| jaguar |
03-17-2002 05:12 AM |
Quote:
"A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the denial isn’t accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn’t know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can’t be true anywhere else, for anybody else."
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*sighs*
While it is a moral distinction, personally I don't think it makes a shred of difference allot of innocent people died, no matter what way you look at it. As for smart weapons, once again, there is little change in reality. Instead of carpet bombing, we have precision, but at the same time, I’m sure one hell of allot of innocent people died why? Because the US didn't dare do the dirty work itself. By basically buying local militias to do nearly all the real ground fighting, these groups, as well as carrying out their own revenge killings have harnessed the US, under the guise of apparent al queda camps, to kill innocents, wedding, villages, schools have been bombed as well as raids by specops troops on apparent al queda bases that turn out to be a rival warlord's troops. Our guns may have got smarter but our on-the-ground Intel has got weaker, a fundamental weakens in a place like Afghanistan. I'm nitpicking I know but the fact is I don't accept pseudo-moral justifications, or we-don't-know innocent death counts. |
