|
Is that the strategy is meant to inspire terror within the ranks of the enemy military, not the general population.
Attacking known civilian areas with 2000lb bombs. The justification from the military is that their targets, which are real military threats, haven taken up positions within those areas. So I think that's a slightly different moral question than attacking a soft target in the belief that the people you kill don't deserve to live. In the military case, you have to ask whether care was taken to avoid killing noncombatants, whether the force applied was proportionate, what level and kind of threat the target represents.
In fact, in the first months of occupation, the policy of targetted missile strikes against Baathist regime leaders killed many hundreds of innocents and like zilch in the way of legitimate threats. The airstrikes during the first Fallujah siege were admitedly disproportionate, and therefore definitely criminal and arguably terrorist in nature. Many of the recent bombardments seem callous and disproportionate to me. I don't know that they're terrorist in nature, but the military does not have a good track record here.
Here's an equation. Pretend that one in a thousand US airstrikes is indisputably terrorist in intent and effect. Do you say that the military is 99.9% non-terrorist? At low intesnity, it would seem to be less lethal than al Qaida or any other terrorist organization. But as the military launches more and more airstrikes, the body count of US terrorism greatly exceeds that of al Qaida. What sense would it make to say that the military was 99.9% non-terrorist when it killed more innocents in terrorist attacks than the world's most active terrorist network? And if you, as head of state or military advisor, craft a policy that calls for a gazillion airstrikes, knowing that 1 in a 1000 will kill innocents and terrorize non-combatants, how can you say you're not a terrorist?
Now, the militarists will either deny prior knowledge that thier weapons terrorize and kill the innocent ("Bad people have parties too"), much less that they sometimes do so with clear intent (as if the moral sense of their warfighters were as infallible as their armaments), or else they will argue that the threat they face justifies the bad things that happen when you launch a gazillion airstrikes. But in the case of Iraq that would be a flat out lie. So, yeah, I agree with you that the Vulcans disrepsect human life as much as if not more than OBL. I don't extend that judgement to every decision made in the Iraq conflict, even those that are unethical or in violation of Geneva protocols. But there are a lot of immoral decisions being made, concatenations of meanness and violence that yield only more meanness and violence. It's worth asking.
Interesting.
|