h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thank you, Ben.

"Collateral Damage" and "Innocent civilians"
I have a problem with both those terms.
I think they are all weasel words.
Saying 'collateral damage' when you mean "OOps, sorry, we didn't mean to blow that up!," is disgusting. It's kinda like the old joke about "friendly fire". Ain't no such thing.
If we really wanted to keep our boys safe, they wouldn't be over there. If anyone can rationally believe that you can have a 'safe' war, then they can prove their thesis by going out and having a 'safe' knife fight. You fight, somebody gets hurt. One of the problems with dealing with guerillas(I'm never gonna spell this word right) and rebels is that they tend not to wear uniforms or huddle up in brightly painted installations.
The Taliban and the other warlords have killed people at will for years and for some very strange reasons. When someone dies in a battle for their freedom, it is not the same as dying for no reason.
The families of the soldiers who die and the families of the dead noncombatants will have equal reason to grieve. No real comfort comes from a cause. But both families will have reason to wonder about the cowards who did nothing to end the conflict before it escalated and who now are armchair generalling and moralising.
"Innocent civilians" Oo, there's a good one. The country was under occupation by a 'government' that had proven that it was not going to play fair. It was run by illiterates who called themselves 'scholars'.
By children who called themselves men. By rapists who called themselves holy. The women and girls were enslaved and tortured and jailed just for being female. And while for years there have been nice people making impassioned pleas for this to stop, I seriously think that if Sept. 11 hadn't happened, it would have gone on for another ten years. People die and get injured in wars. Do you seriously think that the people of Afghanistan did not wake up every morning of their lives in the last thirty years wondering if they were going to make it through the day without being killed? Their innocence was stolen a long time ago.

I call it collateral damage because that's what it is. It's a side effect of attacking legitmate targets. The issue is intent. Bin Laden's terrorists attacked a target with the inent of killing civilians in order to affect the views of governments and populations. We intended to destroy the enemy and their facilities.

From my point of view American lives are more important than Afghan lives. I'm an American. They're soldiers fighting for my nation. It's unfortunate that civilians, espeically civilians who are in no way to blame for the actions of foriegn nationals who have been using their nation for haven. However, civilian causlties will always be caused by war. They always will be.

In war, the first priorty is to accomplish the mission in a legal manner, and the second is to conserve your combat power.

If my daughter died, I wouldn't be ill about it. The circumstances would dictate how I felt about it. How do you suppose the French felt about their citizens who died from allied attacks during WWII?

There's no doubt in my mind that Bin Laden's terrorists deliberately targetted civilians, and publically advocated doing so. The American forces, I am sure, tried to avoid civilian casualties. Sometimes they failed in that, but that's not the same as targetting civilians.

I don't accept for a moment that there's a moral equivalence between the civilians killed by Bin Laden's men and those killed by the Americans in Afghanistan. I have reservations about the strategy, but that's another argument.

In war people die, many of them non-combatants (there's a nice neutral term). We were talking about peace, though, and I agree with Tonsil Revenge - terms like collateral damage and friendly fire may be accurate and grammatical, but they are also euphemisms which hide the horrors of what they coldly describe.

Two Bit, you actually describe the situation most clearly when you say, 'We intended to destroy the enemy...' That is what war is - the attempt to destroy an enemy.

There's nothing euphemistic about destroying the enemy - it means shooting and blowing up human beings of another nation until there are either none left to shoot or those that remain surrender. You need a damn good reason for doing that. Defending yourself is a good reason. Imposing your culture on somebody who doesn't want it is not.

My problem with "collateral damage" isn't the word "collateral", you're right, it is a side-effect of the war. The problem is describing deaths as "damage" as if corpses are broken windows.

how do you take peace to a war loving people?

How about one day at a time?

http://www.peaceoneday.org/

how do you take peace to a war loving people?

How about one day at a time?

http://www.peaceoneday.org/

Peace has never been the main objective anyway. There's black gold in them thar hills.

From the powers-that-be's p.o.v., the removal of a hideous régime is obviously a bonus, but an incidental one. A more friendly régime can now be installed, a pipeline built, and billion dollar contracts for several nefarious conglomerates can be drawn up.

What galls me is that this sort of behaviour always has to be dressed up in terms of freedom. Or rather, since all governments do this, that we Western nations, especially anglophone ones, and especially the US, seem to believe our own hype that our governments are really doing these people a favour for altruistic reasons, rather than compromising their freedom by imposing our strings-attached variety, and taking a big cheque into the bargain. I'm not an übercynic, by the way.

>They know that we are seeking those responsible for the attack.<

In Iraq? I thought Dubya said they were in Afghanistan, or is this another of his 'Nigeria is a very important continent' type pieces of geography. Do the combined secret sevices and intelligence agencies of the world have any idea where Bin Laden is, or are we now just picking targets at random? Presumably as Saddam can't have weapons of mass destruction, then Dubya will let the UN weapons inspectors into all the US's atomic, bacterial and chemical weapons plants? Oh yeah, I forgot, the US is 'trustworthy'.
I remain convinced that Dubya's interest in Iraq, for all the mealy mouthing about the 'Axis of Evil', (a term which neatly gives a bunch of 2nd rate military powers some form of legitimacy whilst robbing them of their humanity) is essentially a dynastic one.
And let's stop with the Orwellian double-speak. 'Collateral damage' is civilian casualties. The term makes me sick to my stomach.

