Or, God forbid, Iran kills 30 Saudis in Saud.

We've been exposed to so much propaganda that we instinctively know what is "worse", and who is "allowed" to kill without due process.

Just imagine China start to playing news such like this in those concentration camps, free golden material for showing people how rightful it is to follow the lead of CCP I'd say.

While it is true the U.S. is benefiting from it's strong global influence, but it is also true that nobody wants to be threatened. If the U.S. don't want to be the good guy in this game, at least don't be the bad one.

That war is absurd and should have stopped a long time ago. It's just fueling more terrorism. All western countries should leave the middle east, for good, forever (except maybe the odd ship to secure shipping lanes and stuff like that, but you get my point).

If you don't think that way, assuming that you're from US, you should demand an answer for each and every civilian death.

The normalizing of imperialistic murder abroad is not an anomaly; it is a core part of US identity. The US itself is a product of imperialistic murder, its crowning achievement even.

To this day US soldiers deployed abroad use the term “indian country” to designate occupied territory where they conduct counter-insurgency operations. That term dates back to counter-insurgency operations conducted by the very same institution against Native Americans until 100 years ago. What was once abroad is now domestic - such is the nature of empire.

“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.

“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone pilot targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.

Small change, large impact on the takeaway.

I have watched Restrepo on Netflix and found one thing interesting, that biggest thing soldiers have missed in their civilian lives is the adrenaline/joy rush of a shoot-out, no matter how dangerous it is. Paradoxically most of the interviewees are clearly suffering from some levels of PTSD, because probably you cannot be trained for when you see your friend's body/face to be blown apart.

It would be interesting to hear from someone in the military or someone with military psychology training knowledge, how this works. Seems that soldiers are fine with killing "the enemy", but seeing death of your friends gives you (understandably) PTSD.

It’s as bleak and distressing as you can imagine. Here’s a couple to get you started:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/life-as-a-dron...

https://dronecenter.bard.edu/burdens-war-crews-drone-aircraf...

Even being in a conventional aircraft you are largely removed from the situation because you are thousands (or tens of thousands) of feet above your target and any individual is an unrecognizable speck that your weapon system strikes after you're already well past your target.

This is a problem, for society, with modern warfare. You can sit a mile away and 'paint' a target with IR for someone else to fire a missile with, or you can call in on your radio coordinates and have artillery take out your target from even farther away, or you can effectively emulate a video game and drop a bomb on a few pixels in Afghanistan while sitting in an air conditioned trailer in Nevada. You can wage war without ever having to see the face of the enemy, you strip the enemy of their humanity making it easier to kill.

I imagine some drone operators struggle with severe depression but I imagine it's generally less than an infantrymen that was in CQB firefights in Ramadi or Fallujah or a trench in WWI.

Modern warfare allows us to be cold and calculating, it allows us to pause our humanity. It's good for a military but it's bad for civilization.

Most likely they went home, slept soundly, thinking it was a good day, god and country, etc.

Shall we just let Israel get wiped off the map while we are at it?

Edit: “they” in my sentence is IS, and Al-Qaeda, if that wasn’t obvious.

> Civilians dying is bad and we should avoid it, but it’s obviously not morally dispositive since we do it too.

Of course the killing of civilians is "morally dispositive." If civilians were accidentally killed in the strike our military will exhibit some accountability, and if civilians were deliberately targeted it would be a crime and it would be prosecuted.

When the Taliban kills civilians, that's the point. The civilians are the target.

Civilian deaths are an outrage but there's no moral equivalence between the parties or their actions.

> If a foreign power occupied America, Americans would do the exact same thing. In fact, that’s what Americans did during the Revolution. You can’t hope to make sense of the issue unless you morally analyze the ends for which people are fighting. Islamic State is wrong and must be stamped out because the end for which they’re fighting is wrong. Americans fighting the British to establish a Republic, by contrast, is right.

We aren't talking about the Islamic State, we're talking about the Taliban.

This just scratches the surface of how badly you misunderstand the conflict. There are a number of parties involved in the conflict in Afghanistan - including the Taliban and IS - and some of them are our allies. It is literally nothing like Americans fighting the revolution.

(in that bizarre analogy, we would be... France?)

Killing civilians accidentally is virtually guaranteed when engaging in military action.

So the tactics are extremely different in why they work, if they work at all. They are very different in the percentage of military vs civilians killed. They are very different in intention. The fact that they share some aspects in common doesn’t make them the same.

Then of course it might be the case here that civilians were targeted, by mistake or on purpose. But the parent point is quite valid.

Imagine that, say, China blew up 30 Americans in the US with a missile. And their reaction was, “sorry, my bad, I thought they were terrorists.”

Can you imagine the response? I think we’d have a nuclear war before the end of the day.

I remember in the early days of our being in Afghanistan, there were a few media pieces reporting that they remembered the last time the British were there, 100 or 150 years ago. The tone was very much that it was somehow surprising the Afghans brought this up again.

Yet Britain and the US are built on national history, myths and memories. The US has a huge national story around independence and the push west into the frontier. The UK has our tales and myths of 1940 and 1066. Scots still remember "the 45" (that's 1745). Why wouldn't Afghanistan or Iraq?

And the worst thing is: from a policy perspective (obviously not arguing about every single US citizen) that's really hard to argue with, given which countries the US has entered into armed conflicts with, which groups of people are most picked upon by politicians, etc.

isn't there though? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49764305

Or maybe because one was a tactical op gone horribly wrong based on bad intel from the ground, and the other was a well planned and highly coordinated strategic op designed to destabilize international markets?

This is how the cycle of violence is perpetuated.

Better?

