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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (99891)	6/2/2003 4:04:36 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Close enough to what I said, although I'd prefer if you let me parse my own words. "Has." Present tense. Will you accept historical examples? If so, how far back? 5 years? 200 years? Don't want to bother posting something you'll dismiss out of hand. If you're going to accept only the present, today only, and ignore all historical patterns as irrelevant (It's a new NeoCon world, we're not responsible for any past crimes, everything's different now), then, as I said a few posts ago, the U.S. doesn't have an official policy of targetting civilians. But, in practice, we end up killing more innocent civilians than our terrorist opponents do. And we know, ahead of time, that will be the result of our policies. For instance, just this year (so far), we've killed more Iraqi civilians, than our total dead on 9/11. Now, you may argue that each individual dead Iraqi civilian was not deliberately targetted. True. But then, each American dead on 9/11 wasn't individually targetted, either. They were killed because they were Americans. It was Collective Punishment. Regime Change in Iraq was policy. And we knew, ahead of time, with absolutely no doubt, that our Regime Change policy was going to end up killing a lot of civilians. So, they were targetted collectively, rather than individually. Collective Punishment. And they are just as dead, as those who died in the Twin Towers. You may make the argument that the U.S. military has strenuously tried to avoid civilian casualties in Iraq. I will answer, that the decision to do Regime Change, was a decision to kill a number of civilians (as many as necessary, in practice), and all else is details. When we know what the results of any particular policy are going to be, then we are responsible for those effects. All of them. Actually, I could argue that we are responsible for the unknown and unintended effects as well, on the basis of "ignorance is no excuse."