The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    How Foreign Policy People Think, Part IV

    By Michael Maiello on Fri, 06/20/2014 - 2:20pm | Politics

    This time, from Rand scholar Karl P. Mueller, about civilian casualties in the event of air strikes against Iraq:

    "The popular impression that the deployment of airpower automatically makes conflicts more deadly for civilians is a myth. Large-scale, indiscriminate bombing can certainly kill large numbers of noncombatants, but the United States hasn’t conducted such attacks in more than 40 years. In Libya, every bomb dropped by coalition aircraft was precision-guided, and the civilian death toll may have been as low as one per hundred bombs used."

    So, every hundred times they dropped a bomb they killed somebody who was not in the war.  The death toll for the recalled GM Ion car was 5.9 per 100,000.

    Amazing what passes for acceptable these days.

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      Human Rights Watch said that we killed about 72 Libyan civilians.  While you may not consider that "acceptable",  it is low.  Civilian casualties are a good reason to be antiwar, but I can't concede that any war in which any civilians are killed is immoral. That would make the defeat of genocide in Rwanda immoral, and World War II, of course, would have to be written off.


    by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 06/20/2014 - 7:47pm

    The idea that civilian casualties are acceptable is offensive to me. Wrong place, wrong time? What about their dramas and comedies? One human life contains multitudes.

    Not intervening in Rwanda May well have been a great choice. But nobody will get credit for that.

     

     

     

     


    by Michael Maiello on Sat, 06/21/2014 - 12:39am

    I don't have the link cause it is the middle of the night, but I read this critique of Slaughterhouse-Five.

    Vonnegut is attacked because 120,000 folks were not killed in the Dresden Bombings--just 20 or 30 thousand.

    I cannot laugh at this.

    I want to because the critique seems so MAD!

    Collateral Damage. One hell of a phrase.

    I am not in charge, I have not read the files (neither have any of the media critics) and it is hard for me to judge.

    If I am in London from 1940 on, I could give one goddamn how many Germans were killed during the Dresden bombings.

    I am sure about that.

    We have lost 6,000 soldiers in two wars in a decade? And the way I figure it from the readings I have seen, hundreds of thousands of 'the enemy' are dead?  Remember Vietnam? Every single week we were told that ten times our 'losses' were incurred by the 'enemy'.

    I have before about 'collateral damage' and of course those 6,000 we have lost amounts to tens of thousands through suicide and such.

    It is not enough to just conclude that war will always be with us.

    But to see Dicky Cheney boasting about his wonderful ethos, enrages me to no end.

    I am meandering again, but thank you for this series.

    I just am having problems dealing with the real issues here.


    by Richard Day on Sat, 06/21/2014 - 6:01am