http://www.pagat.com/war/war.html All past wars have had beheadings and raping and pillaging and burning and things not yet mentioned in this thread. War is Hell. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. True enough. We've starved them, isolated them, infected them, robbed them, and armed their enemies. We don't always have to bomb them, at least not directly anyway. I'm a live and let live kind of guy, but our military-industrial complex has been doing bad things to Arabs for decades upon decades and I don't think they share the same philosophy. I don't think they will ever forgive "Americans", which means the MIC has succeeded in establishing a permanent cash cow at the expense of Real Americans.
It's like the difference between 2nd-hand knowledge and 1st-hand knowledge. 2nd-hand: One is mad when he hears of oppression to others. (Before Cheney & Bush, Arabs merely disliked the U.S. for backing up the Israeli occupation.) 1st-hand: But when he himself feels the pain, with his relatives tortured and killed, it gets personal. (Now Arabs will hate the U.S. for at least a century.) Torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis has consequences. Allied leaders warned Republicans of this (and the hasty lack of planning) in 2001-03, and there were some articles about it, but the bloodthirsty Cheney faction couldn't wait to flip the world upside-down. Welcome to the world your side created. In the long run, it just means that the U.S. will financially die a generation earlier, i.e. China takes over the world around 2030 instead of 2060 as nations buy less of our stuff, a resentment which began in 2003. In some international economic sectors, it will be useful for China to put U.S.-hating Arabs into power over us, to wreak personal revenge for the deaths of their innocent fathers, mothers, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins.
Difference between first-hand and second-hand knowledge: (2nd-hand) "I watch the news/read the paper/scour housemom blogs/etc. and try to pretend that everything that happens militarily today is a result of neo-con-ism and MIC, regurgitating talking points I 'learned' 40 years ago" (1st-hand) "I've been there, seen raw intel, talked to people, seen how the media messes it up (on purpose or accidentally or based on just not enough info), and still care enough to try to tell people how messed up their opinions are, but it's not working. And now those people are saying 'it's cool to target American women and children in their homes, because, well, I read that a bunch of people are dead and I just assumed it had to be the fault of the Americans'."
2nd hand - the war is in someone else's country, bombs falling on their homes 1st hand - the war is here.
Brian, We do use spy satellites to track opposition military figures and use drones to strike them, no? Isn't it symmetric that they do the same? War sucks.
No, and I'm wondering why the asymmetry isn't being understood by most. I get the fictional characters just being fictional characters, but the others of you make me wonder if I'm just not explaining things well enough. A) We're not 'at war' with any country. Our government is being asked by the nations involved, NATO or the UN to help governments stop people within their borders from committing crimes of such heinous nature that the President's only option left is to use the military (and not even the "normal" military--niches like cargo planes, special forces and a bunch of reservists and national guardsmen). B) In your drone example, we can't target law-abiding citizens. We can't say "Ahmad looks like he's a sketchy raghead. Have the drone follow him to his house and kill him." Hell, we can't even say "that guy is known to supply money to terrorists. Kill him." or "I'm pretty sure he went to a mosque with a bad guy. Kill him". Now, have people been killed due to faulty intelligence? Sure. Have 'informants' played their allies for personal vendettas? Of course. But those are the vast minority, and those have to be explained or else operations get shut down. We aren't like the administrations in the past that correlated body count to success. C) there wasn't a US military presence in Iraq post-2011. We left. And amazingly enough, people kept getting killed in more creative ways by more people who thought that, now that there wasn't a "sheriff" in town, they could act with impunity. To the point that Iraq/UN asked us to help, again, so we are, again. Believe me, most members of the military aren't chomping at the bit to go back. D) Even if you believe that all's fair in wartime symmetry, the rest of the world disagrees. That's why we have the Geneva Convention and international laws on war, among other things. It doesn't matter if I'm absolutely convinced that we should practice symmetry and rape women, behead people who aren't my religion, set on fire our prisoners, etc. It's not allowed, even if it's "symmetric" to what the bad guys are doing. I'm not allowed to eradicate a tribe of people, knowing that if I leave a boy alive his tribal culture makes him hold a vendetta against his perceived "enemy" until fulfilled. E) If it's a matter of them just going after the military member, as a matter of "symmetry", then I could almost understand that. Going after the military families as well? Not OK. But if you're still cool with people doing this, you better be cool when habeus corpus in the US gets suspended and I just start militarily eliminating perceived threats in my area of operations, which just got opened up from being 8000 miles away to my backyard and every city where ISIS just posted an address and a call to action. Or, wait, did that just get symmetrical for you, too?
