While you didn't direct this to me, I'd like to make it clear that I do not deny that the US military causes civilian casualties. In fact, to me it seems to be informal US policy to cause deliberate civilian casualties in the countries that we are at war with. That is why we firebombed as many German cities as we were able to in the second world war. And we cut them off from food imports (for example, by carefully restricting food exports to neutral countries that bordered Nazi held territory) even though the effect was entirely on the civilian population. The atomic bomb was not developed with the intent that it be used on military targets in Japan. It was intended to be used on German civilians. It was fortunate for them that their army was weak and our scientists were slow. We paid scientists to explore better ways to set Axis cities on fire. These are attacks against civilian targets with little military effect. At the present time, the US is using drones to kill terrorists. And when the US does this, it appears to me to be trying to maximize "collateral damage". That is, instead of just killing the terrorist and his driver and body guard, the US drops the bombs at places like wedding ceremonies where there are as many civilians as possible. Now I should admit that the US military claims that these are "mistakes" but I truly doubt it. The targeting of civilians is a traditional part of warfare that has been present in the human species since long before recorded history began. The number of wars where civilians are *not* targeted are few and far between. (I can think only of a few naval conflicts.) Nor are these techniques used today only by the US. When terrorists attack the US (and Europe), they also target civilians. In fact, in the little brush wars of today, killing only the enemy military is a waste of ammunition. Because so few people are killed in these wars, there will always be large numbers of volunteers to replace them. To actually make a population change its mind about supporting terrorism and insurgency, it seems to be necessary to kill people who lives are more important to them than the lives of 18-year old males. Societies glorify youth who sacrifice their lives in war.
you are totally insane buddy. Not even America's worst enemy believes that the US is intentionally targeting civilians. Possibly the only event in the past 100 years could be the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and even that can be argued. You must be wearing a huge tin foil hat to believe in such fairy tales. By the way the holocaust comparison was directed at you. But I am not surprised you cherry pick what issues you address and which you do not. You seem to be a highly confused man in an advanced age which makes that particularly sad.
Obviously you don't read anything written by "America's worst enemies", LOL. In fact, I don't think you read much military history at all and you certainly haven't been following recent research. During WW1, a total of 720 German civilians were killed by military action. The result was that the Germans wanted to go at it again 20 years later. During WW2 a total of about 2,000,000 German civilians were killed by military action. The result was that Germany became a peaceful country intent on economic competition instead of military. (And you think this was not intentional?) Here, read an analysis from the United States Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It basically states that we're failing in the Middle East because we're not killing enough civilians. And note that this is a paper published in a US military research journal and you're reading it hosted from a US military website (.mil): Just War Theory and Democratization by Force, Two Incompatible Agendas Cora Sol Goldstein, Ph.D. Military Review, October 31, 2012 ... The American experiences in democratization by force in Germany and Japan (1945) suggest that it is necessary to first win the war in such a way that the enemy population is dissuaded from resistance. Total victory implies not only total defeat of the enemy army, but also the destruction of the will to fight and resist in the civilian population. Only in this context can a military occupation be transformative, and the occupiers can implement radical institutional, political, and cultural reforms. ... The most glaring Western violations of the principle of civilian immunity were the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany and the American air war on Japan. In both cases, the aim was to terrorize noncombatants, to lower their morale, and to abolish their will to fight. The planners of the Allied bombing campaigns tried to maximize, not minimize, the killing of civilians. In 1943, the U.S. government built exact duplicates of German and Japanese houses in the Dugway Proving Ground in the desert of Utah to test the efficiency of incendiary bombs. ... http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20121031_art004.pdf More information on the source of the above: Military Review is... The U.S. Army's cutting edge forum for original thought and debate on the science of land warfare. http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/index.asp#archive Unlike you, the people who run those drones read these articles and understand the implications. Do they say out right that they're targeting civilians? No, that would be illegal. But in the real world, real people walk a fine line between legality and military efficiency. It appears to me that the new policy is instead of killing as many enemy civilians as possible (as was done in the second world war), the US is now targeting friends and family of terrorists. The objective is to terrorize the terrorists. Again, this is illegal under US military law (against Geneva convention and all that), but I've no doubt that US military people talk about this sort of thing and I suspect that knowledge of it alters their targeting decisions. It's one thing to die for a cause you believe in. It's a whole nother thing to have your wife and children die with you.
You can choose to believe such but it makes you sound very naive and uninformed. Arguing that 720 civilian deaths cause the beginning of a world war is outright ridiculous. I have no further inclination (as usual ) to debate with those who choose to be ignorant to consider and accept facts.
That's a cheap shot to someone who just posted some military study to defend his pov while the main backing to your pov is, well, your asinine style.
He backed up that the US has been and is targeting civilian casualties on purpose as part of government and military policy? Goodness, I must have missed that. This is , by the way, the same guy who posted a lengthy article on cancer and smoking when we were talking about the impact of agent orange and land mines on civilians and how the US rejected for long time any responsibility but has recently picked up at least part of the bill in an obvious admission of wrongdoing. If you like to take cheap shots just because you still have issues with me then go ahead but not sure where in his article there was any substantial proof that the US engages in purposely targeting civilians to achieve its military objectives on an ongoing basis and orchastrated from the top. A ridiculous claim, yes but that is it.
