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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments.

We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.

The real solution, of course, is to avoid wars, and violence, in general. Supposedly, the world is more peaceful now than ever, even with Syria, the train station suicide bomber is Russia today, etc.

Personally, I don't want to see the US be the world police. There's a high cost in both money and American lives. Still, for the foreseeable future, the world needs to address the problems and try to solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.

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>> "There's a high cost in both money and American lives"

There's a high cost in both money and human lives - nationality should not be a consideration.

Hear Hear

But unfortunately, it always is. American life, and American citizenship is more precious than any other life.

I know it's not the same issue, but throughout the whole NSA snooping revelations, Americans have only been concerned by the legality of spying on their own citizens. All of us foreigners are fair game.

This is similar. The value of an American life is much more than that of a foreigner's life.

Rest assured that not all of us Americans think it's a-ok that the NSA is spying on other countries' citizens either.

> All of us foreigners are fair game

Americans feel this way, sure. But Americans are only 4% of humans, and soon 100% of humans will be on the Internet.

This worldview is not an economic survival trait.

I suggest relaxing, brewing some tea, and waiting for this to play out in the global market. Either they'll change, or they'll go out of business.

> Americans feel this way, sure.

I'm American. I don't feel that way at all.

7000000000 300000000 I never got passed pre-algebra, but i am having a hard time getting to 4%. I fully acknowledge i am shit at maths, but i would love an explanation (completely serious; i have heard this "4%" malarkey a few times now). I know these numbers are estimations at best, but they seem accepted so: >China: 1.3-1.5 billions >India: 1.3-1.4 billions >EU: 400 millions >US: 400 millions >sum total, all nations: 7.1 billions [1]

I know this may seem like semantic silliness, but here of all places i expect accuracy within region. to the larger point, at this time, american minds are more valuable in terms of conviction, as it is our country that is so reckless in regards to others, be it in the realms of security, supply lines, manufacturing, etc. This is no an inherent value; the most important dude at the party is always the person with the weed. It is not because she is better than her peers, it is because of her relationship to here peers in the context of what they want and what she has. Before you charge up your righteous indignation cannons, this "importance" along with all the times i must sit through a harangue about why i need to be more respectful/appreciative of the greatest nation on earth drives me, and many other americans, completely nuts. i fucking hate it, but when i travel, my brothers and sisters from overseas will only let me be a shitty american. some of us over here are paying attention, you know.

pass the tea, mate. this whole coffee thing needs to end as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

300,000,000 / 7,000,000,000 = 3 / 70, or a little less than half (3.5 / 70) of 10% (7 / 70). About 4%.

Or: 300,000,000 / 7,000,000,000 = 0.04285714285

4.28%

Reply to classicsnoot: in your referenced article the estimated US population is 317 million, and the world population is 7134 million. 317/7134=0.444 so the US population is then 4.4% of the world population.

thanks to you and @alpeper, i appreciate you reserving judgement i used to be embarrassed of my poor maths skills, but now i do not have the time for silly feel.

317/7134 = 0.044, which is indeed 4.4%

I blame a typo. :)

Americans should be more concerned about the NSA spying on US citizens than on foreigners. Here's why:

When the US government decides a US citizen's communication patterns makes him a terrorist, the US government is free to knock down their door in the middle of the night and whisk them off to Guantanamo, and NO ONE except the US government can do anything to stop them.

When the US government decides a foreigner is a terrorist, they have to ASK your government to cooperate, and if they don't, the US has to be ready to go to war to kill/capture him.

The difference between the NSA spying on an American and a foreigner is that only the foreigner has a government that can protect them from the US government.

> When the US government decides a US citizen's communication patterns makes him a terrorist, the US government is free to knock down their door in the middle of the night and whisk them off to Guantanamo, and NO ONE except the US government can do anything to stop them.

While I dislike how the U. S. government has decided that who they classify as terrorists superceding the rights of a US citizen, this is just wrong. Communicating with terrorists on a typical basis isn't enough for the U. S. government to do so - the only cases where I have heard of this happening is when the US citizen in question has carried out actual violent terrorist actions such as armed combat.

