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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

My recollection is the CIA considers any military aged males in the area of a strike to be enemy combatants, which could be one cause for significantly different numbers.

Here we go:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in...

"It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

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Well it goes back to Vietnam really. The idea was that bullets fired by American soldiers towards civilians would automatically turn those civilians into Viet Cong. That was basically the unspoken policy.

Another story was from a helicopter pilot. They would capture what looked like "enemy combatants", load them into a helicopter for transport, then proceed to interrogate them under a threat of being thrown down on the ground. And then they would get the information and throw them off the helicopter But the issue was that they had to count the casualties. So the policy was to _always_ count when disembarking the helicopter not before. As those two numbers were sometimes quite different.

The scary part is that this line of thinking is not entirely untrue seeing as civilian casualties have a way of radicalizing young men in search of revenge.

The REALLY scary part where America goes from being a misguided but well-intentioned brute to a completely evil, opportunistic warmonger is when you think about the data that the US intelligence and military complex has access to. Don't they know that their war is creating more enemy combatants with each and every civilian casualty, and if they know that then why are they steadfastly continuing with their campaign as if it's actually producing positive results.

This was my point above in my comment. War is a good thing for the US.

"The scary part is that this line of thinking is not entirely untrue seeing as civilian casualties have a way of radicalizing young men in search of revenge."

I do not expect to convince you to change your opinion, but I would like to let you know that this is not an opinion well verified by fact. It's a supposition made by chaps like Noam Chomsky without serious data behind it. It is also counter to what we know is true, which is that serious terrorism comes from religiously-motivated intellectuals, not the down-trodden poor incited to revenge.

I wouldn't call them intellectuals - more like college students. But I also don't think that applies in the general case, like Al Qaeda in Iraq. Attacks on western soil, like 9/11, it has definitely been stablished has mainly middle to upper-class college educated guys - engineers, dentists, that sort of thing. But in the middle east and south asia I don't think the rank file qualify.

Don't be a hypocrite. You scold the GP for not having any factual basis, and then proceed to give your own argument without factual basis. Please show some proof, or stop scolding people for not showing proof.

I believe civilian casualties do have a way of radicalizing young men in search of revenge. Examples can easily be found which show that American men enlisted in response to attacks on our soil.

"One of those young men was William Grigsby, now an Army staff sergeant who enlisted in early 2002. “The events of 9/11 had everything to do with my decision to enlist,” he said." [1]

"It's clear the events of Sept. 11, 2001 played a role in many peoples' decisions to join the military. The Minnesota National Guard is still benefiting from a boost in recruitment a decade later." [2]

[1] http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=65272

[2] http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/09/05/sept...

That NYT article you linked to came to mind when I was reading this link as well, especially this quote from the Pakistani administration:

"In the media, they said it was all children. They were absolutely wrong. There may have been some collateral damage of some children but they were not children at all, they were all militants doing training inside."

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