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Comment by HDThoreaun | Hacker News Reader

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No. No childs life is worth some hypothetical regime change. There is no greater evil in this scenario than a hypothetical greater good attempts at justifying this.

What are the lives of the next 10 thousand protesters the regime will kill worth?

Still not worth the lives of children

What about 100 thousand dead protesters? A million?

I'm curious to know what you consider a reasonable exchange rate.

I don’t have an exchange rate when it comes to dealing with lives of children. That’s a reprehensible statement.

The people that run hospitals, build safety devices, approve drugs, issue insurance, etc etc all do. I certainly hope the people that drop bombs do too.

Look up Value of a Statistical Life, Value of a Statistical Life Year, and Age Weighting.

> Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime.

It most absolutely is not and I struggle to believe you can build a valid argument that links bombing school children as necessary for the fall of Iran’s government.

How you win a war, especially one as lopsided as this invasion is, is as important as winning. I cannot so easily sleep at night knowing we are committing horrific atrocities during an invasion we chose to launch against a country thousands of miles away with zero military capacity to harm us here at home.

Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Do you agree with the statement "No war has ever been worth the results."? If yes, then okay end of conversation. But if not then we need to talk about acceptable mistake rates and where this falls, because zero mistakes is not possible. Note that I am not defending the strike here, I'm saying that the criticism needs more depth.

Would you mind sharing a handful of examples where, from your perspective, a war was worth its results?

I guess I'd start with most colonial freedom wars.

I might not know your personal background, but I have a hard time imagining you come from a lineage that has experience the cost of one of those.

The list of today's remaining colonies is short enough[0] that it is worth considering whether decolonization was "an idea that reached its time" in the late 20th century ; and given that there are examples of peaceful revolutions (eg India and West Africa) it is worth asking whether more places could have undergone peaceful transitions, and whether the cost in human lives and atrocities born within a decade of war doesn't outweigh the cost of the colonial system dying by itself within the same order of magnitude of time.

But then again, I think you're veering us somewhat off-topic as I'd consider a "colonial freedom war" to be a revolution (the people overthrowing their overlord) which is quite different from the topic at hand here, war between nation-states.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_list_of_non-sel...

> Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war.

Killing children is a war crime, and not an inevitable part of war.

Same commenter, 3 hours later, defending bombing of children:

> Parents are solely responsible for bringing their children on stolen land. There were indigenous children living there that were murdered.

On purpose or with significant negligence, it's a war crime. But collateral damage is not something you can just choose to avoid.

I don’t need to hear deep arguments to be convinced that it’s not ok to kill my children/bomb their school.

Can you answer the question though? It's not a trick question, I want to see where you're coming from.

And it's not about whether it's "okay".

I didn’t answer it because you’re framing it as the end-all be-all of this discussion when it’s bordering on a strawman argument.

Which part do you think is a strawman? Because one of the people that replied to me does appear to think that no war has ever been worth the results. It's a legitimate point of view, and that's why I asked if it was your point of view.

For the rest of this post I'm assuming it's not your point of view.

I'm very much not trying to strawman you, I'm trying to improve your argument. If any wars are considered "worth it, morally speaking", then single mistakes can't be enough to invalidate the war. We need to talk about how many mistakes happen and how they happen. We need to say how much is too much, and "zero mistakes" is not compatible with "some wars are worth it". The idea that we could have both in the real world is self-deception.

1. This isnt an invasion, just a bombing campaign.

2. Of course it would be better to not kill any kids, but thats just not how war works. Mistakes will be made, that doesnt mean eliminating the number one funder of terror in the world isnt worth it. Even if the next regime hates the US/israel just as much they will likely spend much less supporting terror groups because they know theyll just get bombed again.

3. Of course this is all if the bombing campaign actually worked. It didnt, and thats no surprise, which is why the whole thing is pretty clearly immoral imo.

> zero military capacity to harm us here at home.

The houthis harmed the US quite a bit by destroying American ships and harming global trade. In fact their actions were arguably far more harmful to the average american than any domestic terrorist attack could possibly be because of the economic impact that effected every single american.

The US/Israel are far and away the number one terrorist organization in the world, and it's not even close.

