131–140 of 145 posts
Most of the civilian casualties aren't even documented in a war. If you think the military you support invades a country and only kills the bad guys, you are watching too many hollywood movies.
I think everybody understands there was never in history a war without innocent dying.
There have been dozens of incidents of non-combatants bombed to paste over the last decade and it seems USAF will just simply not fix what it is doing wrong.
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And y'all wonder why Americans are hated. It takes a special amount of delusion to pat yourself on the back, for whatever made-up reason, after having killed innocent people. Imagine saying the same thing about 9/11 and watch your life be torn to pieces.
In the real world military actions often have unintended civilian casualties. The difference is that some groups don't care (china, russia) or are doing them purposefully (terrorists). If you can't understand the moral distinction then I don't think you're going to be able to add anything but noise to these kinds of debates.
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Have you actually had a conversation with anyone outside the US about what they think about US govt/military policy? Most people are too polite to say these things unless specifically asked. By the way, I am not an American and I don't live in the US. So I have a perspective on this which you probably don't have.
OP is speaking about Americans , not the American military.
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It's a slightly different case, but look at what happened last time Russia shot down an airliner ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 ): the perpetrators weren't exactly judged, but they got "disappeared", which is a form of punishment. For comparison, when the US shot down an airliner ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 ), the perpetrators... got decorated.
The cases couldn't be more different... There is no record of an investigation of how the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 got shot down. Whereas the incident with the Iranian airliner almost looks like it was provoked by the Iranian side.
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Why isn't bin Laden saying verbatim to the public that he's responsible enough? If that's not enough, what could the coalition forces possibly say that would convince the Taliban? There isn't high bar to cross. They've already decided what they think. That's what I mean by 'bad faith'.
Killing infidels is justifiable and completely ethical to some people.
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Yes, we narrowly missed Bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001. But "just send more troops" and "use bigger bombs" betrays a lack of familiarity with combat in the mountainous and inhospitable parts of Afghanistan. There's only so much air power can do in these places. It's incredibly hard to insert troops into places like these. You need to be able to medevac the WIA and KIA when things go wrong. There were no roads. In 200…
> The history of these big mountain operations in Afghanistan is basically one of "let's send more troops/use bigger bombs/etc. etc." and it never got us anywhere. Except in the Battle of Tora Bora, where the commanders on the ground said that the 100 troops deployed to the area were insufficient to push into a heavily fortified mountainous region. And they're right. If those 100 troops pushed in, they would have bee…
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> The history of these big mountain operations in Afghanistan is basically one of "let's send more troops/use bigger bombs/etc. etc." and it never got us anywhere. Except in the Battle of Tora Bora, where the commanders on the ground said that the 100 troops deployed to the area were insufficient to push into a heavily fortified mountainous region. And they're right. If those 100 troops pushed in, they would have bee…
You're getting fixated on the specifics of Tora Bora. Zoom out and look at the other big mountain operations over the following 15 years; you'll hear similar excuses "we needed this technology/we needed more men at this spot." With that context it's easy to see that Tora Bora probably wouldn't have been a success even with GATOR mines or more men.
Bin Laden thought he was going to die in that battle. We were close: just a little bit more would have done it.
Sure, we didn't know how close we were until afterwards. But when you consider what we did accomplish with just 100 boots on the ground + air support, it really makes you wonder what we could have done with 800 or 2000 men instead.
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You're getting fixated on the specifics of Tora Bora. Zoom out and look at the other big mountain operations over the following 15 years; you'll hear similar excuses "we needed this technology/we needed more men at this spot." With that context it's easy to see that Tora Bora probably wouldn't have been a success even with GATOR mines or more men.
We are literally talking about a battle that scared Osama Bin Laden so much that he wrote his last will and testament during the battle. Bin Laden thought he was going to die in that battle. We were close: just a little bit more would have done it. Sure, we didn't know how close we were until afterwards. But when you consider what we did accomplish with just 100 boots on the ground + air support, it really makes you…
If you're interested in learning more, I'd strongly recommend Wes Morgan's excellent book "The Hardest Place."