A military organization, such as that described in this article, seeks to minimize civilian casualties to the utmost possible extent. One of the realities of warfare is that civilian casualties can't always be entirely avoided, and a war still be prosecuted with meaningful hope of success. But the failure to avoid civilian casualties, however necessary, is regarded as a failure nonetheless, and weighs heavily on those involved - perhaps you overlooked the mention of an increased need for anti-suicide counseling after strikes in which civilian casualties occur. One does not often find "the complete devaluation of innocent human lives" coincident with contemplation of suicide as a potentially proportionate response to having taken them.

A terrorist organization, such as its current adversary, has no such scruples, and indeed will often seek to inflict as much atrocity on innocents as it can manage. The incentives, and the balance of advantage and disadvantage, for irregular fighters, are such that the involvement of civilians - not just as targets, but also as human shields and as a sort of moving camouflage in which to conceal oneself - is an utter necessity, because there's only one way for a stand-up fight between a regular military and a guerrilla band to end. The typical fashion in which such bands misuse innocents by default would weigh heavily on their members as well, which is why one finds such a heavy investment in ideology among these groups, whether it be religious as in the current case or secular as in the case of last century's "Communist revolutionaries". You have to have some story to tell yourself that makes your flagrant abuse of civilians seem righteous - in other words, to devalue innocent human lives enough that you can live with the things you do to them.

To casually equate such wanton violation of every civilized standard of conduct, with the extreme if admittedly at times imperfect care that military forces exercise to avoid behaving even remotely similarly, strikes me as something that must be motivated either by arrant ignorance of the facts underlying the case, or by some sort of ideologically motivated disinterest in them. Neither seems to me terribly useful in developing an accurate apprehension of reality.

This has only become the case officially after WWII.

And frankly I think the only reason this even matters is the media.

Civilian lives meant absolutely nothing and were considered fair target during war.

Millions died in WWII from intentional fire bombing campaigns on urban areas by the allied forces.

Same in the Korean war.

Same during the Vietnam war.

Civilians were purposely targeted to "demoralize the enemy" and force them to surrender.

The official difference between war and terrorism is that war must be officially declared by a government and have specific objectives and once the objective is reached then the killing should stop.

What's your source for this definition?

So the media is doing it's job, then? I don't see the problem.

I don't know.

You need to distinguish between the "soldiers" such as those in the article and the ones you describe as needing counseling and suffering from the effects, and the people up top calling the shots and deciding policy.

While a soldier may decide on a per-case basis what is acceptable collateral damage, that decision doesn't exist in a void, it's rooted in the policies and guidelines of the organization set by people that, one could argue, are not placing the same premium on human life.

- Edward Peck, former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq (under Jimmy Carter) and former ambassador to Mauritania

For what it's worth, I'm not american (canadian), but your post reads like pure unadulterated american propaganda to me. Stuff like putting "communist revolutionaries" in quotes, repeating the unsourced myth that american patriot soldiers suffer with suicidal ideation because they feel remorse, etc.

It's like we're from two different worlds.

Here, Mr. Peck's partial citation is carefully circumscribed in a fashion that seems impossible to read as other than tendentious. The first term set out in 18 USC 2331's definition of the term "international terrorism" [1] is thus:

> As used in this chapter--

> the term “international terrorism” means activities that--

> involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;

While I'm happy to concede that the US government has taken a somewhat cavalier line with regard to its own policies on the declaration of war, our legal and judicial systems have yet at this time to find that such conduct is unlawful. Until that changes, there seems no clear argument to be made that that conduct qualifies as "international terrorism" under the definition our law provides.

To claim that the problem of suicide among US soldiers and veterans is mere "unsourced myth" is to say the least remarkable. You may care to examine a recent report [2] on the matter, produced by our Department of Veterans' Affairs - an organization whose misfeasance is legendary among veterans themselves and among other Americans knowledgeable on the matter, so if anything, even the vastly disproportionate rates there described are still likely to be low. Or you may not care to examine it, preferring instead to continue in the comfortable fancy that I'm just making this all up to serve my turn. I don't really care either way which you choose, but the facts are here before you, if you have any interest in them.

As for the rest - I do suppose I can understand how it might seem that way, for all that the difference is purely one of perception and analysis. I don't see any compelling reason at this time to privilege your perception and analysis over mine - and it does seem as though yours is somewhat less universally shared than you may imagine; at any rate, some of the world's most effective snipers are countrymen of yours. Perhaps they come from a world less like yours than like mine.

[1] http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-pro...

[2] https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/2016suicidedatareport.p...

