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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (37721)	7/22/2005 8:48:47 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

And in the Civil War, before Sherman changed the calculus of war on American soil, civilians used to take their carriages out to watch the battles and picnic while the fighting was going on. That happened at the beginning but I'm not sure that it didn't mostly end before Sherman's march. It turned out to be a rather dangerous activity. In ancient times there wasn't normally much concern about enemy civilians. In medieval times you had the notion of chivalry, but it often was dispensed with. Sometimes it may have protected civilians, other times they where killed with little more concern than we would give to termites killed by an exterminator. As you get more in to modern times I think that some of the more advanced and civilized countries developed a stronger objection to killing civilians, but at the same time the greater destructiveness of our weapons, combined with the deadly earnestness of the wars (and higher civilian populations) resulted in a lot more civilians being killed. "The Pig War" was more of a standoff with some skirmishes than a real war. There was hardly the same concern for national existence, access to important resources, or major ideological principles that there was in say WWI or WWII. There have been wars where attacks by solders on unresisting civilians were rare even when they had plenty of opportunity to do so. They might have looted the civilians to support the army, or seized their houses but killing or abusing them if they didn't fight back might have been looked down on, or even result in charges. Such an idea is more likely to be implemented if the enemy doesn't use terrorist, or even guerilla tactics. If you can easily distinguish between the enemy soldiers and civilians, and the soldiers are not mixed with the civilians than your less likely to shoot a bunch of civilians. Certainly the current American army tries to avoid killing civilians, and if someone tried to fight a set piece battle against us on unoccupied or sparsely inhabited land then you probably wouldn't have a lot of civilian deaths. Unfortunately that's not how our enemies fight against us. Partially because it would play too strongly in to our strengths. Our enemies may be many things but few of them are that foolish. Saddam was in the first war, but its hard to think of another case. And even then while a lot of his army was out in the desert the support structure was mixed in with civilians, and going after the support structure did result in civilian deaths. Tim