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Comment by lysurgic | Hacker News Reader

and is there a list of children murdered by Muslim extremists in the Middle East? in the world?

Murder for murder is the way that vendettas and feuds continue for decades, centuries, and even millenia. It's how one death turns into ten then a hundred then thousands then millions.

That's not how civilized people should approach violence or warfare, even when violence may be justified.

Look at the aftermath of WWII, for example, many of the most bitter enemies (such as the US and Japan) forged bonds of friendship and alliance and today live in peace with each other, contributing more towards each others' prosperity and happiness than anything else. That's how conflicts are truly ended, the chaos of the battlefield is merely a tool that allows you to get to a point where such things are possible, and if that opportunity is wasted then you have done little other than to perpetuate or create yet another vendetta.

The difference is that the US, Japan, and Germany were civilized and had something to lose from continued war. Tribes in the mountains of Pakistan don't.

So instead of continuing to fight them, we should give them more to lose.

We tried that in Egypt (just sending multi-billion checks every year). It wasn't exactly a resounding success.

That quite a narrow definition of what it means to be civilized and what it means to understand other cultures. The tribes in mountains of Pakistan value their way of living, their religion, their ideologies, their decentralized governance, their barter economy, their local food production, their way of dressing and their way of dealing with internal feuds as much as you love your civilization. To claim that their ways are outdated or unfair to certain sections of their society is fine. But to claim that they have nothing to lose is so effing narrow sighted that I wonder if you being sarcastic.

And I say this being citizen of a country that has suffered from terrorism longer than most civilized countries and paid significantly higher costs.

So we should let Islamist terrorists continue launching missiles from schools?

This is the kind of question I would expect to see in a highschool debate club when a debater is losing the argument. It's an emotionally loaded red herring which is designed to derail discussion, not further it.

This is the kind of ad hominem attack used by middle school debaters to avoid refuting an argument.

lol. very good sir.

Do you imagine that drone strikes will stop them?

Other than that, I'd like to echo the obvious [citation needed]. Which terrorists are launching missiles from what schools at whom? And did someone actually authorize a drone strike on a school in retaliation?

I should think that it's pretty clear that if you blow up a school, you're probably evil no matter your reasoning. I'm not saying there never has been or will be a case to blow up a school, but you'd better be pretty damn sure.

Is that what we're talking about? I thought we were talking about drone strikes which are targeted assassinations that, so far, have had considerable "collateral damage" (i.e. death of innocents).

The sad truth is that the American assassination campaign is little better than one that would be carried out using car bombs. Though had those methods been used it would be much easier to place in a more accurate moral context.

So just because that happens, we should overlook the fact that there are drones killing innocent children everyday sanctioned by the United States? You seem to be the type of person that says, "What if X is bad? Look at Y, which suits my agenda."

Things like this creates more terrorism and more extremism. You may not realize, but it's not a nice thing to see your children and loved ones being killed by planes from the sky.

You are missing an important point - the reasons drones are up in the sky in the first place is to fight the muslim extremists.

So the number of people they kill is an important variable to countenance the number of accidental drone kills. The two are not unrelated.

Yes, I think it is quite appropriate to discuss what these drone strikes prevented as much as it is important to discuss what they caused. Elsewhere in the this thread, it is argued that drone strikes also create enough anguish that they end up creating more extremists than they have killed.

For instance, killing of children is not even the only cause of growing anger towards these drone strikes. It also hurts the sovereignty of these states and fuels to Anti-American patriotism in them. If I live in a failed state, it is still my state. Unless it is abundantly supported from people outside my country (and yours) and almost universally acceptable from people within mine, your government shouldn't be interfering.

Terrorists who launch attacks from neighborhood schools should be ignored, right?

Funny how you created a fake account just for these comments.

I am in no way defending terrorism. I am saying we should look at all of it, instead of saying, "What about X?"

The reasonable solution to the problem of terrorism is creating more terrorists.

I'm gonna make my standard objection here: there is a popular western conception that terrorism is caused by "extremism" but the evidence for this is lacking. Relatively devout Muslims who practice stricter interpretations of Islam are not more predisposed to violence than those who are more casual about the whole thing. In a randomized controlled trial, sending Pakistanis on Hajj made them both more devout in practice and less supportive of conflict with non-Muslims.

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3659699/Kremer_Es...

You know, you got a point - Drone attacks are just yet another form of terrorism (but officially approved, with a stamp).

America claims to believe in the rule of law, and thus should hold itself to higher standards than extremist terrorist organisations.

It's not a particularly high bar.

Children should have special protection. (http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/childr...) (http://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-rights/international-law.p...)

The US didn't stop dropping cluster bombs on civilians, but they did change the colour of foodaid - which had been the same yellow colour as bomblets and also delivered by air drop.

(http://www.landmineclearance.org/page2.html)

These munitions can last for many years. (http://www.irinnews.org/Report/78463/LAOS-Deadly-cost-of-une...)

Here's an image of an oldstyle food aid package, and a cluster bomblet. (Also images of wounded children.) (http://www.rawa.org/cluster2.htm)

It's not as if the food drops were always any use. Sometimes the food had spoiled, becoming potentially dangerous to eat. (Dropped from too high, damaging the package.) Or collected and sold for profit. (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0326-02.htm)

it's not like, a competition ...

