posted
Interesting websites. I stand by my statement, though: if a majority of civilians were killed in some ancient conflicts, to wit, from your source:
quote: Estimates for democide by ancient empires and civilizations are not easily available, although historians insist that the Assyrians, among others, wiped out whole peoples.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP2.HTM --then modern conflicts which do not kill the majority of civilians can hardly be called an increase, much less a continuous increase, in the casualty ratios. I see that some authors divide history statistics into 20th Century and pre-20th Century, which makes sense. Also, many of the statistics in the democide websites are for deaths carried out by governments on their own people, not war per se.
If you have a specific graph or table that backs up your statement, I would be happy to look at it.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote:*blink* And you're using this as an excuse for war?
When exactly did I do that? I was saying that the whole argument of "this war is bad because innocents are dying" was invalid. Innocents die in every war, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a just and necessary war. The death of innocents is an unfortunate negative side effect of even just wars, but that doesn't automatically mean that every war ever fought has been unjust. That fact does not justify an unjust war, but it also does not invalidate a just war.
And whether the present war is just or not--and I have no interest in getting into a flamewar about whether it is or isn't--the fact remains that we have done all we reasonably can to avoid civilian casualties. The circumstances make it tricky, but we're doing it as well as we can. So comparing it to a jihad is dishonest at best.
Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
I think the comparison to a "jihad" has less to do with killing an unusual number of civilians than with the cultural zeal and patriotic idealism that we use as a justification for those deaths. It's not like we face an immediate kill-or-be-killed situation, or even the threat of one in the near future. (Perhaps when the government thought there were WMDs in Iraq, but not now when we know there was no such threat.) Instead our government now describes the Iraq war as a fight against evil and evil values, in the hopes that bringing our ways to Middle Eastern nations will somehow at some point make us safer - in the same sort of way that Al Qaeda seems to think that fighting America will ultimately, in some indirect way, save what they consider their people and their culture. In this way, our Iraq war is quite similar to their jihad.
(Note: Just to add, this use of "jihad" is not the correct use of the term in Islam, from what I hear. I'm using it this way only because that's the way most people think of it these days, so I'm guessing you understand what I mean. )
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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quote: First of all, no Bush administration official has yet encouraged americans to go do Jihad in Iraq. Nothing even slightly analogous to that has occurred.
I disagree..I think that the War on Terror is exactally that. We only target combatants, but there is a lot of "collateral damage". We ARE sending people into Iraq to kill, and a lot of civillians ARE gettign killed in the crossfire....and this is due to the Bush White House and a lack of a decent plan for occupation.
That's not an assertion that the existence of civilian casualties indicates we're conducting a jihad?
Well, whether it was or it wasn't, I still think that the mere fact that civilians have died is not a valid argument against any war. If we were deliberately targeting civilians, yes. If we were being so careless about our conduct that vast numbers of avoidable civilian deaths were occurring, yes. Then there would be an argument. But when we've done our level best to avoid civilian casualties, and done a better job of avoiding it than any nation in any other war, then it's meaningless to point at the relatively small numbers of civilian deaths and say that that, in and of itself, proves that what we're doing is wrong.
Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Because there are things worth fighting for. While it is horrible that innocent civilians were killed by Allied forces in World War II, that doesn't mean we should have just sat back and given Hitler whatever he wanted. That was a just and necessary war.
Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
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