And as for the suicide point, I'm not challenging the idea that US forces are depressed or suicidal. I'm challenging the idea that they're depressed and suicidal because they're such compassionate warriors that they feel their victims' pain and suffer for the deaths that they cause or some such nonsense. I think these are much more related to the drudgery and boredom of this new form of warfare.

I'd address the definition point or the Canadian sniper point, but I'm busy. I will check back later and see if I can complete this.

I've had the opportunity to get to know a few veterans. To the extent they've opened up to me on such a sensitive subject, I have never developed the impression that it was drudgery and boredom that tended to inspire soldiers and veterans to consider suicide. This strikes me as quite a remarkable statement on your part, and I would very much like to know more about how you have reached this conclusion. Perhaps you will convince me.

In a political victory for the guerrillas? This kind of absolutism was killed by the Vietnam War. And the Vietnamese success against the French the previous decade kicked off the whole end-of-colonialism thing.

> A military organization, such as that described in this article, seeks to minimize civilian casualties to the utmost possible extent.

This is a PR line, not truth. There are plenty of militaries that don't particularly care about civilians, especially civilians that don't look like them.

> A terrorist organization, such as its current adversary, has no such scruples, and indeed will often seek to inflict as much atrocity on innocents as it can manage. The

Which is again a myth. The IRA would frequently phone ahead to say where and when its bombs would go off. Yes, the IRA killed people, but it didn't seek to inflict as much atrocity on innocents as it could manage. Europe has been awash with terrorists, and they don't all go after innocents - some of them very specifically go after authority figures involved in what they perceive as their oppressors.

> if admittedly at times imperfect care

Words fail me. Doubly so given that the reason we have ISIS as a military presence is because of the 'admittedly imperfect care' of the invasion conducted by the exact same military we're talking about here.

The IRA is a special case. Early on in their conflict, they employed typical guerrilla schrecklichkeit tactics - it was only later, when their leadership realized that killing English civilians was hardening opposition against them rather than advancing their goals, that they switched to targeting the English economy rather than its people. They found much more success that way, too - but they couldn't have done it at all absent the coincidence of geography that put them close enough to English economic centers for the tactic to be viable.

I shouldn't like to be mistaken for saying that all the moral opprobrium in conflicts like those we discuss should accrue to one side or the other. As I said in another comment here, warfare means having to choose, not between right and wrong, but what looks to be least among the wrongs which are all that that form of human interaction makes available. Even when proceeding from the best of intentions, people can't be relied upon to always make the choice which is clearly correct in retrospect - and, of course, people don't always proceed from the best of intentions. I'm not interested in defending the actions that brought us to the present state of affairs, because I regard them in the main as indefensible. But regardless of how we got here, we are here, and I fail to grasp how slandering our own military forces with the name "terrorist" in any way advances the purpose of finding a path forward that involves the minimum extent of atrocity, on all sides, that we can possibly manage to produce.

It's more like: as soon as you decide to fight, you willingly seek situations in which you might get killed by those who fight back. It's your choice. As a civilian, you try to avoid those situations.

So yes, there is a difference, and it has nothing to do with religion, but with choice.

This attitude--differentiating based on civilian-ness--is useful. Spreading it allows wars to do less damage, because if fewer civilians die then repairing the economy is easier afterwards. This leads to a host of good consequences, most importantly that it reduces the chance of renewed war later on.

Soldiers' lives aren't as important, in that sense. Sorry, but they're not. And soldiers are going to die no matter what; the cultural innovation here isn't treating soldiers' lives as worth little, it's treating civilians as highly valuable. Some of which has later spread to the soldiers as well...

I disagree. War must be deadly and costly for both sides. Human intercation is heavily based on deterrents. One can see that in interactions in small and big groups. Taking away the deadliness and cost of war will make it happen more often.

Besides the obvious example, there is peace in europe for so long only because the war before has been so costly and deadly.

A power in the world that can wage military conflicts without significant loss in their rows is a disaster for the world.

That's a bold statement and not supported by any evidence. Look at the Yugoslav wars. One of the most brutalized regions in WWII, and nobody gave a shit when it was about starting a new war some decades later.

Of course it is. If you choose to fight in a war, you forfeit your life. That's how wars work. You only win a battle by decimating your enemy. How is this bigotry?

Also, you believe your cause to be righteous, and so does your enemy. You both believe your cause to be so righteous, and your enemy to be so menacing to your cause, that you both have decided to go to arms over it.

On the other hand a civilian is a civilian. He didn't choose war, so he doesn't deserve to have his life taken away by a conflict he has no interest in.