So this is bullshit? http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2...ed-al-shabaab-leader-tied-mall-attack/107919/
I don't understand. Is what bullshit? That the US, working with the government of the country involved, killed someone who had performed an operation claimed by a terrorist organization?
That we target opposition leaders with our drones. From our POV, it is just. From their POV, it is tit for tat. If we stir up hornets' nests, we have to deal with the hornets. FWIW, I don't think we should be working with governments' "permission" to drop bombs in foreign countries. If we're at war, declare war and let's go to town. I don't think our government particularly acts in our best interests - more in its own interests. I don't think any different of foreign nations' governments. Plus, I am pretty sure we influence those foreign governments through all sorts of means, to allow us to strike who and where we want. In many cases, we don't have permission (Pakistan?).
In ONE case, we didn't have permission in Pakistan. And even that was because of other issues. And while there may be "influence" on foreign governments, that happens all the time...it's called diplomacy. We're doing it right now with Russia and Ukraine and Venezuela and Cuba and Iran and .... The difference is that in this case, we are operating violently as the host government wants us to, rather than through sanctions or withholding trade or whatever. If we weren't operating as they want us to, they don't let us (see: not using the Main Supply Route in Pakistan, or not being allowed to use Russian airspace, or air bases in Saudi for combat operations, or Karzai not signing the SoFA). We don't target "opposition leaders". We execute justice on people who can be proven (or who have confessed openly) to have committed crimes. If they happen to be someone who has committed enough of these acts that they are the head of a group, well, that sucks for them. I disagree with the notion that we stirred up anything.
We execute justice on people without a trial. If we're at war, declare war and let's go to town. The US being the world's policemen (actually, judge/jury/executioner) is only going to make the bad guys want to retaliate. It's just questionable, at best, that some "country" could invite us in to effect combat yet the people might be in revolt against that government. Hell, even in the USA you'd only get roughly 1/2 the people to support anything the government wants to do.
Nothing is our fault, because we wear the white hats and they wear the black hats. God is on our side, and he doesn't screw things up, so we don't either.
Man, you folks who think that ISIS brutality is about repayment in kind for drone strikes are totally off the mark, from what I've read. These guys are dedicated to the notion that they are bringing about a caliphate that will take over the world, eliminate the infidels (which by their definition is anyone who does not ascribe to their 7th century view of Islam), and are willing to do whatever it takes to bring that vision about. These beheadings and other atrocities are calculated to draw the West into a holy war that will cause all of Islam to rise up and join them in their vision of jihad. If you think that it's just the military families who are on that list that are in danger, you're sadly mistaken. It's any "infidel" that they think stands in their way or even who may be useful in advancing their cause by spreading terror. This article from the Atlantic is a pretty good assessment, IMO. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
We do that all the time here. Which is why deadly force is used. If a suspect draws a weapon on a cop, he gets shot without a trial. If it looks like a kidnapper is about to kill his victim, he gets executed without a trial. And that's here, where arguable we have the most robust laws and the most citizen protection of just about anyone, anywhere. Even if the politicians "declare war", we can't indiscriminately kill, rape, loot, plunder, behead, set on fire, urinate on victims, desecrate religious objects, have sex with farm animals, etc. Doesn't matter that the enemy does. You don't get to use "symmetry". What do you think "going to town" would entail that we're not already doing? No, bad guys want to "retaliate" because they're being stopped from doing what made them "bad guys' in the first place. The US didn't start anything from Morocco to Pakistan. They weren't the ones who reneged on the Israel/Palestine solution in 1948. They didn't start the Iran/Iraq war, and they didn't cause Saddam to invade Kuwait. The US didn't start the Arab Spring. EDIT: What eblazer said as well, while I was typing It's a pretty well-established international law, with many precedents. But, as shown very recently, normal citizens (at least here) don't get to tell other countries stuff that contradicts the government. If Bush invited the Mexican Army to provide security by shooting looters during Hurricane Katrina, I couldn't shoot the "invaders" without being convicted of murder (and most likely, be killed before I could finish).
Arabs have been doing bad things to others, including other Arabs, for millenia. It's not some religious thing, though that's handily used as an excuse. It's not some "anti-progressivism" thing, since the Islamic world was at the forefront of education and learning as late as the Renaissance. It's criminality, pure and simple, as wrong today as it was in 1939 or 622. It's greed, barbarism, bloodlust, etc., and it doesn't deserve to be allowed to live. Real Americans are doing their best to follow orders from people who think they know the best way to protect Americans.
What we do here is what we do here, bound by our laws. Going to town means > 1M boots on the ground, a draft if necessary.
