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Comment by Banthum | Hacker News Reader

In war we regularly maim and kill teenagers, using bullets and explosives. This is entirely intentional and done to save our troops and our people and to win the conflict.

If it's necessary to win a fight that matters, and it works, it is okay.

See: allied bombing campaigns in WW2 wherein we intentionally roasted thousands of babies and grandmas.

The self-indulgent alternative is a recipe for extinction. And you can't have much influence over the world if you're not there.

If you're not brutal enough, you just end up handing the future to someone more brutal, which is itself a wrong. Just like it'd be wrong to let the Nazis take Europe because you didn't want to roast babies and grandmas.

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We're not fighting an army on the battlefield (the bombings is a particularly bad example because it's a frequent example of atrocities committed on the allied side), we're talking about arresting loosely organized criminals who are deprived of the right to a trial and detained indefinitely. This isn't an episode of 24 where there's a bomb that will go off and rough a guy up for the passcode. This is waterboarding people for 16 hours a day for months on end in secret prisons unaccountable to the rule of law. And no, even if it helped save lives, the moral repugnance of what we've been doing does not absolve us of moral responsibility for our actions and policies.

See: allied bombing campaigns in WW2 wherein we intentionally roasted thousands of babies and grandmas.

See: War Crimes

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

You might not like it, but the GP has a point in that this is how war is usually conducted.

Trying to sweep it under the rug is, IMO, morally wrong all by itself. If you're doing something, at least admit it. Not all of the things GP is talking about are considered warcrimes, and it's sometimes a word thrown around to make it look like we care about something after the fact, but we still do it.

It is how war is usually conducted, and perhaps there is a justification for total war if something poses an existential threat.

But you need to consider this in the context of actual reality, where nearly all "war" is really a police action taken extrajudicially by ultrapowerful states against guerilla groups or civilian populations in order to ensure the dominance and power of wealthy global interests. Every war in the cold war was like this.

The doctrine of the acceptability of mass slaughter of innocents is how the people with weapons have chosen to use them in these non-existential "wars" but that isn't a justification for that choice.

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