Everyone knows the term “human shields” They are used extensively by IS.

Civilians will be killed no matter how hard we try to avoid it (I believe we do). If civilian deaths are unacceptable there is no military solution. So what’s the answer? Appeasement? Or just learn to live with the evil.

I’m sorry folks, you simply make fools of yourselves when you try to take the high road. The United States gave that up long, long ago. I truly am sorry – I wish the US could take the high road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
“The government of Vietnam says that 4 million of its citizens were exposed to Agent Orange, and as many as 3 million have suffered illnesses because of it; these figures include the children of people who were exposed.[59] The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to contaminated Agent Orange.[60] The United States government has challenged these figures as being unreliable.[61]“

No one doubts the historical factors that lead up to contemporary conflicts. Of course, the events of the modern world are a direct consequence of Western Imperialism, military, political and economic, corporate greed and European racism and rivalries. We know this, the Conservatives ignore it; they prefer to dwell on OUR virtue and exceptionalism and THEIR barbarity and evil.

But why stop there? You could go back to the the Ottoman Empire (Muslim on Muslim aggression). You could go back to the Crusades (Western on Eastern aggression). You could even go back to the Medieval Islamic wave of conquest that swept across North Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe (Eastern on Western aggression). You could even make a case that Rome and Alexander started the conflict of East and West. How far back do you want to go looking for excuses?

Sure, there are historical reasons why things happen, but we live in the here and now. Only a tiny proportion of the populations of the East and West are even aware of this strategic history, and those who do are not entitled to use it as a justification for their tactical action (or inaction). The people who are victims and warriors of these wars, for the most part, know nothing of those events, even if those who incite them may be perfectly aware of them and cynically exploit them.

We should all recognize why things happen, and how we got here. Understanding is essential to justice, and certainly to action. But we need not apologize for our ancestors, or suffer for their crimes. It was not our fault they did what they did. And we owe nothing to their victims, and certainly not to their self-appointed avengers. That was then, this is now.

………………

But you’re right. It is all about scale, context and causality: temporal resolution as I called it in an earlier post on a different topic in “Mysteries of the Multiverse”. We are both right, and so is Bowser. That’s what makes US different from THEM. We understand that we can be swept along by historical currents, but we are still entitled, even obligated, to swim as best we can.

ER is focusing narrowly on the here-and-now, and the tit-for-tat of how “morally” we hit back at our attackers compared to how “morally” they hit us in the first place. Good for us, we’re not like Them, we’re relatively less barbaric in the way we hit back. We’re less bloody, anyway, those Hellfire missiles fired from drones don’t leave much blood, or anything else.

But bowser and mcfly are, properly in my opinion, accounting for more than two centuries of history, and they’re acknowledging the causality that’s impossible to see in the narrow slice of here-and-now.

There’s a definite risk here I’ll go on for too many paragraphs about the history, from the colonization of the Middle East by Britain and France in the 19th Century, the post-WWI imposition of artificial boundaries that facilitated the efficient extraction of oil, the post WWII manipulation of the Arab world to keep the people focused on religious strife while puppet dictators made billions of dollars selling us trillions of dollars worth of their people’s oil. The sustained covert effort to kill off any impulses to democracy that might threaten the West’s energy supply, the profits of the oil companies, and the wealth of the plutocrats.

The poverty disease and starvation and desperation of hundreds of millions of Arabs.

The millions of Arabs killed at our direction, only some by our hand openly.

But the thing is, Rob, they know what we’ve done to them, and they resent it.

I’m not excusing ISIS or al Qaeda or any of the other barbaric and violent movements we’ve inspired.

But I’m not flinching at the causality that history reveals: We created the fertile ground in which ISIS is now thriving. We created the resentments that a few religious fanatics could exploit, we sowed the seeds of the hatred that they could turn back against us as a weapon. We magnified the power of ISIS by giving them so many willing, and desperate, recruits.

And now we empower ISIS with inflammatory rhetoric about carpet-bombing the Middle East, about “making the sand glow”, about torturing Muslims not so much to gather vital intelligence to save lives, dubious as that proposition is, but for revenge and blood lust. Rhetoric about “purging” Muslims from American society in a way morally no different than the Nazi attempt to purge Germany of Jews. They hear all that cacophony over the background buzz and explosion of Obama’s drone flights firing missiles from afar.

There are two sides to the story, Rob. I’m with the people who have the courage to tell both sides of it.

That’s what I feel about it. Thanks for asking.

Agent Orange wasn’t aimed at civilians? Cluster bombs are marked with spray paint, “For combatants only!”. Napalming a village leaves clear areas where families were standing?

Of course not, and you’re smart enough to see that if you hadn’t turned off some critical portions of your brain. The Stars and Stripes is not a cleaning rag which will erase war crimes. But I will say that it IS a blindfold for some people, who use it to shut their eyes and hold their noses while they glorify America’s noble efforts to slaughter only badguys with weapons like B-52 carpet bombing, with smart bombs carefully weaving in and out while they avoid farmers, schools, women and children.

It was a United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who said “Shit happens”. Or words to that effect. What “shit” do you think he meant, he was excusing?

The US military committed the offences at Mai Lai, and the US civilian government in effect excused it. And you want to tell me the US does not deliberately target civilians!!!??? And I should just listen, passively, and say that if those shooters had on American uniforms they are innocent? Do you intend the insult, or is it “collateral damage”?

You must think I’m awfully stupid, or naive, or ignorant or blind.

Yes, I know that we nuked two Japanese cities, and killed many more civilians than that during the firebombing of Tokyo, but these were actions designed to break the Japanese spirit and end the war, and to demonstrate that further resistance was futile.
By bringing the war to an earlier end, lives on both sides were probably saved. I realize others may disagree with that assessment, and I may even be wrong in my logic, but if I had been in Truman’s place when he ordered those actions I would have done the same thing.

In our current wars, we have been known to attack venues where we know (or sincerely believe)enemy combatants are present, even though we realize innocent civilians may also be present (such as weddings). But terrorists deliberately target innocent civilians at targets that have no military value, precisely because there are civilians present. Its not an accident, and its not collateral damage. It is deliberate. They have no military objectives, they simply want to humiliate us because we don’t believe in their ridiculous religion. There are Americans that do think this way, like the creeps that bomb abortion clinics and federal office buildings, but I’m not one of them.

I would not put an end to ISIS by carpet-bombing Raqqa. Besides the 50,000 or so ISIS and their supporters that live there, there are also about a million other people, most of them victims and slaves of ISIS. That is too high a price to pay. But like the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, under certain circumstances I could see myself giving the order.

If ISIS were getting bigger and stronger, and if nothing else could stop them, and if I were assured that Dresden-bombing the city would do the job, then yes, I would do it. But unlike Messrs Trump and Cruz, I would not boast about it, I would not look forward to it, I would not use it as an talking point to fire up my bloodthirsty followers, and I would be thoroughly ashamed for the rest of my life if I did.

I realize terrible things are done in war, and sometimes by good people for good reasons; like torture. And sometimes, we learn later that they may not have been necessary. I cannot say I would not do those things, to save the lives of my comrades. But I despise people who go into a conflict preparing, even looking forward, to doing these things, proudly and arrogantly, and usually from behind a comfortable desk in an air-conditioned office.