly 10,800 cluster weapons; their British allies used almost 2,200.

The bomblets packed inside these weapons wiped out Iraqi troop formations and silenced Iraqi artillery. They also killed civilians. These unintentional deaths added to the hostility that has complicated the U.S. occupation. One anti-war group calculates that cluster weapons killed as many as 372 Iraqi civilians. The numbers are impossible to verify: Iraqi hospital records are incomplete, and many Iraqi families buried their dead without reporting their deaths.

In the most comprehensive report on the use of cluster weapons in Iraq, USA TODAY visited Iraqi neighborhoods and interviewed dozens of Iraqi families, U.S. troops, teams clearing unexploded ordnance in Iraq, military analysts and humanitarian groups.

<snip>

U.S. forces fired hundreds of cluster weapons into urban areas. These strikes, from late March to early April, killed dozens and possibly hundreds of Iraqi civilians. Forty civilians were killed in one neighborhood in Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, say residents and Saad Khazal al-Faluji, a surgeon at Hillah General Hospital who tracked casualties.

The attacks also left behind thousands of unexploded bomblets, known as duds, that continued to kill and injure Iraqi civilians weeks after the fighting stopped. U.S. officials say they sought to limit civilian casualties by trying to avoid using cluster munitions. But often alternative weapons were not available or would not have been as effective during the invasion.

This is common knowledge. Your ranting dismissal of known facts you couldn’t be bothered to check suggests you do not have the knowledge to contribute so forthrightly to this discussion. Your rosy eyed view of Fallujah, where the US Army turned back all military age males before bombing, shelling and napalming the city, could also do with some fact checking.

[marshmallow]

@GomiBoy

We’re not conquerors or torturers, by policy or by intent or even by the actions of our soldiers. I’m not saying those things didn’t happen, I’m saying they’re not policy and when they did happen, those responsible were punished. Our soldiers and first and foremost Americans. Are you saying all Americans are inherently war criminals?

I’ll agree we’re not conquerors. You’re falling through the ice on the torture idea, though. I mean, you remember the last couple of years right? The PTB dragging their feet in defense of torture? Maybe there wasn’t a document that said it’s OK to smash people’s fingers with a hammer but there was that entire “it’s not torture unless it causes organ failure” fiasco. Plus that whole kidnapping random citizens of other countries and shipping them off to some other country for a couple of years and putting them through the wringer story. Poor Canuck.

Your last two sentences are bizarre. I mean, no, the Japanese aren’t inherently war criminals…but when they raped women, shot them in the back of the head and dumped their bodies in a field well…yeah, they (that is to say, the people who did it and supported it) are war criminals. Americans aren’t special – we get the same standards applied to us as anyone else (especially when our government trumpets our beliefs in liberty and justice).

You’re probably one of those hard-left jingoists that say that the recent Israeli-Hamas war was an act of aggression by Israel and involved the Israeli military targeting civilians intentionally. Of course you ignore the intentional targeting of civilians by Hamas, as well as the locating by Hamas of command and control in civilian apartment buildings and using their own populace, the ones they’re supposed to be fighting for the freedom of, as a human shield, because clearly the militarily superior power is to blame for all evil in the world.

One thing I personally learn from history is that there is very rarely what I would call a ‘good guy’ like in a movie or comic book. Usually it’s two bad guys beating the hell out of each other for dumb reasons.

[msmith537]

@GomiBoy

History disagrees with you rather strongly. Many many cities were sacked and and burned and all inhabitants put to the sword long before the advent of cruise missiles.

That’s not what I meant. When you stab someone, you don’t accidently take out the 20 people standing next to them. It’s very deliberate.

Modern mechanized warfare, with the exclusion of close quarters urban fighting, is fairly impersonal. It’s much easier to take out a village of people when it appears as an on some computer monitor 100 miles away and not as a bunch of hysterical, screaming people.

While we may not intentionally raze cities, an M2 Browning .50 cal machinegun like the ones mounted on the ubiquitous HUMVEE, fires 550 rounds a minute to a range of 2200 yards and will shoot through just about anything people live in. Every bullet that leaves the weapon has to land somewhere.

[GomiBoy]

So apparently I am now being painted as the ‘War Supporter’ on this thread? Funny, I don’t remember supporting the war at any point, and especially not now. What I do support is our own soldiers, who I refuse to admit could be co-opted into such hideous actions as they are being accused of in this thread.

Tagos - so I am ranting now? I thought it was a disagreement with another poster. As for Fallujah, I never even mentioned it. I happen to think that was one of those errors our commanders made, in a lot of different ways, but you go right ahead and make more assumptions about what I believe without ever asking me.

The bomblets packed inside these weapons wiped out Iraqi troop formations and silenced Iraqi artillery. They also killed civilians. These unintentional deaths added to the hostility that has complicated the U.S. occupation. One anti-war group calculates that cluster weapons killed as many as 372 Iraqi civilians. The numbers are impossible to verify: Iraqi hospital records are incomplete, and many Iraqi families buried their dead without reporting their deaths.

Strange, I seem to recall stating that any civilian casualties were accidents, not intentional, and any targets we attacked with any weapons whatsoever, much less cluster munitions and napalm, were military targets. Funny, would seem this quote bears me out.

Oh, and by the way - ‘impossible to verify’ works both ways.

Mstay - our leadership may not be the good guys, but we aren’t by default the ones wearing black hats either, especially not the guys at the sharp end.

Msmith537 - True, but casting a rosy-eyed view of history as being so much nicer and cleaner than our ‘remote’ wars is kind of silly.

[RedFury]

***For nearly 12 years, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say gung-ho, Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life - Marine boot camp.

The Iraq war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S. invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was honorably discharged with full severance last Dec. 31 and is now back in his hometown, Waynsville, N.C.

When I talked with Massey last week, he expressed his remorse at the civilian loss of life in incidents in which he himself was involved…***

Much more at source. And that folks, is reality in Iraq and not what your star-spangled glasses allow you to see/read.

[GomiBoy]

@RedFury

Much more at source. And that folks, is reality in Iraq and not what your star-spangled glasses allow you to see/read.

Login required - would you be able to post more from this source please?

I’d like to compare my ‘star spangled’ view, which has been quite tempered by living in the UK for over 5 years, being adamantly opposed to the war in the first place, a combat veteran in the USAF, and getting almost exclusively UK press by the way, with your specific version of reality.

I’m surprised by this level of liberal jingoism. Perhaps you should quit attempting to destroy the people who go your way but don’t walk in the exact same steps as you do and maybe be able to keep the majority and not alienate so many from your views.