Read the article. It indicated that American bombs sometimes killed civilians, which I alredy knew. This is unavoidable in any war: arguing that it is always immoral to do anything that may kill some civilians in war is really an argument that war is always immoral.
If we'd been "bombing the Afghan people," in the sense of targeting them, we would have been destroying whole cities and towns, and the civilian death toll from our bombing alone would now be in the low millions, even assuming that we didn't use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (if we did that it would be in the high millions to low tens of millions), out of a population of 31 million people. We know this because of the history of deliberate attacks against civilian populations in World War II.
Using "bombing the people" as a synonym for "going to war with a regime" thus creates a false mental image. I'm not saying you're doing that deliberately, but the tactic dates back to at least the Vietnam War, in which the Communists falsely accused us of deliberately targeting their civilian population. And the willingness to believe this statement, when faced with the obvious fact that we haven't killed millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of Afghan civilians, implies a certain ignorance of military history.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 12:31 am (UTC)If we'd been "bombing the Afghan people," in the sense of targeting them, we would have been destroying whole cities and towns, and the civilian death toll from our bombing alone would now be in the low millions, even assuming that we didn't use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (if we did that it would be in the high millions to low tens of millions), out of a population of 31 million people. We know this because of the history of deliberate attacks against civilian populations in World War II.
Using "bombing the people" as a synonym for "going to war with a regime" thus creates a false mental image. I'm not saying you're doing that deliberately, but the tactic dates back to at least the Vietnam War, in which the Communists falsely accused us of deliberately targeting their civilian population. And the willingness to believe this statement, when faced with the obvious fact that we haven't killed millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of Afghan civilians, implies a certain ignorance of military history.