Undoubtedly, but important questions about the ethics of war aren't usually based upon the body count. They're based upon initiation of force, hostility, ability to negotiate peace, treatment of captives, willingness to adhere to treaties, etc.
Actually, one of the most important principles of the laws of war (International humanitarian law) is that of proportionality, and body count is a major determinant of proportionality [1,2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)
2. http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/proportionality-princip...
The Iraqis suffered casualties of greater than 150 to 1 vs casualties of the coalition forces.
The hostility and attack upon national sovereignty committed by the Iraqis was far more important than the subsequent body count in determining proportionality.
Abe: "The U.S. and the U.N. gave several public justifications for involvement in the First Gulf War, the most prominent being the Iraqi violation of Kuwaiti territorial integrity.
However, shortly before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, April Glaspie, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, had personally communicated to Saddam Hussein that America “took no position on these Arab affairs”.
In addition, the U.S. justified its military actions as support for Saudi Arabia, a key supplier of oil.
Shortly after the Iraqi invasion, Defense Secretary Cheney made the first of several visits to Saudi Arabia where King Fahd requested U.S. military assistance. During a speech in a special joint session of the U.S. Congress given on 11 September 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush summed up the reasons with the following remarks: “Within three days, 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then that I decided to act to check that aggression.”
The Pentagon stated that satellite photos showing a buildup of Iraqi forces along the border were this information’s source, but this was later alleged to be false. A reporter for the St. Petersburg Times acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images made at the time in question, which showed nothing but empty desert.
Other justifications for foreign involvement included Iraq’s history of human rights abuses under Saddam. Iraq was also known to possess biological weapons and chemical weapons, which Saddam had used against Iranian troops during the Iran–Iraq War and against his own country’s Kurdish population in the Al-Anfal Campaign. Iraq was also known to have a nuclear weapons program, but the report about it from January 1991 was partially declassified by the CIA on 26 May 2001.
Although there were human rights abuses committed in Kuwait by the invading Iraqi military, the alleged incidents which received most publicity in the U.S. were inventions of the public relations firm hired by the government of Kuwait to influence U.S. opinion in favor of military intervention. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the U.S. It hired the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for about $11 million, paid by Kuwait’s government.
Among many other means of influencing U.S. opinion (distributing books on Iraqi atrocities to U.S. soldiers deployed in the region, ‘Free Kuwait’ T-shirts and speakers to college campuses, and dozens of video news releases to television stations), the firm arranged for an appearance before a group of members of the U.S. Congress in which a woman identifying herself as a nurse working in the Kuwait City hospital described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and letting them die on the floor.
The story was an influence in tipping both the public and Congress towards a war with Iraq: six Congressmen said the testimony was enough for them to support military action against Iraq and seven Senators referenced the testimony in debate. The Senate supported the military actions in a 52–47 vote. A year after the war, however, this allegation was revealed to be a fabrication. The woman who had testified was found to be a member of Kuwait’s Royal Family, in fact the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S.[95] She hadn’t lived in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion.
The details of the Hill & Knowlton public relations campaign, including the incubator testimony, were published in John R. MacArthur’s Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), and came to wide public attention when an Op-ed by MacArthur was published in The New York Times. This prompted a reexamination by Amnesty International, which had originally promoted an account alleging even greater numbers of babies torn from incubators than the original fake testimony. After finding no evidence to support it, the organization issued a retraction. President Bush then repeated the incubator allegations on television."
World | Sun Sep 27, 2015 4:36pm EDT Related: WORLD, UNITED NATIONS, FRANCE, SYRIA France launches air strikes against Islamic State in Syria UNITED NATIONS/PARIS | BY JOHN IRISH AND DOMINIQUE VIDALON
France said on Sunday it launched its first air strikes in Syria, destroying an Islamic State training camp in the east of the country to prevent the group from carrying out attacks against French interests and to protect Syrian civilians.
France had until now only struck Islamic State targets in neighboring Iraq, carrying out just 3 percent of air strikes in an offensive on the group by a U.S.-led coalition. France has also provided limited logistical support to Syrian rebels it considers moderate, including Kurds.
So, zero. They participated in 3% of the air strikes in Iraq, 0% in Syria.
This is a fallacy that's constantly repeated by atheists. It's not true. Lack of religion is just as bad, if not worse (e.g. nazis, communists).
The issue is the "us or them"-thinking that all humans are born with. We all want to belong and in trying to achieve that it's inherent in us to define our group as different from "that other group". This is human nature. The problem comes from us going too far to define our group as better than "that other group", we start to claim they are not human/not worthy to live. It quickly goes downhill from there. The dividing factor can be anything: religion, culture, politics, race, sports and so on.
I grew up very religiously christian, but that changed after I went to war in Iraq. It took me years of reading, studying, and discussion with others to pull myself out of that mental bondage, and one of the things I realized is that it is religion itself that encourages irrationality, and that is certainly no false equivalance as you claim.
I see more American taliban where I live in the bible belt than I saw jihadists in Iraq. We have killed thousands upon thousands more men women and children. (Not debating justification at the moment)
That is not to ignore the varying of degrees of extremism and the probability scale on which one religion produces extremists over another, especially given cultural contexts which I would consider more important than the religion itself. (See differences between wahhabi suadis and shia who live in America)
That being said though, the real danger is for the west to accept the idea that this is a purely ideological war of muslim fanatics against the oh so peaceful christian (or culturally christian) west, all the time ignoring that same seed of extremism in us that mirrors our so called enemy.
Until we can admit that it is religion itself that is the danger, and the irrationality it encourages, this issue will never be solved.
Also, regarding France, And I may get downvoted for this, but wasnt France bombing in Syria for almost two months prior to the attack? I would be willing to bet they killed at least as many civilians as died in the Paris attack, not including military age males, but where is the outrage for the syrian people?
Ill tell you the main thing I realized about terrorism, is that we create terrorists faster than we kill them, and very few of them are purely reliously motivated. I put it this way to my family and friends:
I am a warrior first and foremost. If a random bomb fell on my house and killed my family, or a stray shot from an occuping nation in America killed my son, daughter, mother or wife, I can guarantee you I would be on a great warpath. If the chinese invaded America because they claimed we were a terrorist country, and kidnapped my friend, we would try to rescue him by force if necessary.
If we want to reduce terrorism, the number one way is to stop fucking bombing every country in the middle east. not just that, but we need to stop propping up every dictator who has friendly policies to us and overthrowing any democratic movement that isnt friendly. We undermine the very foundational principles of America by doing so, and we should be leading by example, and not by force.
That is not to say force should never be used, for Im not a pacifist and beleive in the right of self defense, but I am increasingly having a hard time beleiving self defense means bombing countries halfway around the world. I would like to have that debate with someone knowledgeable.