Not just a war, an assymetric war. We are not fighting a conventional war; human shields, hiding amongst the "innocent" are all part of their approach to war. If we don't engage the enemy, they live to take out more of our soldiers. If we do, they allow organizations like the BBC to come in with their cameras and paint us to be murderers. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. Our principal concern is the safety of our own troops. Collateral damage will happen when our adversary intentionally hides amongst the "innocent". It sucks, it is ugly, it is unfortunate, but it is necessary. I highly doubt that our planes are just freelancing the countryside looking for shit to blow up. There would have to be sufficient intelligence to support any strikes.
Classic refutation of a Barman post
Nowhere have I stated that the US military is "doing most of the killing of innocents".
It's absurd to think that I or anyone else would have an accurate comparative tally.
My submission is that killing civilians for reasons other than imminent self-defense is morally repugnant if done by a random Islamic radical or by a US military fighter pilot.
I realize there are many folks who rank one form of killing innocents as more or less repugnant than other forms. Just don't include me in that group.
That would have made things easy, eh eek?
BTW: can you name one person on earth that said that?
I read your previous post 3 times and the only inference I can draw is that you think the Pentagon is responsible for the most killing of innocents. But maybe I'm missing something.
In any case, your idealism is beyond confounding. Can any country win a war without collateral damage to their opponents' civilian populations? Could the allies have defeated the Germans without bombing their cities? Would you have preferred an invasion of the Japanese mainland that would surely have resulted in tens of thousands of US troop deaths rather than nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And our enemies today are virtually all "civilians" in the technical sense.
US military fighter pilots do not intentionally target civilians. In fact, they make every effort to avoid them. The Clinton administration's decision not to bomb Bin Laden's convoy in the late 1990s in order to spare the lives of a few civilians ultimately caused the death of many more (see list above). And yes, from my perspective the lives lost on 911 were far more valuable than the few who would have perished in such an attack.