> " 'Collateral damage' is civilian casualties."

It includes that. It also includes people's homes and jobs; leisure; ability to walk, talk, see, hear; communication; transport links; culture; psychological damage; and the rest.

> "The country was under occupation by a 'government' that had proven that it was not going to play fair. It was run by illiterates who called themselves 'scholars'. By children who called themselves men. By rapists who called themselves holy. The women and girls were enslaved and tortured and jailed just for being female."

Actually, the Taliban did vastly less raping than the groups that they replaced when they came to power. That's a large part of why they were initially so popular: they restored the rule of law to a country that desperately needed it.

There was much to condemn in the Taliban regime - why make stuff up?

Am I being incredibly tendentious? (I thought I was. Er) Or is it that my above post is all accepted without contention? Or is 2bit on holiday...?

Am I being incredibly tendentious? (I thought I was. Er) Or is it that my above post is all accepted without contention? Or is 2bit on holiday...?

Am I being incredibly tendentious? (I thought I was. Er) Or is it that my above post is all accepted without contention? Or is 2bit on holiday...?

Am I being incredibly tendentious? (I thought I was. Er) Or is it that my above post is all accepted without contention? Or is 2bit on holiday...?

*Please* don't say I posted that 4 times. The system was playing up, I have to add.

Again? It completely refused to post one for me yesterday and I tried for a half hour.

Ok, Lucinda. I only know what I read in the papers...

I have been trying to resolve my ignorance on many things, including Afghani history.

Ben cut to the quick of my original question. I'd forgotten that pithy little phrase, though I'd used it in the past.

With regards to the intelligence of the President...I think that Mr. Hussein and the North Koreans have had their say on that...long after some of the biggest mouths in the US had had their say.

Peace and greed often go hand in hand, I agree, but peace and religion, do, too. It seems that many a prophet has lamented the pain of life but promised peace in the afterlife...with certain conditions attached, of course.

But if peace is supposed to be the absence of conflict, does that also mean the absence of competition?

Or do we just want folks to follow the rules? Treat others like you want to be treated. Don't gossip or lie. Feed the poor, the orphans and the widows. Visit those in prison. Take care of the sick. Don't rape, murder or steal. Don't repeat the same basic script more than twice in two successive seasons. Take it for granted that if the majority of registered voters don't vote, then the people who are voting are in the minority and their choice means very little.

It's only been 9 hours. If it makes you feel better, you posted it three times.

I don't think anyone thinks we're fighing in Afghanistan for the benefit of the Afghans. We're there for our own reasons. The fact that we're deposing the Taliban is bonus. If it helps out the Afghans, then I'm happyt for them. Same with Iraq.

Granted, I'm not satisfied with our justification for taking any action against Iraq. On the other hand, we're not attacking them yet.

Now, to twist it about a bit. If we say (for the sake of argument) that the Americans are a 'war-loving' people, how would one 'take' peace to them?

I think you could easily'take peace' to the American people, and I think they'd be quite happy to accept it. You can't take peace to the likes of Dubya - he doesn't seem to be listening. But you asked about the people, not the politicians.

It seems to an outsider like me that the American media gives a very insular view of the world to the American people. I don't know that's true - that's just how it seems. I think Europeans often fail to grasp just how big - physically big - America is. An American in New York is as far from Los Angeles as a Brit is from the Middle East, yet he shares a culture, a language and a nation with his Angelino co-citizen. I read recently that the majority of American citizens don't even have a passport - that's very different to Europeans.

To take peace to Americans (and I don't accept that they are war-loving) we non-Americans must try to ensure that other views are heard there. For which we need a medium, and inside help from those Americans who do listen to voices from abroad. Erm, that would be h2g2, and you, tonsil revenge. And Two Bit. And all the other American researchers who come here and engage in constructive dialogue with the rest of the world.

Given the present conditions, +the only way to 'take' peace to the Americans would be for everybody to lie down and play dead. If they think they've won, they will go back into their own world and ignore us again.
I think I was the one who introduced the phrase 'morally abhorrent' in my last post, which set off a big argument. The fact is that I only wrote it as a side-issue. My point was that, whether we leave them alone or not, the combatants will try to pull us in. One of the main long-term tactics of the Palestinians is to paint the Israelis as oppressors in order to get international help. The first reason why Osama bin Laden came to hate America was due to their interference in the polotics of the Middle East. Either way, someone ends up hating us and they have proven that they are willing to take the issue to us if we will not go to the Mountain ourselves. From a practical point of view, it is not possible for us to be bystanders.
When I mentioned morality, I was thinking about what I see on the news. Every day there is another news story about another few Israelis dead. To stand aloof while this is going on would get harder and harder, and we can at least _think_ about possible ways to relieve the problems.