Skashion said:
pominoz said:
Do not go down the racist route Skansh, you are better than that, there were many Brown/black civilians in the UK,USA and Aus that were victims.
It is about ideology not race.
I have a simple concept, every innocent life is equal. It doesn't matter to me whether it's a British civilian, an American civilian or a Pakistani or an Afghan civilian. I always believe the lives of civilians should be placed ahead of the lives of soldiers, because soldiers signed up with a risk of dying. They consented to it. Civilians don't. There should never be a situation where fifty civilians die to kill one terrorist. The civilised and morally right thing to do is to risk soldiers who consented to fight, to go and arrest them if possible, kill if not. Terrorists should be extracted, charged, and if found guilty sentenced and imprisoned. We did it to Nazi war criminals. It should be what we are doing now. The reality is that the life of a Pakistani or Afghan civilian is worth considerably less than a British or American soldier, and that should not be the case. That is wrong and it is racism. However, we are even getting beyond this right now aren't we.
Go on, try to justify signature strikes to me. Signature strikes for those who don't know are where the identity is unknown and it simply just looks like they might be up to something dodgy i.e. there's no evidence. People on here are somewhat misinformed about the nature of these drone strikes. It is not only civilians in the vicinity of terrorists who are killed, but simply people who fit a pattern. Go on, justify killing someone without evidence. Please, make my day, and fucking justify that for me.
A good post and it highlights two of the biggest problems with modern warfare. Bizarrely, there are rules for warfare which most governments have signed up to. Soldiers of these countries have to follow these rules on how they engage in an “ethical” war.
“Terrorists” ignore these. “Terrorists” do not wear uniforms. “Terrorists” shield themselves with innocent members of the local population; they use women and children not only as shields, but also as weapons, particularly in suicide attacks. They stash weapons, equipment and personnel in schools and medical centres to profit from the press when these places are attacked. They plant shrapnel bombs in packed markets, which are usually filled with women and children.
It is not possible for a modern “ethical” army to fight terrorists and insurgents in a man to man battle. The war is dirty and it is deliberately made so, because for every soldier in the combat area, there is the world press. These “terrorists” are not stupid; they know how to use media to manipulate the situation. Nothing makes you choke on your morning cornflakes more than a dead child on the front page. And if anyone can get rid of or change a government they don’t like, then it’s those people reading that newspaper, the public, the voters.
Which is my second point. There is a very dirty war being fought here, but then war has always been dirty, the only thing that has really changed is the amount of media coverage, now you know it’s dirty, previously you didn’t. You can now ride the actual bomb in on YouTube, right through the house window, you can watch the chain-gun on the Apache attack helicopter rip up the enemy “technicals” in real time, as it happened, body parts and all. There was a recent thread on Bomber Command, when the RAF / USAAF were firebombing the civilian populations of the major German cities in WW2, if the hideous photographs and footage that exist of the aftermath of those raids was circulated everyday in media at the time, I wonder if that would have swayed the actions of the then government?
