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It really doesn’t make any difference if an aircraft engaged in aerial bombing has a pilot or not. At least our pilot is not at risk with a UAV. He/she can't be shot down, captured and….well you know the rest. War is just a horrible business whereby civilians very often die in higher numbers than combatants. Evidence of our mistakes in combat are real and plentiful, but I just don’t think our military would intentionally target innocent people if they could avoid it considering the value of the target. The best thing to do is stay out of war if possible. If war is unavoidable then I don’t think much can be done regarding innocent deaths. War is what it is, man’s greatest inhumanity.
I must state though, that in our current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the effort for avoiding innocent deaths should be measurable, recorded accurately, and, analyzed constantly by those with the power to stop the attacks.
Exactly. The US for example killed an estimated 600,000 people during the bombing of Cambodia in the Vietnam war, and all the bombing we did in Vietnam exceeded the amount of bombing we did in WWII, during which we obliterated cities in Germany - Dresden being the most cited example. And of course there is Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, I understand the reasoning behind the bombing of those two cities, but the point is this: All the innocents, all the civilians who are killed in times of war don't debate about whether it's war or murder. They are just as dead either way. Needless to say, the US is only one of many warlike cultures to have existed throughout history, and atrocities abounded before we were even on the map. I single out the US only because it is my country, and I grew up being taught that we are the standard of morality among all the countries of the earth. Of course the truth is a little more complicated eh? National defense is one thing, but that's hardly the only reason we've gone to war. Let's face it, we're a sick species.
We avoid intentional targeting of the innocent (this is not World War II), as does Israel. The problems begin when the enemy conceals itself and blends within the innocent civilian population (as well as in a population that often is not innocent, but is collaborative and supportive). I believe at least once we have revised our tactics in Afghanistan specifically because we were producing excessive and unacceptably high civilian casualties in attacks (as well as not doing enough homework on identifying the enemy before attacking).
I don't have a problem with the UAVs provided they're used properly. I look at our past history objectively (and note we were less bad than our enemies were, obviously) as well as what we were ready to do as far as escalation in that earlier time (chemical and biological warfare against the Axis if they attacked first, then considered as an initiative to end the war against Japan). I'm not pathologically anti-nuclear; we need a new generation of smaller, better nuclear weapons for deeply buried targets, hardened targets, and to destroy enemy WMDs (along with more work on non-nuclear WMD-destruction agents), and obviously it might make sense to put chemicals or radiological substances on areas to deny their use or transit rather than use land mines (not only in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border zone but also the Korean DMZ, for example, or for Israel to do that on its final borders). There's nothing wrong about such weapons that leaves it up to the enemy to expose itself and harm itself -- consequence of its own actions and its own responsibility.
Why expose our aircrews to attack when we can use remotely piloted or even someday autonomous armed UAVs? "Missile away."
It depends who you ask. War is a very profitable business. Also, killing civilians really is the central tactic in modern warfare. By which I mean, it's the point. It's not incidental; it's the point.
It is not for the USA, Israel, and so many other nations. In fact, they avoid it to the extent of constraining themselves and deliberately creating risk for their own forces.
Who do you think the right-wing death squads we have trained & financed in Central America were killing, if not civilians?
Then there is always that all out war looming. Nuclear holocaust. The end of life. One wonders if mankind has the capacity to prevent its own extinction. We are greedy little monkeys. Paranoid in the knowledge that we are all far more alike than different.