You could follow the list of attacks at http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks, look up more information for the individual attacks, and filter out the adults. But as far as I'm aware, nobody's doing that right now.

That's the wrong comparison to make. AFAIK we're not launching those drone strikes to kill some Middle Eastern children in retaliation for our children that died on Sep. 11. Instead, we're taking actions in the Middle East, which we know will result in the deaths of a few [1] children today, in hopes of disrupting terrorist capabilities to prevent the future deaths of a lot [1] of children in terrorist attacks tomorrow.

In other words, you should really be comparing to the children who would have died from terrorist actions if we hadn't launched those wars. It's like calling doctors murderers for providing a vaccine that kills one in a million, but prevents a disease that, left unchecked, would kill one in a thousand [2].

In either case, which people die are real and knowable as individuals, but which people are saved are hypothetical and statistical. You choose the best course of action from the alternatives available, but sometimes it's not possible to choose a course of action that saves everyone.

In other words, choosing the greatest good for the greatest number may result in some disquieting sacrifices -- we wish the world didn't work that way, but we must base decisions and actions on the way the world actually works, not the way we wish it worked.

[1] "A few" and "a lot" are relative terms.

[2] The scenarios aren't exactly comparable, because there are presumably plenty of well-designed studies which rigorously establish the number of children who would have died in the disease scenario.

The number of children who would have died in terrorist attacks in a different foreign policy scenario is much more difficult to estimate, and much dependent on your assumptions of human behavior: A hawkish viewpoint might say that if we hadn't counter-attacked with the war in Afghanistan and our drone activities, the terrorists would have been able to build strength and launch more major attacks; a doveish viewpoint might say that our military activities in the Middle East are a big reason the terrorists hate us, and if we don't attack them, they won't attack us.

We can observe that, having launched the wars and drones, the US has not suffered another attack of the same magnitude as 9/11 in the decade-plus since; the hawkish scenario is supported, or at least not ruled out, by the evidence. The doveish scenario is also not ruled out by the evidence, but we can't know for sure what would have happened on the road not taken.

Presidents have to make world-altering decisions on the basis of equivocal evidence and their best guesses of the future interactions of humans with wildly different cultures and sometimes-irrational thought processes. This is why I stick to math and science.

> In other words, you should really be comparing to the children who would have died from terrorist actions if we hadn't launched those wars.

Is there any evidence whcih provides more than weak and highly-speculative support for the claim that launching the wars has done anything to reduce the number of children (or any other class of victims) killed in terrorist attacks compared to what it would have been without the wars?

Yes, fewer civilians/children are dying from wars every year.

1. Where is the evidence for that claimed outcome?

2. Where is the evidence that that outcome is caused by the US-led wars?

http://www.npr.org/2013/05/31/175619007/is-the-world-a-less-...

Sorry, but your generic excuse works for any war crime out there.

EDIT: Or any other crime against humanity. Nazis did holocaust for the "great good". This same reason was used for many communist crimes as well.

The unsatisfying response to this is that circumstances matter, and long lists of names without context do not give the sort of information that would allow one to act.

I don't think this project's lists are aimed at a full analysis of the situation, but just one piece of information: reminding people that there is significant collateral damage, and innocent people killed have names/etc., rather than just being units in some kind of RTS game.

People may decide that's unfortunate but ultimately still the right decision; as you note, it's not the only piece of information. But right now many people are not making that decision actively. I haven't surveyed people formally, but in my discussions around the subject very few people guess the death tolls are anywhere near the real numbers. Many people have the impression that, yes, the U.S. strikes are imperfect, but generally accurate and with only a handful of innocent people occasionally being killed.

Maybe people should maintain tallies of easily avoidable deaths:

Starvation, Poor infrastructure, poor medication, poor parenting, etc.

Lots of it is preventable. Should we keep tallies just so we know how (young) people are dying?

You know why people don't make a big deal about those greater tallies? Because it's not a political message which aligns with someone's particular politics. Not because they would be harder to influence.

This makes the optimistic assumption that drone strikes can kill terrorists faster than it can recruit them. You may be right, but imagine for a moment how you would feel if another country were operating deadly flying robots around your children.

Why do you conveniently ignore terrorists blatantly launching missiles from elementary schools?

You keep throwing argument, please back it with facts.

Really? Okay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BlEICvj6iA

You do understand that Pakistan, Yemen, and Palestine are all different places, right?

Are you asking someone else or posing a straw man argument?

No straw men here. I get that you're passionate enough about this point to make an entirely new account to iterate it over and over.

I'm just trying to get a handle on where you're coming from. The article was about Pakistan and Yemen. My comment was about drone strikes creating terrorists. You made a comment about elementary schools and when pressed for evidence, you provided a video from Palestine.

Is your point that because Palestinian terrorists launched a missiles from an elementary school, it's a good thing that drones kill children in Pakistan and Yemen?

Do you think that citizens of Pakistan and Yemen will be less outraged by drone strikes because of what terrorists in another country are doing?

Are you trolling?

I ignore it because it's not even close to relevant to my point. Even if terrorists are blatantly launching missiles from elementary schools, that doesn't change the fact that drone strikes may create new terrorists faster than they can kill them.

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