I gave you proof that the US military itself publishes articles that admits the past practice of targeting civilians, that it was highly successful, and that the absence of the practice in Iraq and Afghanistan led to failure in those missions. That's not enough, LOL. "Ongoing basis and orchastrated[sic] from the top"; well now you're in quite the retreat. Before you were claiming it didn't happen. Now you're implicitly admitting that it happens, but it's not orchestrated from the top? Doesn't really matter, does it. The top orders the military to win and the military does the best job it can. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The same thing can be said about torture. US policy is that prisoners of war are not to be tortured. It's a matter of military law, the "Law of Armed Conflict". And so it shouldn't happen and it certainly wouldn't be orchestrated from the top. And then the pictures came out. And we find that the White House had their lawyers orchestrate the definition of "torture" to exclude a procedure called "waterboarding". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You have to be fairly stupid to assume that US law, the Geneva Convention, the UCMJ or the LOAC restricts US military actions, now or in the past. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The religious prescription of "an eye for an eye" is uniformly violated by military actions by all countries. The first violation is that the "punishment" is not equal in magnitude to the "crime" in the sense of the number of eyes. The military kills as many of the opposing force as possible. In fact the military ideal is to kill lots while taking zero casualties oneself, if possible. And the US is extremely good at this. The second violation is that the revenge is not extracted from the perpetrator. Instead, war targets people whose relationship, to the person or group that caused the conflict, is largely only that they happen to live in the same country. That is, war is, at best, about "collective punishment". The UCMJ, Geneva Convention and LOAC are all in conflict with the biblical limitation on revenge. All war is in violation of this. The targeting of civilians is no more evil than war itself. The enemy's sailors and soldiers are as innocent as the civilians who make their weapons, pay the taxes needed for the military, etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As a practical matter, the "civilized" countries, (or maybe "more industrialized" is a better description) sometimes refrain from using certain techniques in warfare. A lot of time this is due to their unpleasant experience of it previously. So the great powers in the 2nd world war avoided the use of gas (at least against each others military forces) because the military had hated its use in the previous war. But in the event of wartime (and I mean real war, not the little brush fires the world has experienced since 1945), the restraint exercised by the civilized countries evaporates when the opposing side fails to also exercise that restraint. A good example of this is the deliberate bombing of civilians. It would have been to Britain's great advantage to have started the bombing of Berlin on the first day of the war. It would have put the war onto a technological / industrial basis that was exactly where Britain was so much superior to Germany, and introduced attacks against civilians that produced almost no damage to Britain's war fighting ability. Instead, the Battle of Britain was postponed to the next year and Germany was able to concentrate entirely on the ground war. The result was that they were able to knock France out of the war. The only way I could imagine that deliberate wide-scale targeting of civilians could occur in the "war on terror" would be if ISIS was somehow able to take control over a really large amount of territory. Then they would be a real threat and one of their most difficult tasks would be protecting their civilian population. The justification for the US using these methods would simply be that ISIS did it first. And the primary US weapon would be blockade leading to starvation which one can argue really isn't very military at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ But the targeting of civilians who happen to be relatives, friends and acquaintances of known terrorists, that's what I think is happening now. Israel does something similar, but Israel is not a great power and can't get away with the stuff the US does. So instead of killing the family of a suicide bomber, the Israelis will destroy the house he lived in. This leaves his family (usually parents and siblings) homeless. In 1968, after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, Theodor Meron, then legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, advised the Prime Minister's office in a top secret memorandum that house demolitions, even of suspected terrorists's residences, violated the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in war. Undertaking such measures, as though they were in continuity with British mandatory emergency regulations, might be useful as hasbara but were 'legally unconvincing'. The advise was ignored. His view, according to Gershom Gorenberg, is shared by nearly all scholars of international law, prominent Israeli experts included.[13] ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_demolition_in_the_Israeli–Palestinian_conflict
The abuses by individual soldiers cannot be equated with orchestrated commands from the top. Plus your cited 2 links are BOTH DOWN. looks like your people should first invest in better technology. Or have the Chinese hackers struck again?
I realize you doubt me on this. Try reading this through and perhaps you'll understand the complicated difficulties of the issue the way I do. ________________________________________________ We're talking here about an incidence of spina bifida of about 3.0% in the normal population and an increase to about 3.9% in the population of children of veterans exposed to Agent Orange. [This is what is meant by a 29% "risk factor", that is, 3.9% is 29% larger than 3.0%, that is 3.0 x 1.29 = 3.87 ~= 3.9] This seems pretty cut and dried, doesn't it? Easy-peasy; you take some data, compute your statistics, and you have your proof. But in science, correlation does not imply causation. You need to look at how important other considerations are. You have to look at the other correlations. The basic problem is that different people with different diets have extremely different rates of spina bifida. For example, these pre-Columbian American Indians had a spina bifida rate of 67%. Compared to the 3% of average modern Americans, this is a risk factor of 2,133%: Spina bifida in a pre-Columbian Cuban population: A paleopidemiological study of genetic and dietary risk factors Armstrong, Cloutier, Arredondo, Roksandic, Matheson International Journal of Paleopathology 3 (2013) 19-29 ... Spina bifida (SB) is a congenital disease that can be examined from a paleoepidemiological perspective, given its genetic and dietary components, joining molecular paleopathology with dietary evidence to help understand a given population's potential for high disease prevalence. This neutral tube defect (NTD) shows a high frequency in a pre-Columbian Cuban sample from the archeological site of Canimar Abajo, with 14 of 21 (67%) preserved sacra demonstrating non-fused sacral vertebrae. ... http://www.academia.edu/3623826/Spi...cal_study_of_genetic_and_dietary_risk_factors You can't blame the above on Monsanto because these Indians are "pre-Columbian". Monsanto was founded in 1901 while "pre-Columbian" means "before Columbus", that is, before 1492. So how are you going to find a risk factor of 29% when you're dealing with population and diet differences that can create risk factors of 2133%? The simple fact is that it can't be done. As we say in science, the "signal is lost in the noise". The papers which purport to find a relationship are simply garbage science.