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In reply to the discussion: Venezuela's Chavez welcomes ally Ahmadinejad [View all]JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)If you know that thousands of civilian non-combatants will die and be maimed as a predictable and necessary consequence of your actions, then even if you are not targeting them, and even if you are striving to minimize how many of them die, you are still making the choice to kill them.
Now any effort you might make to split hairs about how this deliberate killing of civilians is nevertheless not mass murder becomes superfluous once we identify and reject your unspoken premise: that war somehow happens, when in fact the wars that the US has engaged in after WW2 have never been in self-defense, and in the case of the invasions of Iraq and Vietnam they were clear cut wars of aggression waged on false pretexts, the worst conceivable international crime. Not only is the predictable and therefore deliberate choice to kill civilians as "collateral damage" an act of mass murder and arguably genocide (only a legal definition would preclude that, not a moral difference), but in fact killing anyone, including insurgents against invaders and occupiers of their country, is murder.