You have far less protection against the U. S. government if you are not a citizen, since there is nothing protecting you against broad actions. You can be assassinated in the middle of the night & your government wouldn't be able to do a damn thing to pre-empt that. There are also far less protections as to spying as well, but that has nothing to do with this article.

> Communicating with terrorists on a typical basis isn't enough for the U. S. government to do so

For the time being. Do you think how the surveillance apparatus currently works is how it will always work in perpetuity?

Arguably, if you are living in Pakistan or some other "near failed" state which gets military support from the US, you are at a much higher risk.

Some B.A. in the NSA digs through your traffic and decides you are some terrorist mastermind, next thing you know a Hellfire blows up your home and family.

> The difference between the NSA spying on an American and a foreigner is that only the foreigner has a government that can protect them from the US government.

Pakistan is a nuclear power and even they don't have a government that can protect its people from the US government.

It's not an American thing. It's the human condition. I don't care where you live, if someone who lives down the street from you and looks like you gets killed, you care more about that than about someone on the other side of the world. That's how people work.

But there is no reason it has to be that way. For most of human history we lived in small tribes of a hundred people or so, and everyone pretty much cared only for the people in their own tribe. But then we moved on to entire cities of thousands, where you likely didn't know everyone else, but it was still possible to care for strangers because they were still part of your "tribe". Then we moved on to nations with millions of people, and nationalism still proved to be effective.

So maybe we can someday go to globalism. Putting the whole of humanity inside your circle of concern, not just your friends and members of your tribe.

Maybe. It would be nice.

The reality is, your brain cannot process that many close connections so you are inevitably limited.

Well the same is true for countries, but nationalism seems to work.

That's how people with an inadequate exposure to multiple cultures during childhood work.... such as most Americans, sadly, who remain fantastically insular. As a British kid in US school for a year, I was astounded to find that of this group of "elite" children, only two (other than myself) had ventured beyond Illinois, and one abroad - to Canada.

Did you not also perceive that Illinois is in the middle of nowhere? If you're in England you might end up in Paris just on a bender (citation: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509837/Teenager-wen...).

Still, judging from the actions of the democratically elected UK government, you lot don't seem to do much better...

Oh, indeed. Geography is no small part of it. Folks from corners of the world in proximal contact with other cultures end up with far more cultural cross-talk and the ensuing ability to understand other cultures... or they have the inverse reaction, of outright xenophobia.

Our government isn't democratically elected - had they enacted the electoral reforms that they said they would, the next might have been - but they won't, and it won't be.

> There's a high cost in both money and human lives - nationality should not be a consideration.

Here's a sobering thought: The way super-villains are portrayed in movies is basically how leaders were expected to act up through the 1600's. Screw over and kill your neighbors to benefit your side? Just business as usual. Torture and gruesome and spectacular executions? Just business as usual. Kill prisoners and animals in large part because of the entertainment value? Just expected behavior.

I wonder if the way leaders and the national security apparatus behaves now will be viewed as super-villainy in the future? Probably.

And here you go again missing the point, trying to falsely equate drones and B-52's, while arrogantly implying Americans are more valuable than foreigners.

BTW, when was the last time B52s were used to bomb weddings to kill one suspected, not convicted, terrorist? Drones are used for that, in place of human assassins, or, heaven forbid, a judicial process. Remember that? The law?

This is the difference. With drones, governments think they can get away with it. They claim it clean and use the same false equivalents you use.

Tell me, if you are to be stopped in the streets, do you want that to be by a person, or robot? In the end, that is where these cowards will end up.

Not to detract from your point, but we used B-52s frequently for air support missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Units (well, usually AF CCT or TACP on the ground with the unit) could call up fire missions and would get a platform, which could be an A-10, F-16, F-15, F-18, B-1B, B-52, etc. as supplied by the air force based on what was available (usually overhead, or within a short flight). CCT had more flexibility in getting "better" stuff or more specific requests.

So, I'm going to say "2010", but it might actually have been 2011 or 2012 or even 2013 (I haven't kept up).

