I'll take down-votes for quoting Tom any time. We will, after all, all go together when we go...
If this was about helping the military of my country, I would also find it questionable.
I guess I need to start quoting all of my replies to prevent that.
Also the trial against Hussein is widely regarded as a show trial.
Get off your high horse and make your political, off topic statements on reddit instead.
Just because someone higher up decides something, doesn't mean you don't have any moral responsibility.
If you think what the DoD does is morally questionable (and I think it is pretty clear cut that it is) then you are morally obliged to not help them with it. It's pretty easy in the software industry to find work somewhere else.
No, but they still assist those politics (and often proudly) with their engineering.
I don't really think the "it's above my paycheck concern" attitude is really moral.
>The reality is that they were there / still there so while you work to campaign for changing the reality are you suggesting we should NOT make things better for our soldiers to stay safer?
Yes, I believe we should question such things.
Unfortunately, if we give some examples about other people in other eras using similar excuses ("it was a reality, so we were just doing our job to make our military safer/more effective"), someone is going to invoke Godwin's law.
Then just say no when the DoD asks you to work for them.
>are you suggesting we should NOT make things better for our soldiers to stay safer?
I certainly am. The safer "our" soldiers are the more people they can murder.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding with how DoD contracting works. Regardless this is too broad of a paintbrush to use.
> I certainly am. The safer "our" soldiers are the more people they can murder.
This is literally the exact opposite of how things work in the military. Regardless if you think killing is so horrible it's a bit shocking you would rather soldiers to be more likely to die and contribute to even more death.
What a strange accusation for a person involved in the military to make. Are you saying that when the army makes an offensive operation with the goal of eliminating some enemies combatants, it's because they think killing is awesome?
Because it seems to me that the reason is much the same: we must kill these people to lower overall deaths, no?
I'm not sure how you could come to that assessment but I wouldn't come to that conclusion at all (even my previous comments echo the opposite). Regardless I wouldn't consider myself part of the military at all (especially since I've left the public contracting space 2 years ago and the army wasn't my last contract anyway).
Like it's not anyone's concern that say the US puts the largest number of its citizens in jail (25% of the worlds inmates for a country with 4% of the world's population) and of which the predominant number are black.
I mean it should concern people all over the world, and they should ask and lend support and diplomatic pressure to change that, but they should in no way interfere with internal politics, invade or attack the US for that. And that's something that hurts far more people (millions) compared to "some thousand".
Besides, what have you accomplished now? A hell hole of a country, an ex-country, with fractions fighting from several competitive sides, millions flying and hundreds of thousands dead. Yay for getting rid of the dictator, sure turned out well. And the place is a paradise now for the sex and slave trade.
Not to mention the hypocrisy of it all. Those decisions to support the rebels in official capacity wasn't because anybody really cared for the regime's victims. After all they always did and continue to do great business and have cordial relations with Saudi Arabia (how do local women fare there legally? Or search about what happens to thousands of immigrant women coming to work there as house servants etc.).
It pays to think about such events beyond what the mainstream media and the official government announcements say. Read some books, and not just celebrated books that maintain the official party line of one's government, try to find the other side's story too. And historical books, for such regions, to get perspective.
I'm doing what now?
BTW: Western countries didn't give a fuck about Gaddafi's human rights violations (except from condemning them verbally) until he started to lose power. Then suddenly they decided they should invade Libya.
Of course Libya has a lot of oil reserves, so this is to be expected. Can't bite the hand that keeps your economy running...
Soldiers deployed in the other side of the world where they have no business to be in the first place? Securing cheap oil resources and/or control of strategic interests?