Which is why I said I dont think it would be immoral for Iran to launch a bunch of rockets at the US or israel to force regime changes.

But they can’t and don’t lob missiles at the US so to act as if they are is ridiculous. This is not a fight between equal weight classes.

First, this is completely untrue. Hamas and Hezbollah have been launching missiles at Israel literally nonstop for 20 years. The houithis have and will continue to launch missiles at US assets along the Bab al-Mandab Strait. All of these missiles came directly from the iranian regime. Those groups are an arm of the Iranian government

Thats not the point though. There is no reason for either party to respond proportionally in a war. Going to war against an equal weight class as idiocy, sun tzu figured that one out forever ago.

>At the US

So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents? Doesnt make sense to me. Thats before we even get to the major economic damage their terrorist network has caused. The US morally must just sit back while Iran funds and arms the group that routinely shuts down global trade and costs americans billions?

> So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents?

israel has killed even more "untold innocent children and innocents", so you should expect to continue finding no global sympathy or solidarity for them as they, an aggressor, initiate a war of choice against someone else.

By your logic, israel has greater causus belli against themselves than iran. Yet we don't see israel warring against itself. The only conclusion is that israel doesn't actually care about kids being killed, and started this war for totally different reasons.

There's literally zero proof that Iran killed any innocent children.

I didn’t say literally anything like that. What?

israel is not the US

Most of our politicians seem to think it is, so maybe it was a Freudian slip.

We literally just deployed 5000 troops to Iran after weeks of bombing. We are boots on the ground and our belligerent president literally calls it a war. It is disingenuous to bicker over whether we can call our attack an invasion. If it was happening to us we certainly would call it one.

Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. Especially when discussing bombing a school.

> Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics.

I was responding to whether the "invasion" could have been accomplished without killing the kids. I dont think that's realistic.

The separate question of whether it's worth it morally to topple the regime given kids will die I think is pretty simply yes. Iran's funding of terrorism kills and will continue to kill far more kids than died in this strike. Iran's funding of Hamas has been partially responsible for the terrible conditions Gazans are subject to. Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off. Same with Yemen, if Iranian funding is cut off conditions for the 15 million children there will improve. So yea for me personally Ive got no problem with a bombing campaign that will undoubtedly accidentally kill some civilians if it means the Iranian regime is toppled.

Killing children in an unprovoked attack to stop somebody else from potentially killing children in the future doesn't seem like a moral take to me, even if "someone else" killed more in the past or will in the future. In particular, because it actually sends the message that it's ok to kill children as long as you get what you want in the end. Not a great precedent. Perhaps that is the root of where your utilitarian morals diverge from some others' morals.

Unfortunately for everyone, now the US and israel killed a bunch of kids, and reinforced that precedent for others with these sorts of flimsy justifications, *and* everything will be the same or worse in Iran, especially for civilians. So lose-lose-lose.

> Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that [conditions in the Gaza region of Palestine] I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off.

We can already see the outcome of that in the West Bank region of Palestine: no hamas, yet israel still exercises ultimate control via violence, and keeps oppressing and killing Palestinians and taking or destroying their stuff with impunity, especially as of late.

There's no indication israel would be more generous to Palestinians in the Gaza region of Palestine if hamas wasn't there. Palestinians in Gaza see what israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank, and want no part of it. Who can blame them? It's sick.

Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth. If all the million kids in gaza got to live in conditions as good as the west bank kids get the bombing would be worth it for that alone.

> Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth.

'The brutal apartheid ongoing in the West Bank isn't as bad as the brutal genocide ongoing in Gaza' isn't the best flex for israel, especially since they're perpetrating both.

obviously before the latest wave of israel's genocide in Gaza, the oppression, control, and lack of freedom in the West Bank region of Palestine were worse than Gaza. Plus the West Bank still experiences israel imprisoning and killing Palestinian civilians and taking or destroying their land and stuff with impunity

the observant reader might notice that the common factor behind the misery in both regions of Palestine is not hamas, but israel

also, consider reading the first half of the post to which you responded – we were talking about the wisdom and morality of killing kids to achieve your objectives, and then also miserably failing to achieve your objectives. Your thoughts? Still worth killing the kids when it was for nothing?

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