Drones, Napalm, B-52 bombing—all weapons for cowards. The problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost; remember that the Vietnam war didn't end because the great public bought into the hippies' peace&love ideology, it ended because the great public was receiving too many of their sons back in body bags.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.” Patton

All weapons are the weapons of cowards. It isn't fair that almost all the weapons we use in Afghanistan are superior to our enemies, and it isn't fair that they resort with IEDs and suicide bombs.

If you have equal weapons then you look for superiority in numbers or tactics. Long gone are the days when "honourable" war meant agreeing to fight pitched battles on terrain that suited neither side and both sides knew was coming. Those "honourable" wars were also the most brutal to both prisoners and civilians.

A related point is that we used to have conscription and it was much harder to get elected if you didn't have a good record of service. This meant that leaders thought much harder about going to war and there was a genuine political cost in that the masses had a better grasp on the implications.

I bet people used to call rifles "weapons for cowards". And before that, muskets. And cannons. Before that, I'm sure people thought bows and arrows were "for cowards". Or spears. Or just plain pointy sticks.

The ideal of "Batman" and most other superheroes encapsulate this idea exactly.

They probably did up until the point when both sides were armed with them. But the difference with Napalms, B52s and drone strikes is the enemy they were used against were never likely to be able to obtain similar weapons and thus threaten their opponents to a similar extent.

I'm not particularly sure about the concept of "cowardice" here, I just had to point out this logical flaw.

On what timescale does "never" apply? Large technological gaps in weapons between different people carrying out a fight aren't that uncommon, after all. A couple hundred years later and you can hardly tell the difference.

> On what timescale does "never" apply?

Non-temporal colloquial "never". "Never in their wildest dreams" never.

It seems reasonably possible that the people we're currently blowing up with drones would have similar technology by, say, the year 3000. (Not the exact same people, obviously, but that group of people.)

> The problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost

Oversimplification. Domestically, the US is still paying the cost of using, eg, Agent Orange in Asia, today (children of service members born deformed).

Really? I haven't received my bill for agent orange in forever. Anyone sent to prison for authorising its use? Civil lawsuits? No, there was no cost (except to those directly affected) for using agent orange.

You haven't received a bill? Fascinating — do you not pay taxes? Because if you are, then you most certainly have been paying for medical treatments for veterans and their families, as well as various US government cleanup projects.

Civil lawsuit: http://www.benefits.va.gov/compensation/claims-postservice-a...

Sorry, can't find that bill. I pay taxes and I regard any class action funding from the DoD with the same skepticism as the Iraq War. No one is paying for it, not in dollars. We've spent many trillions in Iraq and the government just charges it to the fed who kicks the can down the road.

I'm sure I might pay for it one day. I'm fairly sure my kids and grandchildren will pay for it.

The world is more peaceful:

"The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005 (definitions are obviously fluid; these are the ones used by scholars at the universities of Uppsala and British Columbia for a project called the “Human Security Report”). On their definitions, the number of international wars peaked during the 1970s and has been falling slowly since. The number of civil wars continued to rise until about 1990 and then fell precipitately. In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s."

The Economist, 28 June 2008: http://www.economist.com/node/10564141

>Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars.

What war are we in currently?!

Are you playing the we never declared war game? We didn't declare war in Korea either. It was the Korean Conflict.

Anyway, let's try not to run into the weeds playing games. It adds no value to the conversation.

The question is not whether the US military is murdering on a consistent, timely basis. It's a question of why the murdering is happening in the first place.

I have no power to change any aspect of the US military, but that doesn't mean I can't decry it as evil.

USA and its allies are occupying two countries and they are fighting the local resistance. The occupied countries never threatened the offensive forces. Does it reminde you of anything similar that happened 70 years ago? And btw when was the last time that USA was in a war as a defensive force? When did the American soldiers defend their homes and their American soil?

Your stance is that we should never involve ourselves in any foreign conflict and only fight when we are domestically attacked? Please be more explicit so the discussion can be more focused. Certainly, we could move all our our soldiers in all countries back to the US. We still have troops in Korea, Japan, Germany, and many other countries.

>Are you playing the we never declared war game?

Maybe. The 'declared war game' has several nice properties:

1) It provides a definite start and end to hostilities. 2) Clearly identifies a target. 3) Has relatively clear rules of war, especially with regards to treatment of POWs and civilians.

