I think it's worth stepping back and asking the question of why the US is involved in the conflict there in the first place? And to what extent the US is really threatened by people on the other side of the planet?

> why the US is involved in the conflict there in the first place?

Active and believable threats directed at the US, including sending resources and fighters to actively engage the US. It'd be great if we could give just give Iraq a ring and ask them to go shove a boot up these folks other-sides, but since they're massively losing cities and land to these warlords, they're not really in a place to handle the situation themselves. Something about a terrorist group taking large swathes of your land, borderline enslaving your people into forced labor and selling the pretty ones as "wives" to be raped endlessly kind of makes it hard to function as a normal country.

> to what extent the US is really threatened by people on the other side of the planet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_li...

+ June 2016

+ November 2016

+ October 2017

> Active and believable threats directed at the US

American police kill more Americans than do terrorists. I'd call that an active and believable threat:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...

https://www.newsweek.com/how-many-americans-do-cops-kill-eac...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerome-karabel/police-killing...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/police-violence-us-cops-killed-...

So when will the war on police start?

Total or innocents?

The guilty are citizens (and people) too, you know. Inalienable rights and all?

I don't remember Iraq having quite such a problem with its territorial integrity before the US invaded, disbanded its army, and allowed its munitions dumps to be looted by anyone with a truck.

The June 2016 incident, the "Pulse" nightclub mass shooting, is a good case in point. The person involved wasn't "sent" to the US, he was a US-born national living in the US who'd never visited the middle East. He seems to have been radicalised by speech in the same way that other mass shooters were.

>He seems to have been radicalised by speech in the same way that other mass shooters were.

During his calls to 911 he said directly that the US bombing campaigns in the Middle East led to his mass shooting. He seems to be a direct example of how backwards US policy is.

Those are like 1 incident per year. So the US spends billions in conflicts to prevent a handful of such incidents, which could even be considered relatively minor compared to the regular mass shootings in the US? Is it even preventing them or creating them when it's killing so many indiscriminately with drone strikes over there?

Could that money not be spent better elsewhere to prevent other types of deaths? I think the U.S. and American politicians accept increases in budgets to the military so easily, that they don't even think about whether or not those resources are used effectively anymore.

You spent thousands to be treated for cancer, despite only having one tumor a year? Clearly you should be spending that money on a gym membership instead...

It's hard to wage terrorist activities when you're fighting a literal multi-sided war.

All the problems now faced by the US were created by the US. By continuing without acknowledging this there will no doubt be more similar future problems.

Especially when some sides of it have received your money and weapons....

Plus there's the issue of how many terrorist attacks there would be if there was indeed no response.

We all know the answer to that one: we'd all be living under "amateur" Taliban, Mafias and worse anywhere near any large city, with constant public executions for "sacrilege" and for "competing" with the Mafia, and for ... There would be no international (or generally non-private) flights, and so on.

Your examples all occurred after we suspended individual liberties and spent untold fortunes and lives to stop it. Would you conclude that to be a successful strategy?

How many Americans were harmed? How many innocent people got killed or injured by American response to those events?

What about the innocent people freed by the American response to those events? Or do Iraq citizens being raped and murdered not count? Do we include the tally for terrorist events in the UK, France and other allies as well?

"Oh hey, yeah, sorry that a terrorist group armed someone to shoot up a gay nightclub, we feel real bad about that, but we need at least a hundred more people killed before we can do anything."

That's also a good question. So, do we have any rough estimates?

> we need at least a hundred more people killed before we can do anything.

That's the usual response to white mass shooters in the US, yes. Especially in response to discussions of gun control.

A book recommendation: The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives by Zbigniew Brzezinski [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard

so you're saying because the current legal framework doesn't allow you to randomly start military actions in other countries' territory without their consent, that the legal framework is wrong?

Maybe as a thought experiment, try applying similar logic the other way around: should any other country have gotten involved in e.g. the Ferguson situation? If so, would that be considered an act of war by the US?

If the "Ferguson situation" involved collaborators seeking to secede a section of the US/overthrow of US gov't and had a proven history of using mass casualty tactics to achieve it and the US government had asked for that countries help and had approved those tactics? ... Then no, that would not be considered an act of war.

that's a very long list of "if"s, and they don't all apply to the situations today.

