Targeting Civilians
To:hdl who wrote (6782)
From: Bilow Sunday, Oct 14, 2001 1:28 AM
Respond to of 6858
Hi hdl; Re: "The muslims are saying it is against islam to kill innocent civilians. If the u.s. follows this, as it claims to do, it can't win against terrorists who are killing innocent u.s. civilians. I think the u.s. will give in before 1,000,000 american civilians are killed
"
I agree. The U.S., as a long standing principle of foreign policy, has never forsworn first use of nuclear weapons.
Killing "innocent" civilians (as opposed to "guilty" soldiers) has been a constant of warfare as long as warfare has existed. Every now and then someone manages to have a war that largely leaves the civilians alone, but it is generally one which is either fought in a region where there are very few civilians, or it is fought between opponents that are so unmatched in capabilities that the stronger side wins without a lot of bloodshed.
The slaughter of civilians is characteristic of long combat between opponents of equal power. If you possess overwhelming force you can leave the civilians alone.
There has never, ever, ever been a war where attacks against civilians did anything other than really piss off their friends and relatives. The bombing of British, German and Japanese civilians in WW2 (and British civilians in WW1) was horrible, but militarily ineffectual. Same with the bombing of North Vietnam, etc.
I don't think it's necessarily a moral issue that makes the US avoid civilian casualties. In fact, looking at it from the eyes of an alien, wouldn't it be more moral to obtain victory by killing a few hundred thousand civilians instead of killing a few million soldiers? Why should we honor the life of an enemy civilian more than an enemy soldier?
But the military fact is that killing civilians doesn't do you much good, unless you kill such high percentages of them that you achieve genocide. (Hence the supposed effectiveness of large numbers of nuclear weapons.) This is not to say that killing civilians is completely ineffective, just that it is much, much less effective than killing soldiers.
Our enemy, being too weak to fight our soldiers, can only use "terror". But this never works, it can only piss us off. And if it really came down to a fight for survival (like WW2), the United States would drop the pretense of never targeting civilians. In that, the current generation is not morally different from the generation that nuked Japan, or any other generation.
We are strong, so we don't target civilians.
As far as "collateral" damage goes, I doubt that it will create much of a problem for the U.S. over the long run. If it did, it would be quite the exception to the historical record. Where are the Jewish terrorists attacking Germany? The German or Japanese terrorists attacking the Allies?
When a people are crushed militarily, they tend to blame the deaths on their own leadership, or maybe the leadership of the enemy, rather than on their enemy. The bloody parts of the world (like the Pakistan / India border) tend to be the places where neither side completely crushed the other into submission.
Without victory it is not possible to have peace. Just about every festering sore on this planet is a place where "peace" was negotiated, rather than places where a crushing defeat inflicted on one side by the other.
-- Carl
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