You don't want to play that game. Ok. So what are we left with?! We have not-really-POWs at Guantanamo. We drone-strike targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and apparently Yemen. There is no clarity around who the targets are, why they are targeted, who sentences them to death and what the procedure is, how long this will last, and any other information that would introduce some sort of accountability. Just a few weeks ago, a wedding convoy was mistakenly targeted and 17 innocent people died. Clearly there was some MASSIVE lapse in intelligence. Worse, why is a convoy EVER targeted given that more than likely most convoy-travelers are either innocent or not-deserving of a death sentence even if a known terrorist is among them. So...why did this happen? who was responsible for the 'mishap'? what was done to make sure this doesn't happen again? Who was fired/disciplined/court-marshaled?

> What war are we in currently?!

The one initiated by the 9/11 attacks and declared by Congress via Pub.L. 107-40 (September 14, 2011)

It wasn't a declaration of war. It was an authorization of military force against targets that that committed or aided in the 9/11 attacks.

Using this Act almost 15 years later to justify drone attacks against targets that had nothing to do with 9/11 stretches the interpretation a little. No? I mean, surely, you're not suggesting that this act means the office of the president has perpetual authorization and apparently such a huge leeway in its interpretation.

> It wasn't a declaration of war.

It most emphatically was a conditional declaration of war.

> It was an authorization of military force against targets that that committed or aided in the 9/11 attacks.

"An authorization of military force" is an exercise of Congress' power to declare war. And it was against those "nations, organizations, or persons" that the President of the United States determines to have committed or aided, or harbored those who have committed or aided, in the 9/11 attacks.

> Using this Act almost 15 years later to justify drone attacks against targets that had nothing to do with 9/11 stretches the interpretation a little. No?

The attacks are against al-Qaeda, an organization which did not have "nothing to do with 9/11".

> I mean, surely, you're not suggesting that this act means the office of the president has perpetual authorization and apparently such a huge leeway in its interpretation.

Until and unless it is repealed, yes, by its plain language the AUMF gives the President perpetual authorization with very broad discretion -- which is why a number of people (including Barack Obama) have called for it's authority to be conclusively sunsetted by Congress -- though the continuing attacks against al-Qaeda aren't really any kind of a stretch.

Its not about precision weapons anymore., its not about killing the right or wrong people. Its not even war anymore, its a kill list and the real question is will the kill list ever end, the kill list has been endlessly growing.

Dirty Wars [1] is a fine piece of investigative journalism by Jeremy Schaill about exactly this.

[1] http://dirtywars.org/

> Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars.

Except there's not really a war. There's just poorly-targeted killing, or let's just call it what it is, murder.

Weddings, funerals and restaurants are not war zones.

If you know are in a war zone, you can at least do your best to avoid it or flee as a war refugee. Should all citizens start fleeing all countries being targeted by drones?

>in all wars

Drones are used outside of declared war zones in "targeted killings". This is an important distinction.

You are referring to what I think was called Operation High Tower in the Vietnam War, which in retrospect was a low point in my country's actions. You have the benefit of hindsight so I find it disturbing that you sound OK with the napalming and massive high altitude bombing of mostly civilian populations.

I didn't at all get the impression he was okay with the napalm bombings

I may have misunderstood him, in which case, apologies.

I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about war.

> There's a high cost in both money and American lives.

Likewise, there's huge financial opportunities in a war for the military-industrial complex which just so happens to have strong ties with our political leadership.

>We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.

I don't war a war at all. I want sovereign countries to be left to their own.

If there is a cross-country attack, then it can be handled either by the country's police (if it was by individuals acting on their own) or by a proper war operation.

Do you mean like in Syria where 130,000 people have died?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/02/us-syria-crisis-to...

By some accounts, 1 in 10 killed was a child. Why don't we ever discuss this on HN?

Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.

Would fewer people have died if USA hadn't interfered in Syria to the extent that we have? I.e., no constant media and political coverage, no arming the rebels, no diplomatic ante-upping games? It's impossible to be certain, but it certainly makes sense. What is indisputable is that further action on the part of USA will increase the death toll dramatically, as it has done everywhere else.

