Support Our Troops (As They Kill Civilians?)
The NY Times relates a familiar story - American troops dropping bombs that kill civilians:
. . American airstrikes left 57 villagers dead, nearly half of them women and children, on April 27 and 29. Even the accounts of villagers bore little resemblance to those of NATO and American officials . . .
The United States military says it came under heavy fire from insurgents as it searched for a local tribal commander and weapons caches and called in airstrikes, killing 136 Taliban fighters.
Knowingly killing civilians is immoral, brutal, and probably a war crime.
U.S. troops do it routinely.
Why are U.S. troops killing civilians? Here's what the article says:
. . . American officials say that they have been forced to use air power more intensively as they have spread their reach throughout Afghanistan, raiding Taliban strongholds that had gone untouched for six years. One senior NATO official said that “without air, we’d need hundreds of thousands of troops” in the country.
U.S. troops routinely kill civilians because they are "forced" to. But what is the compulsion that forces U.S. troops to kill innocent people? What does the explanation "without air, we’d need hundreds of thousands of troops" mean?
Gerty says that the "American officials" are peddling the idea that what U.S. troops are doing is the lesser of two evils -- killing innocents is not as bad as sending more troops. Gerty says that readers will think that sending more U.S. troops is a very bad thing - worse than killing innocent people.
This is hard for me to accept. How could normal people think that slaughtering innocents is better than disrupting the lives of Americans? I know many Americans are selfish but can they really be that bad? I just don't believe it.
I prefer to believe that most Americans just don't think about the alternatives to dropping bombs on civilians. (Though that Americans don't even notice that we are committing ghastly crimes is nearly as scary as approving them.)