See for example Pakistan:

"Pakistan has repeatedly protested these attacks as an infringement of its sovereignty and because civilian deaths have also resulted, including women and children, which has further angered the Pakistani government and people."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan#Paki...

Of course it makes them angry and it should. These type of operations should be handled with the gravest responsibility and killing dozens of noncombatants just because they're gathered for a wedding, for example, is an outrage and beyond unacceptable. But do you think these operations are happening without the approval of the Pakistani government, or do you think those statements are for domestic consumption?

It's not OK to kill civilians in Pakistan regardless of what the Pakistani government may or may not privately think about it.

But that's not what's happening. Pakistani militants have planned and executed attacks on US citizens in the US and Afghanistan. Bin Laden lived there and coordinated from northern Pakistan for a decade after 9/11. The operations are targeting criminals who have committed and conspired to commit murder, not an indiscriminate campaign of murder against random citizens of Pakistan. Many innocent Pakistani people (and a Pakistani PM) have been killed by these groups. It's not morally cut and dry.

From wikipedia (see above):

"the US policy of considering all military-age males in a strike zone as militants"

In other words: even IF you assume that killing someone because they're "militants" is automatically okay, the people "pulling the trigger" barely ever know who they're killing, yet they retroactively count them as "probably bad enough to be droned".

John Oliver had a good segment on the issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4NRJoCNHIs

Pray tell. There is international law, and international law. There is NO international law. Law exists where you have clear laws, a clear and separate way to determine how it applies in situations, and a way to rectify situations afterwards, and an enforcement mechanism ... So thankfully none of that exists, all there is is some vague international documents nobody actually respects. Not the US, not Europe, and certainly no-one else.

For instance, one part of international law said that France and the UK (and several others) would declare war on Russia if Russia ever violated the territory of the Ukraine, which it did when it annexed Crimea ... [1]

Is it that "legal framework" you're talking about (international treaties) ? Why don't you complain that a new world war wasn't started, despite the "legal framework" (ie. international treaties) stating that we should to respond to Russia's provocation ?

Weird how people have such selective application of law and weird interpretations.

Interpretations ? Yes, by the way. Why don't you go through those human rights treaties, and verify these questions for me ?

1) if you take actions against a foreign state or military without wearing a uniform, what rights do you have ? None. You can be shot on sight, with collateral damage around you (no limits, so theoretically we could nuke terrorists), by a foreign force, on the territory of a different state than the one controlling the foreign force.

2) WHO makes the determination if you fall under that category from question 1) ? The "on the ground" commander of the force shooting you. This decision is final and cannot be contested by courts afterwards.

3) It does not matter why that force is there, whether they're invading, just visiting, protecting dignitaries, or in fact just entering that territory to eliminate terrorists.

Read through the human rights treaties (start here [2]) and point out where I'm wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

[2] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Okay... there is no internationally ( or perhaps even nationally) accepted concensus on legalized killing for the reasons you enumerated.

Now what?

So something is missing in international laws. A country can only declare war to another country, so one might ask : what if conventions about wars were to be modified to include this: allow a country to formally declare war to an organization ? I know this won't happen because of many arguments: it is too tempting to limit the level of recognition of the opposite side, especially fighters who are just "terrorists" and not called soldiers ; it is easier also to do what you want when there is no law, even for countries at war as they see more efficiency when there is no formal control. So the dilemna is : either there is more formalization of wars with countries vs terror groups, to allow for better rules and control for avoiding civilian casualties and not breeding new generations of terrorists ourselves, with the downside of legitimizing those terror groups (which might help them on the long run) and losing efficiency in the fight, or we allow ourselves to act as what many can describe as murderers, because of the blind killings of civilians by drones. It is a lose-lose situation, so the choice is really about who we want to be.

Efficiency is important. Being morally distinguishable from the people you are trying to kill is important.

I don't know. I don't even know that I'd want to be making those decisions. But I thought the discussion was getting reduced to a caricature of the actual issue, and wanted to elevate it. It strikes me like the trolley problem in that there may not be a "good" solution, let alone one that everyone can agree on.

I'm just as curious about your ideas, honestly.