Nearly every soldier in any war will have directly or indirectly killed an innocent civilian. Which ones are war crimes and which aren’t?
How do you decide and who gives you the authority to do so?
What if the civilian they kill has a substantial effect on the enemy's military capabilities, for example by being someone famous who loudly endorses the honour of signing up to fight for one's country, thereby motivating thousands of young men to do just that?
Once you open the door, where do you draw the line?
It is precisely the concept of such a "hard line" -- which by design enables such inhumanity to be passed off as inconsequential -- that must be brought out into the light and examined.
Radicalised soldiers and armies will give less and less concern to civilians, and at a certain hated level civilians actually will get targeted by individual soldiers or squads. If it then moves up the command chain and there's not enough accountability or pushback from the top leadership then you get to proper genocidal actions like what happened at Srebrenica.
Targeting civilians for death is not acceptable or justifiable.
> Targeting civilians for death is not acceptable or justifiable.
so we have numerous evidence of US and its allied forces deliberatly murdering civilians and nothing happens. Why do you think targeting is not acceptable? from the evidence of dead innocent civilians, it sure as hell, seems like the military people think its acceptable and justifiable (which you just tried to justify by calling it "normal part")