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Comment by helaoban | Hacker News Reader

>Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.

Are we the baddies?

P.S I wonder what was extracted in exchange for a Saturday publish date.

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Combat veteran here. One time I almost killed a civilian due to a split second misidentification. I didn't shoot because something just seemed a little "off" but to this day I'm not sure what. I'm so glad that I didn't shoot. No normal person wants to kill someone, and especially not a bystander.

The problem is the people we fought did everything they could to look like civilians. They would carry trash bags full of bombs, and dress like women to hide weapons under loosely fitting clothing. This has the obvious effect of causing Americans to suspect normal, everyday activities as terrorist operations. Add to that the facts that things are hard to see at engagement distance and a failure to engage the enemy effectively will result in greater casualties on our side, and it's a recipe for misidentification.

It turns out the woman I almost killed was "washing" her dishes in a pothole of a road after a rainstorm. I had never seen someone do that before and her dish was a large metal bowl that resembled a common type of armor piercing IED. I don't know why I didn't kill her. I can't imagine the regret I would feel had I taken her life.

Thanks for sharing. This is my experience serving over there as well. The enemy uses civilians as a shield as much as possible.

Thanks for sharing and I’m glad you and her are both okay. Well, who knows maybe somebody else ended up shooting her since the.

I can’t help but feel like you are blaming the victims. The bottom line is that those are civilians who were killed by US military. When the most powerful military in the world invades and occupies a country it can’t expect its people to fight according to its rules and expectations. And when those occupied people indeed fight back it does not justify the killing hundreds of thousands of civilians by the US military.

The most powerful military in the world doesn't mean it can identify citizen from enemy combatants 100% of time. A lot of this is kinda meaningless to discuss without some sort of comparison to what other militaries false-positive rates are. Where is the US rank in mis-identification and accidental civilian killings in modern wars?

It's not as simple as placing all blame on one side. Had guerrilla tactics not been used then collateral would be greatly reduced. Both sides have to be equally willing to kill civillians.

The most powerful military in the world is not powerful enough to be completely invincible to modern weapons accessible to guerilla fighters. They cannot just come close and check that the person they are facing is actually a peaceful bystander, and not a carefully concealed guerilla fighter waiting to hurt them. They could try to, but the casualties among them would be significant. US Marines are not WH40k Marines yet.

>And when those occupied people indeed fight back

That too was my understanding for the longest time. However Jocko Wilink (today a podcaster, then a Seal commander fighting in Ramadi) specifically said that the people wanted them there and most of the people they fought were either teenagers being paid to plant IEDs (basically the same as the drugs gangs in the US who will pay teenagers to be lookouts and mules), former Sadam regime people or foreign fighters.

Maybe. But we need hard evidence which we can examine before we reject the most logical explanation wrt who is fighting the invading forces. Obviously we expect that the bulk of the fighters are the invaded are resisting the invaders.

Indeed, the bulk of the fighters were old Sadam people. When the US took over and destroyed the regime all of these people were out of a job, and used to being evil they began to fight back.

> Are we the baddies?

Yes, we are the baddies. This is where a large portion of our tax dollars go instead of providing the people in the US with universal healthcare, public housing, high-speed rail, etc.

Instead of building a better life for all the people, the US destroys the lives of others for some very small amount of people to become filthy rich.

Now on to the next manufactured conflict with China [0][1] and repeat what we have been doing for decades and well through the 20th century [2].

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/wearytolove/status/14309595626521...

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...

[2]: https://monthlyreview.org/product/washington-bullets/

> where a large portion of our tax dollars go instead of providing the people in the US with universal healthcare, public housing, high-speed rail, etc.

23.4% of the FY2022 DoD budget is for direct payments to personnel. Including health insurance for military members and their families. 1.2% in family support programs: child care, schools, etc. With about 1/3 of total funding going to some sort of job or benefit.

> Instead of building a better life for all the people

Like the 0.5% dedicated to DARPA, which among other things funded research in 2013 into rapid development of novel vaccines using mRNA platforms under the ADEPT program?

... I won't say 100% of the DoD budget is morally pristine. Or even most of it.

But it's a huge budget, and it funds a ton of good work that wouldn't otherwise be palatable to the legislative branch, but magically becomes so "because military."

So as the quip goes, American defense spending is as much about social welfare and foreign aid as it is about bombs and bullets.

> American defense spending is as much about social welfare and foreign aid

So all the headlines regarding missing piles of cash and appeasements being given to local child-abusing warlords etc was just a one-time thing, or fake, or...

What do you think warlords do with piles of cash? Sit on them?

Foreign aid essentially forever has amounted to delivering money to the least bad options, so that some of it trickles out to the people who actually need it.

You may find that morally reprehensible, but what's your proposed alternative?

This is such a sheltered take and ignores all the nuances of geopolitics.

Not to say the US hasn’t done bad things, but “High speed rail”? Really?

I agree with you that parent's post is lacking context and a bit crude on arguments, but i believe the message is pretty clear: it's bad doing violent and one could say anti-social politics instead of pro-social politics (whatever they are, let's not get into details). I fully believe that: yeah sure your opponents hide as civilians somehow because that's an effective tactic, so you have to admit you've lost: you cannot use force, because you're not able to (because you're too far, you're not understanding what's happening etc). Just stop doing wars you should have no business in. Eg in which your only business is just defending some aspect of your current power (some times completely unrelated to the proxy).

So you’re saying the US should just look at ISIS and say “not our problem”?

Should the US have done that in WW2? Korea?

ISIS emerged because the US decided to topple the governments of Iraq in the 200s and Syria in the 2010s.

Believe it or not, the Arab world can develop their own home grown terrorists just we we can. Don’t lay the blame of every social I’ll on the west. The Arab governments themselves have been fighting domestic terrorists for decades.

