That simple fact seems to escape everyone who tries, though. “This time it will be different!” Nope, it won’t.
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maybe. maybe not.
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No one’s saying it’s the same, I’m just saying that failing to know what you’re targeting breaks the rules of war.
Unrealistic expectations are all anyone has for combatants. The first expectation is that violence achieves some goal that makes future violence unnecessary. The very purpose of any combat is to fulfill unrealistic expectations. Why is that one OK but mine too strict?
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Think howitzer shells. The size of logs.
Look out, guys, you’re hurting the war criminals’ fee-fees.
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Sometimes violence is the best option. Obviously, a solution where nobody gets hurt is preferable. But negotiation does not always work.
Also, as someone who has actually made such decisions in combat, I know that people make mistakes that can have serious consequences. Such things happen at rates that can often be predicted, and go into the “negative” column when looking at whether troops should go in to engage the enemy. You would not think it is the case from recent coverage, but civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure have been reduced tremendously. Ideally, the goal would be zero, and it is good to strive for that.
There is also the complicated issue of accountability. We want our combat troops to take their jobs seriously, and to understand that actual human death is the very real consequence of pulling the trigger. But we also do not want them so afraid of prosecution via review of records and combat footage that they are afraid of ever pulling the trigger. There have always been punishments via the military discipline system for people who make deadly or expensive mistakes. If you really want to keep this sort of thing from happening, I would suggest complaining to those who actually send the troops into places like Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, and send them with poorly defined goals and unrealistic rules of engagement. That would be the civilian leadership. I have personally been to two wars that all of us there knew were terrible ideas before we even arrived. Nobody asked our opinion, but we did the best we could under the circumstances, with the resources and restrictions that were placed on us. I do not feel any personal guilt that it turned out as poorly as I predicted it would. Of course, I never targeted the wrong building.
If you’re going to get all legalistic - go look up the word “intent”.
Not for a Christian.
I mean, really, not for anyone who isn’t quintessentially amoral, because all moral systems come out in basically the same place on this question: violence is always the worst option. This is part of why absurd things like “rules for war” exist in the first place.
But also, not for a Christian.
“Know what you’re targeting” isn’t an unreasonable demand. If it appears unreasonable, consider again the fact that violence is always the worst answer in whatever moral code you care to ascribe to.
That’s what charging the Pentagon with a war crime does, so I guess we’re in agreement here!
That must’ve sucked, and I don’t know your particular circumstances, but we can’t prosecute a war we don’t have troops for. Instead of trying to defend people on the internet that aren’t under attack, maybe consider how you came to be entangled in this, and how you might prevent others from sharing the same fate. How do you prevent the next you from happening?
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This might be a good time to recall when USA blew up Sudan’s largest pharmaceutical factory too back in 1998, and that was no mistake. They hit exactly what they were aiming at. USA has a history of stuff like this, so you’d have to be a fool to trust them investigating themselves.
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I appreciate your sentiments. If everyone shared them, we would have less need for war. I agree that most of the places we are fighting in, we should not be there. My personal solution was to go into delivering humanitarian aid, but that has been somewhat discouraging as well. But that is a story for another time.
I only started commenting on this thread to add the point that looking back at events with all of the data in front of you, and the ability to watch the instant replay, is a very different experience from being in the stress of combat, making decisions based on limited information, and often time pressure, when your comrades are taking fire and need help.
The problem here is that
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the hospital was marked. In fact, Medecins sans Frontières had notified both American and Afghan commands of the coordinates of the hospital before the action.
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as near as I can tell, no one was under fire from the hospital. MSF has claimed that there was no fighting in the hospital’s vicinity at the time. I quite believe them.
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the action was a protracted one, and American command was notified several times by the hospital staff during it that they were firing on a hospital.
This rather goes beyond a standard snafu: it’s a little hard to claim “the heat of battle” when the battle has all the heat of a drone strike.
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Not for some Christians.
From the crusades to conquest of the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Middle East to kidnapping children and forcing them into residential schools here in Canada in the last century, the Christian church has had no problem, none at all, in resorting to violence in pursuit of its goals. Heck, there are even American evangelists - good Christians, all of them - today lobbying African governments to execute gays and demanding carpet bombing of anyone near ISIS.
I’ve had Christians explain to me that Jesus would absolutely support America’s torture program:
I’m sure Christ would torture innocent people to selfishly save those he loved too. He always said, put your family first, and screw everybody else. In fact, at Gethsemane, he said “Do whatever it takes, no matter how vile, to keep those you care about from dying.”
Jesus is OK with nuking cities too:
The mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which includes a discussion on St. Augustine’s “Christian Just War Theory,” is led by Air Force chaplains and takes place during a missile officer’s first week in training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
In World War II, both the Allies and Nazis had padres to reassure their troops that their killing was peachy-keen in God’s eyes. It can’t be explained away as military propaganda; there was little if any contradiction or protest from the churches during or since.
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Do you have a link to the actual report? It feels uncomfortable to speculate.
Airstrike on the MSF Trauma Center in Kunduz Afghanistan - 3 Oct 2015, US Centcom FIAO Library (I get a SSL cert warning). One should also read MSF’s report.
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this.
was.
not.
combat.
It’s not a mistake. It’s a war crime. Jesus tits.
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It’s beginning to look like SOP.
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It was those doctors solutions as well. But they were somewhat discouraged totally blown up and murdered.
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That. Wasn’t. Occurring.
The hospital wasn’t firing on anyone.
It was a hospital.
Max. Take your head out of your ass and listen for three seconds.
You are adding things to the story to make it more okay. Falsehoods.
Don’t lie to yourself. Don;t lie to people. It is violent to do so.
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[quote=“RogerStrong, post:52, topic:77381, full:true”]
Not for some Christians.[/quote]
All religions have their hypocrites. And then there are the faithful. How about these believers?
Father Berrigan, right and his brother Philip Berrigan seized hundreds of draft records and set them on fire with homemade napalm in 1968.
Some reporters had been told of the raid in advance. They were given a statement that said in part, “We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young men but because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling class of America.” It added, “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.”
( Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94 - The New York Times )
The world needs more true faithful like them to lead us out and away from the man-made wilderness of wrongful conceit dictated by today’s ruling class and its wanton abuse of misplaced power and trust.
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Goddmnit pentagon. A pdf is not a series of watermarked jpegs strung together.
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