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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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I suppose I should have added, "if you're going to hide behind your wife and kids to avoid being killed, don't get all upset when we shoot through them."
edited 4th Jan '13 8:59:30 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"also to futher clarify (it seems fighter didnt read the article anyways)
What Stalin says rings true to today's America "1 death is a tragedy, 1 million deaths its a statistic".
So if terrorist put a bomb in the house a military service member and they kill him, his family, and his neighboors then thats completely justfied and legitimate right?
edited 4th Jan '13 9:01:38 AM by Baff
I will always cherish the chance of a new beggining.And yet, these people, if allowed to live, may send a child strapped in a vest of plastic explosive to blow up a school.
You can't just draw a flat line and declare actions on the opposite side immoral.
Edit: I'm not trying to sound bloodthirsty. I'm observing that you seem to be taking an overly simplistic and morally narrow point of view on what should and should not be allowed.
edited 4th Jan '13 9:06:13 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
1. Why is it so important to kill tribal leaders in Pakistan
2. Asymetric warfare does not justify state sponsor terrorism
3. The drone attack themselves foment Anti American sentiment and strenghten Al Qaeda.
4. What you call oversimplistic its actually being coherent. One cant be coherently morally, or logically, and condemn arab terrorism withou condemning American terrorism. Thats why propaganda is for, and its largely succesful.
5. This whole line of argumentation arose because you attributed to me something I dindt even said.
edited 4th Jan '13 9:09:11 AM by Baff
I will always cherish the chance of a new beggining.1. Because they sponsor, recruit, and train terrorists.
2. Agreed. You seem to be drawing a false equivalence between blowing up military targets with bombs and dealing with the resulting collateral casualties and deliberately targeting civilians for acts of violence.
3. So does having troops on the ground, or manned planes in the air.
4. Whether we should be pursuing this war on terrorists is a separate issue from the methods we use to pursue it.
5. You're the one who seems to feel that drones are somehow less moral than other forms of warfare. If I misinterpreted you, I apologize, but if I did not, you need to justify that statement.
edited 4th Jan '13 9:10:26 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Its not a military target when the terrorist its in a village. Neither is it when he is at a wedding.
And yes, its important because we are blowing up tribal villages in Pakistan and we fell like, somehow, if we dont do so, they will bring about the destruction of the United States.
Al Qaeda is no more a threat to the United States than Monaco is a threat to France. More people will die do to bigmacs than terrorist attacks and yet we continue to maim and crush innocent civilians in the middle east in our persuit of 3rd tier jihadhists.
edited 4th Jan '13 9:11:38 AM by Baff
I will always cherish the chance of a new beggining.What if the enemy doesn't present a military target? How do you fight them? With harsh language? This is the basic problem with asymmetric warfare. If you refuse to fight on strict moral principles, you stand the risk of losing the war. If your principles prevent you from fighting the war, you might as well not be there. If you don't fight the war, you may give up on a vital national interest.
You may argue that there is no vital national interest in pursuing the War on Terror. That is a valid discussion to have.
edited 4th Jan '13 9:13:13 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
you fight them with propaganda. Because the only other way to fight them is to burn the village down and kill all the male population that might one day grow up to become terrorists and that is not morally acceptable.
You could also sign a peace agreament with them.
edited 4th Jan '13 9:13:08 AM by Baff
I will always cherish the chance of a new beggining.But Fighteer, while I am very much of the school of "The American people and their interests must be protected from violent enemies and fuck those who feel sensitive about it," I still wonder...as the United States, don't we have an obligation to fight better than our enemies?
I cannot agree with this. Al Qaeda is not only a bunch of violent psychopaths that use children as grenade carriers, but they actively recruit others to their cause. Al Qaeda is a threat to civilization.
edited 4th Jan '13 9:21:03 AM by TheStarshipMaxima
It was an honorAlso, the whole "honorable combat" ideal really, really breaks down when you introduce the concept of guerrilla warfare and urban warfare. It was one thing to insist on accepting fair surrender and not bombing villages in WWI, but these days we're up against combatants that are explicitly using our propensity for fair combat to their advantage.
It's one thing to say "It's wrong to shoot women and children", but that completely falls apart when you realize that the guys we're fighting against are the sort that will hide behind women and children to keep shooting at us, and aren't afraid to kill them to get at us.