Domestic terrorists in the arab world isn't any of our (U.S.) business. They became our problem when we meddled in their business enough to motivate them to come after us. The US foreign policy created the problem, it could have largely been avoided.

Why might that be? Read up about how the West has been destabilising govt there for the best part of a century now, for oil (really accelerated after ww2, and what we did to Iran in the 60s...)

> The Arab governments themselves have been fighting domestic terrorists for decades.

Interestingly, those were the governments that the US sought to overthrow.

Probably.

No. ISIS would kill innocents in these kinds of numbers _on_purpose_. They also made a policy of hiding among civilians with the express intention of increasing the collateral damage. They're really, really bad.

We can and must do better. The brutality of an enemy doesn't justify this indifference to human life, nor the willful blindness, nor the dishonesty.

But I expect that the vast majority of people in the region are glad ISIS lost.

The military-industrial parasite that built your economy and feeds on perpetual war makes you the baddies. It's like cultural toxoplasmosis.

Yes, of course, and you could have known that with certainty since Wikileaks.

>Are we the baddies?

ISIS took civilians as sex slaves, sold them internally and _bragged about it_, so most assuredly no. They threw people suspected of being homosexual of roofs, they killed suspected traitors by drowning them in an iron cage and, lets not forget, they cut the heads of westerners and bragged about it on TV.

Only difference between them and the Nazies was that they were only able to do this on a small scale and that the Nazis tried to cover up what they were doing.

When you go to war, there are likely going to be civilian casualties. We should understand every one of these cases, ensure that mistakes are prevented and if somebody didn't follow orders they are punished.

But if we are not willing to go to war over civilian casualties, those who don't care are going to rule everything.

> if we are not willing to go to war over civilian casualties, those who don't care are going to rule everything.

So...the people attacking your troops because of their civilian casualties — no issues, right?

That is frequently taken for granted, but I haven't seen actual evidence of it.

And allies on the ground we worked with also had sex slaves..... [1]

The issue here is, there are no saints. And to claim any side if being saintly is throwing up blinders.

As a TLDR for the article. American soldier dismissed for incident involving an Afghan allie who spent money on "dancing boys" and had a young boy chained to a bed as a sex slave. Multiple incidents occured with other afghan militia allies, even on US Bases, US Military policy is essentially to ignore it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/military-overlook...

>Are we the baddies?

Yes, we are, and people will literally bury their heads in the sand every time our government cries about Russia, Iran, or China (despite the fact that none of those are invading any other countries). Not saying those countries never do bad things, but we are way worse, and even worse, we try to justify our actions with words like "democracy" and "freedom" which actually hurts those causes.

There is so much innocent blood on America's hands from just the last two decades alone, its really quite something unfathomable everytime I hear one of those CIA people cry about what Russia or China is doing.

You must be kidding or willfully ignoring the atrocities committed by Russia just in the last decade or two (occupying Crimea, Afghanistan, wars in Chechnya, Georgia and likely Kazakhstan sometime soon) or China (Uyghurs). All in the sole interest of continuing their highly oppressive, dictatorial regimes.

Well, the U.S. did torture priests in Latin America because of their social justice views. We’ve overthrown governments to support banana companies and had no problems supporting Saddam gassing Kurds since he was fighting the Iranians. We supported Papa Doc and for a while Noriega. Our government has experimented on it’s own people and has been involved in the drug trade. We’ve tortured innocent people with no one being held accountable. We spy on a grand scale on our own citizens. We’ve supported dictators and brutality when the people in power thought it beneficial to do so. I don’t think we can claim any sort of moral superiority over others. I’m not saying we are the worst but certainly we are no where close to the best. We are not a light on a hill as some of our presidents have proclaimed.

Hey, get it right, technically we paid and trained most of the right wing death squads who raped nuns and killed nuns and priests in Latin America, mostly at the School of the Americas.

Russia invaded Ukraine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War ), captured Crime and there is ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

Russia invaided also Georgia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War ), with direct trigger caused by South Ossetian separatists but Russia was clearly prepared for war.

China has ongoing invasion of Bhutan by simply building roads and military bases in that country ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-vil... )

China-India relation thankfully not reached invasion level but see say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...

Believing that USA is perfect is delusional but your comment has multiple blatant lies.

Don’t forget the Chinese oppression of the uighur. The scale is terrifying.

Don't forget about Tibet - violently occupied by China since the.. what, 50's?

The burying of one's head in sand is in fact figurative, not literal.

There isn't a single war without innocent civilian casualties caused by every side. At least this is under the guise of accidental, some nations do it on purpose.

I don't think that's better. I want failure modes to occur early and as loud as possible when it comes to this stuff; otherwise it's easy to get away with bombing the shit out of civilians for, oh, I dunno, seventy some aught years.

But hey, we had to put a stop to that darned ole communism, didn't we? Couldn't have that. wouldn't be profitable or godly.

> Are we the baddies?

No but we can do better.

Would you rationalize it that way if a different country did it?

For bonus points: non-NATO and non-“Western”

If a different country was trying to bomb ISIS and made a mistake? Nope.

and killed thousands of civilians and children with dehumanizing ambiguous categorizations?

If another country was bombing our villages because one our soldiers was thought to live there, would they be baddies?

Yeah. Because we don't form our troops among civilians.

Yes, we do, wow.

They're just someone else's civilians!

If a terrorist group was formed in America, invaded surrounding countries then use American towns as bases to hide, then no, I’d say another country accidentally bombing civilians wouldn’t make them baddies.

our terrorists are state funded and better armed. they don't need your house to stay in.

You didn’t read what I wrote I guess?

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