You are wrong. You may decide to fight but not want to be killed nor kill anybody, but just want the war to stop. Most battles ended without decimating any side, and they can even end without much confrontation at all.

Harold Pinter nailed it down in a chilling play, "Precisely"[1], 35 years ago: The body count is the result of negotiations between 2 parties who sit comfortably with a scotch in their hand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precisely_(sketch)

Was it worth Dresden to end Bergen-Belsen?

So the question still merits asking - and answering.

> The answer is no, absolutely fucking not

To be clear, I don't make this point in order to argue some special lack of moral rectitude on your part, but rather for its value as an example of the fact that, in warfare, there exist no options that offer perfect moral uprightness - that the choices available there are not between virtue and iniquity, but rather between greater iniquity and lesser. There's nothing lovely about this fact, but it is a fact nonetheless, and I fail to see how refusing to acknowledge it improves the ability, of one who does so, to correctly understand the world we so imperfectly share.

The attach on Hamburg earlier in the war (July 1943) probably had more impact but even then the Allied air raids on Germany actually achieved disproportionally little given the huge resource allocated to them.

However, bombing did force the Germans to prioritise air defence of their heartlands over tactical air operations against allied ground forces, so that German ground forces and their logistics chains operated under punishingly hostile skies from D-Day onwards.

[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/53742/the-bombing-war/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

[3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/German-War-Nation-Under-1939-45-x/d...

[EDIT - reworded for clarity and additional detail]

As especially the USA's industrial output was much larger than Germany's, bombers might still have been a good investment, even if it didn't actually reduce Germany's industrial capacity, because it did reduce its capacity to wage ground war.

EDIT: Also, even if Germany's industrial output did grow during WWII, it still tied up an enormous amount of resources: "The Allied bombing campaign also tied up valuable manpower, with Albert Speer (Germany's Minister of Armaments) estimating that in the summer of 1944 between 200,000 and 300,000 men were permanently employed in repairing oil installations and placing oil production underground. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Wartim...

Most notably, in the 2nd half of 1944 they effectively lost the oil imports from Romania; at the same time, they were fighting on three fronts - with the Allies coming up through Italy and crossing the Channel, the Soviets from the east. They had to do an awful lot more with an awful lot less.

Granted, it could be argued that obliterating an important railroad junction like Dresden made logistics (even) harder for the Germans - but again, at that late point in the war it probably didn't matter much.

Is that the moment we discuss how many dead are acceptable to end a war, finally agree on some number and toast to it?

Sorry, not joining you here.

Please don't call names like this.

"The complete devaluation of innocent human lives in order to achieve the group's objectives."

Any war will inevitably, and predictably, lead to some number of civilian deaths. Should we disband all militaries? If so, how would we deal with groups like ISIS?

There's still an important difference between the two categories which you have chosen to ignore.

With regards to your statement, you need to realize the Air Force is trying to minimize the casualties while the real terrorist are doing their best to exploit those civilians as a shield. There are numerous examples of this in every day activities among these groups in the Middle East, from the putting weapons on the roofs of schools and hospitals to putting armed men into regular households for shelter.

I am not sure what the best plan is, I would prefer to just leave but the world doesn't want to be at peace or at least a large section is still trying to determine who or what will be in charge

My grandfather spent the rest of his life after the Korean war (as an an anzac, artillery, ironically I guess) in a mental hospital, "shellshock" as they called it then. My grandmother and my mother were terrified of him. He got let out a couple of times and always got put back in.

I don't really know what it means to intervene in things, I suppose we would have to talk in some way about the moral value of South Korea existing even if that is unpalatable.

My point I guess is that you are talking about our yes, corrupted set of moral objectives, without maybe considering what happens if we do nothing.

Most of the time where I thought maybe intervention was a decent idea, it wasn't. The way I think of it now is you can't throw sticks of dynamite in a flower bed and expect roses. All the things war is damages civil society.

Maybe it would have been better if they'd just worked it out themselves. That said, do you know any Koreans?

It sucks and is morally wrong, but it isn't terrorism unless you want to argue that the main purpose of these strikes it to terrorize the civilian population. That may be the case but it seems they really just want to kill certain people and collateral damage is accepted.

Terrorism is a term used in its broadest sense to describe the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror or fear, in order to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim.

But I'd say it's not just indiscriminate violence, targeting e.g. members of political or judiciary organizations is often used too.

That latter can still be a war crime if it is not "proportionate to the military advantage gained", but that seems to be exactly the judgment these rules are trying to make.