Its my opinion that civilian deaths are irrevelent. Once you have committed to commencing military action you have resigned yourself to the conclusion that violence is the answer, that there will be killing, and that you will attempt to use your violence in such a manner as to inflict it disproportionately on the other side. If you haven't reached that conclusion why go to war?
In the same vein of thought, I think its foolish to judge whether you should engage or disengage a war do to casaulty numbers. Once you have committed to going to war, you have resigned yourself to the fact that you will sustain some casaulties. So why even judge what you will do according to such an arbitrary number as civilian deaths or military casaulties?
In my mind going to war is a serious decision, that once reached, is not the realm where shakiness and double-minded wavering can exist. Once you go to war you must achieve your objectives or submit to failure.
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Lucky you to be living in a save country free of people trying to kill you every day. If we put you in Lebanon for 3 weeks (the peace has allready shattered since they are shooting again) you'll have a different opinion. Oh, and you won't be placed in the north. We'll place you in the middle of a city under siege with no way of escaping.
Does the fact that (he says) he is a conservative automatically make him a religious fundamentalist too?
It's on the site because its obvious flaw is the old "it'll all be over by christmas" argument. It happened in 1914-18, and it's what led to the current nightmare in Iraq. Everyone acted as if once they marched into Baghdad and toppled Hussein, it'd all be over and they could go home.
Much as I hate to agree with him, I do in some ways.
"In any worthwhile military operation, you have to press on until you take the objective. Occaisionally, civilians get caught in the crossfire. Such is war. So long as you are using weapons, tactics, and strategies that minimize civilian casualties, no one can blame you much. If you aren't using said weapons, tactics, and strategies, you have become a terrorist, not a soldier. Then you deserve to be stripped of rank and executed, because you have commited murder, most likely multiple murder."
The secret, fuckwit, is to only go to war when ALL other options are gone.
To use a poker player's analogy, this is known as "throwing good money after bad". Sometimes it's better to cut your losses. (I'm not convinced this is one of those times. We can't stay in Iraq indefinitely, but a pullout now would almost certainly result in civil war. If we can prevent that by staying longer, the result will probably be worth it. We might have been better off if we had done nothing, but there is no "undo" button and we have to work from the situation as it is now, not as it was three years ago. Anyway, my point was, baconbits's advice is not good advice.)
In any worthwhile military operation, you have to press on until you take the objective.
What if it is no longer worthwhile (say, for instance, you believed it would be easier than it turned out to be, things have bogged down, and the costs from this point onward [ignoring what has already been paid] would be far greater than you anticipated the total costs from the beginning to be)? Again, I'm not saying that's happened here (largely because the consequences of pulling out are far more drastic than the consequences of doing nothing in the first place would have been), but it's something to consider.
Brain_in_a_jar_
Well that's quite a profound anti-war argument you've got going there buddy.
Funny thing is, some people consider the mass-killing of civilians during war to be a sign of failure. In three years there have been well over 40,000 Iraqi civilians killed. That's half the people who live in my city. That's 300 Iraqi's 'liberated' each day. On July 14, General Peter Schoomaker, the US Army’s chief of staff stated that we are closer to the beginning then the end of the second Iraq war. The depleted uranium rounds being used by the US are most likely the cause of the 600% jump in luekemia cases and the eruption of bizarre birth defects. The cradle of civilization should soon be uninhabitable for four billion years. Other elements in munitions are also radioactive, some as much as 100,000 times as much as the depleted uranium. So now the civilian casualties cannot even be properly estimated since many affected people will be dying slowly and passing on mutations to their own children someday. I think civilian casualties matter very much.
Crosis: if the original objective becomes untenable, you have 2 options:
Exactly. I think we must have been talking past each other for a moment.
So, let´s do wars all the time and kill innocent civilians. After all, following your standards, once you decide that crime is the answer..........
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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