The trouble with judging by actions is it makes everybody bad, including the judge! I suspect that's why people don't like it. Since nearly everyone believes their own intentions are good, judging by intentions preserves their own sense of goodness even if they contribute to a few killings by accident/negligence.

"A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout"

Then what does the IS represent to you? The good guys?

Only if the motive for dropping those bombs is to advance a political/ideological agenda.

We need to be very clear that "terrorism" has a very specific meaning. It's not just a group or individual who terrorises.

The world as we know it, the progress in art, science, and humanities. The cures for polio, infant mortality and poverty dropping.

The website you are currently using to spread poison.

Those are all “_What USA does_”

Cut it out with this evil language.

Yes, of course it does. Hell, even on the recent 9/11 HN thread there were people who said they joined the military after the towers collapsed. It's only natural reaction when your nation gets attacked, and it works the same everywhere.

It's best to think of this as a single self-perpetuating process, with a strong feedback loop of hate and suffering inside. So the US bombs some Muslim countries, and eventually some group manages to pull off a 9/11 in retaliation. US reacts to this by utterly destroying several countries, and in reaction, ISIS is born. Which then US and others attempt to bomb out of existence. Rinse, lather, repeat. A kills B's people, B retaliates by killing A's people, A retaliates to retaliation by killing B's people, ...

It's so sad that you don't know this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver

>Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'

>As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

>(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

> Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks?

Yes? E.g. after the murder of Lee Rigby in the UK there was a small wave of attempted arson on mosques.

As opposed to your elected politicians and your military having blown up his daughter at her wedding, scattering her remains over a wide enough area that it is hard even finding anything to bury.

Makes sense.

The only way you're going to get someone mad enough for that, is if the militia you equipped happens to inflict similar cruelties, or you otherwise mess with his nation in a way that is more than just an inconvenience.

If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug. If the US killed my family members and I had no recourse...

Terrorism is a political tactic coming from a power asymmetry and is labeled as such due to this power dynamic as a consequence of who controls the narrative.

The devil is always in the detail, but generally speaking terrorists are violent combatants who pursue certain political goals, but don't have a regular army, and at some point in their life unfortunately accepted the idea that it is legitimate to intentionally harm or kill civilians to reach those goals. Accepting this horrible idea is what makes them terrorists.

All three of your assertions are wrong, regardless. And you have no business judging 'appropriateness'. Of course there are criminals that take advantage of situations, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that they are not the types that blow themselves up to make a quick buck.

USA should better rush with million dollar offers to families, along with apologies, of course.

How many families were put out by 9/11? About 3000. And you call that an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan etc etc etc. So 3000 American lives, taken by Saudi Arabian citizens, cost the lives of millions across the world so that the American people can feel good about their hegemony?

Al-Qaeda won that war before the US even left their own soil. They had one aim, bring about the end of the USA, and they did it by getting your own government to strip away civil liberties overnight, and you didn't even care.

It's tempting to suggest, "or if we had done a better job with our meddling", but... no, it just doesn't work, empirically so, and we should stop doing it.

Unfortunately, pushing diplomatic solutions hard would be political suicide in the US; the "us vs. them" mentality is strong here, and I don't think most Americans would be ok with what they'd see as giving in or giving up. And even if the politics at home could work, it's unclear if all that many on the other side are interested in a diplomatic solution, given how radicalized some of them have become due to our recklessness and hubris.

What’s worse though is that it’s given us a general apathy toward the bureaucratic abuse of immigrants that happens everywhere. I live in Denmark, we have a place called Sjælsmark, which is an internment camp for immigrants who weren’t granted asylum but refused to leave. I understand why some people would go “well they could just leave”, but there are children in that camp who’ve been there for years. That would have caused a public outcry throughout danish society 25 years ago. I know because that’s exactly what happened during the Balkan wars where society as a whole cake together and did what the government failed to do, and actually integrated the “unwanted” as the decent thing to do.

After 18 years of anti-Islamic sentiment, however, we instead talked about putting the “unwanted” on a prison island to isolate them even further.

That’s what 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Batavian and so on has done to Europe.

The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out and murder people living next door to you without consequence. The humiliation and rage and sense of powerlessness and living every day knowing that they'll do it again and nobody will do anything about it simply festers. These are key ingredients in growing terrorists. This is how you make terrorists. Humilation and anger and a sense of powerlessness and that the perpetrator will face no justice.

When some idiot boy shoots up an office in Paris there's a guilty party, a reckoning with a body (or an arrest), a name, an investigation and professional state employees actively going after someone, actively pursuing justice (very different to the state doing no more than shrugging and saying "yeah, that's the USA for you, they murder you and your neighbours, nothing we can do about it"). There is a qualitative difference; the key ingredients above aren't present. Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s) and that they are being pursued; someone is seeking justice on your behalf.

If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?

On the face of it, not terrorists.

2) False equivalent, if you think the USA should be held to the same standards that we hold the terrorists to then effectively the USA have become terrorists as well.

3) The EU has taken its attacks so far quite well, no other countries were invaded, no mass deportations or murders of muslims or immigrants have happened. Unfortunately this bs has shifted the political climate.

Please try to argue your case better.

Isn’t it just a little ironic that one of our “allies” was harboring OBL?

Lesson learned: nukes are a VERY effective deterrent to foreign invasion. That’s what we’re teaching countries in the Middle East.

It does[0].

> It’s not like Pakistan is running low on terrorists or the state intelligence service ISI isn’t sponsoring their activities.

I don't know how to respond to that, since there isn't a question in there, just a belligerent statement. I suppose the best way is to simply not engage.

[0]: http://pakistanbodycount.org/definitions.html