"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -DrunkscriblerianIt's difficult to say, because of the nature of the beast. Fight it enough and it goes underground, to surface again once the pressure is off. With all the furor over the Benghazi incident, it's easy to forget that it was a terrorist act; clearly we are not free of al-Qaeda and its brothers.
As for the human shield dilemma, picture this situation. A terrorist is holding a woman in front of him, but he has in his other hand the trigger to a bomb which will blow up fifty innocents. Let's assume that Take a Third Option is not readily available. Do you kill him and the hostage to save fifty people, or do you allow the fifty people to die in the hopes of saving the one?
These sorts of decisions are being made on a daily basis both in the field and in the White House and Pentagon, and it's very easy to stand back and judge them when you aren't the one deciding who will live and who will die.
@Baff: There is propaganda being used, continually. It's a major part of the effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as it was a part of the effort in Iraq. As I keep saying, this is not a black and white situation.
I'm not bloodthirsty; I am observing that in the real world, sometimes you have to Shoot the Hostage to save lives, no matter how horrifying it may seem to those who watch from afar and judge.
edited 4th Jan '13 10:00:54 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Can't argue with you there. Do you feel there's a way to draw a line between "the greater good" and "a blind Roaring Rampage of Revenge"?
It was an honorThese sorts of decisions are being made on a daily basis both in the field and in the White House and Pentagon, and it's very easy to stand back and judge them when you aren't the one deciding who will live and who will die.
edited 4th Jan '13 10:15:36 AM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.First of all - asymmetrical warfare is not something that just sprung up out of nowhere. It's been around for as long as warfare itself has been around, and, depending on your pov, can just as easily be painted as heroic within reasonable limits. I don't know about y'all, but whenever I listen to someone talking about the American revolution, I'm always treated to the obligatory mockery of those silly British people, wearing brightly colored uniforms and marching in the open in straight lines. That's not to say that things like hostage-taking are excusable, but the basic idea of refusing to engage in a 'civilized' way is no more honorable or dishonorable than war itself is.
I think the lesson that we can learn from the war on terror is that you don't solve a finesse operation with a hammer. The American military is a bloody big hammer, and we keep slamming it into things that require delicacy and small-scale operations. We didn't get the guy behind 9/11 with an army or an invasion, we got it with a small, surgical strike team. He wasn't even in the country we were fighting in at the time!
What needs to happen, short term, is that we need to transition to assassinations and other targeted strike procedures in worst-case scenarios to deal with criminal elements in relatively lawless regions of the world. Kill a guy, kidnap a guy to take him to trial, whatever, get in, get out.
But more importantly, long term, we need to transition to a nation that is capable of supporting meaningful nation-building like we did with Japan. First-world comforts are the enemy of the kind of misguided zeal that drives bombings and the like. As soon as the average citizen in Afghanistan is too comfortable to care about hating some country across the ocean anymore, we've won. Of course, that also requires that we clamp down on allowing corporations free reign to exploit impoverished countries, and relax things like the war on drugs. It's a problem that's rooted in American culture as much as in foreign ones.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.![]()
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The concept remains similar, even if you broaden the parameters a bit. By mingling with the civilian crowd, they are de facto using human shields, because they know that they can't be bombed without the risk of innocent casualties.
Further, the "hand on the bomb trigger" aspect is delayed somewhat, in the sense that this person may not be immediately threatening mass murder, but they will almost certainly cause grievous harm if allowed to live/remain free.
I'm not saying that we should take the shot in all circumstances and damn the innocent casualties. I'm especially not saying that we should just declare any civilians killed by our bombs to be "potential combatants" and therefore legitimate targets. I am saying, however, that the situation is not so black and white that we, as bystanders not involved with the actions in question, can presume to judge them in black and white terms.
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I agree with this in a conceptual sense.
edited 4th Jan '13 10:22:34 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"... Are you trying to make an ironic point, Tomu? Because Greenspan is being an idiot when he says that.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Now that I will grant. The issue of declaring someone a terrorist so we can justify killing them and their neighbors is a serious problem. What I will not grant is that it has anything to do necessarily with the methods used to kill them.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"