It's possible that the war might be already over if the US hadn't supported rebels, but we can't be sure. Someone else may have filled the vacuum. Consider that we weren't involved in Rawanda and 800,000 to 1,000,000 people were killed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide

Also, I'd be a little embarrassed to suggest that the solution is to not have any media or political coverage. At the very least, there should be more coverage on the world stage.

It can only help if leaders know the world is watching, their acts are being recorded, and someday they may be held accountable.

Further action on the part of the USA will always increase the death toll, like it did in Kosovo? And staying out of things will always reduce deaths, like in Rwanda?

I don't pretend to have the answer in the case of Syria, and I'm not advocating anything one way or another. I'm just pointing out that your model of the world doesn't appear to predict the past, let alone the future.

How would intervening in Rawanda have saved lives exactly? Go in and arm the Tutsi's? Start killing Hutus? It is probable that intervention would have caused more casualties (including to US forces).

Kosovo is also disputed even in terms of actual casualties, let alone projected casualties, and is probably not a good case for intervention.

I fully agree there is not a good answer either way (syria included)... Just pointing out that your examples don't really predict the past or future either. Prediction in any case seems like a waste of time. (Unless you're The Doctor that is.)

How would intervening in Rawanda have saved lives exactly? Go in and arm the Tutsi's?

A group of armed Tutsi's is ultimately what ended the Rwandan genocide. So yes, that likely would have worked well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide#Rwandan_Patrio...

If you believe the judicious provision of weapons is a worthwhile humanitarian endeavor, then by all means create an NGO dedicated to the task. I can certainly envision donating to such a charity. Please don't involve the USA military-industrial complex in such a Faustian manner.

Also it isn't so convincing to link to a wiki section that supposedly proves your point about reducing bloodshed, while the very next section on the page describes 5 million people killed in the same area in the following decade.

Unless of course the support provided by a (Western) outsider had caused other tensions (warlords uniting or what have you), thus increasing the body count, which is one possible outcome out of many.

Genocide tipping in exactly the opposite direction is another (obviously unintended) possibility. Oh yeah... The rest of the wiki you link talks about that... Oops!

You can't predict a future that didn't happen. (Again unless you're The Doctor).

>Do you mean like in Syria where 130,000 people have died?

Yes.

How many have died in the US Civil war? I read ~215K combat deaths and ~500K civillian deaths.

Should someone had intervene, e.g Britain or France, aiding one side over the other (and pushing their own agenda)?

>Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.

Actually, in historical terms, joining WWII was an already made decision, not something the US was "dragged on". The Pearl Harbor was just a pretext, and they worked quite hard on provoking that kind of aggression from the Japanese. They US (not the people, the policy makers and large interests) saw the decline of the old colonial powers, and reached for the opportunity to get a large slice of the post-colonial pie.

Plus, it had a long colonial/invasion history of its own, from Philipines to Mexico and beyond by that time.

The French did intervene in the US Revolutionary War. That's probably why there is a United States today.

Yes, WWII is well documented. The point was we didn't send in our full military until 1941. It's possible tens of millions more people would not have died if we had joined earlier.

>The French did intervene in the US Revolutionary War. That's probably why there is a United States today.

That's not the civil war I asked about though -- the revolutionary war was already between 2 different nations (well, one under construction).

And there was other differences: France did it to weaken Britain (the part which was their rival to their colonial and trade empire). Not to "bring justice/democracy/what have you".

And if France could do much power-wise, it would have taken whatever much it could from the new nation.

But this isn't the war we fought in Iraq or the war we fought against Japan or Nazi Germany. If US declares war against country X and I loosely identify with the objectives I will support it too.

This is war against terrorism. We are not in war with Pakistan. In fact we send them billion of dollars as aides. Then as reasonable Citizen it is my duty to ask - hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in war against terrorism, are we anywhere close to winning it? Are we even using a winning strategy? If not, why spend american lives and money pretending world police where we should leave it to the UN?

...solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.

Aha, your theory of history is of a teleological bent. Not really my cup of tea, as it requires ignoring nearly the entirety of human history...

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