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A Goddamn Separate Thread to Discuss [Collateral Damage. ...No, not that terrible movie]
The Ender
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1:52: About that plane shot down near Snezhnovo Torez. It turned out to be a passenger plane. Fell near Grabovo, there's lots of bodies, women and children. Right now the cossacks are inspecting it.
2:03: On TV they are saying AN-26, Ukrainian transport, but are saying it's labeled Malaysian Airlines.
2:12: What was it doing in Ukrainian territory?
2:16: Maybe it was transporting spies. Who knows. It's war.
So, it seems as if the Ukrainian conflict has claimed the lives of about 300~ civilians by way of a trigger happy SAM operator sympathetic to Russian expansionism. There is considerable outrage at the moment, and no doubt this will be followed by condemnation of the Russian state / Ukrainian separatists. I think it's likely that the Russians will respond by claiming that it was an accident, and counter-argue that any sanctions / condemnation is hypocritical.
I would have to agree with that assessment. My own government, the U.S. government, the British government, etc (essentially any state that you can name that engages in armed conflict - I named those specifically because I think they will be among the countries offering the most vocal condemnation) blows away civilians with pretty reckless abandon in the course of any given military operation. This is never met with sanction, and is only met with condemnation from either human rights organizations or the opposite geopolitical bloc. Both government officials & citizens who identify with a given country responsible for a given atrocity will excuse the behavior in some way, will not punish those responsible for the act and will insist that it was in the pursuit of some greater good, so it's fine. On the flip side, any atrocity committed by countries outside of the NATO bloc is propagandized to be seen as yet more proof of the evil nature of those countries.
For example, this is the type of language / discussion that is typical after incontrovertible footage is shown of U.S. equipment killing a lot of civilians on the ground. Apologetics, mental gymnastics to excuse the violence, no expression of regret or remorse (aside from some regret that the poor troops on the ground don't deserve such criticism & that it's unfair to have a record of their actions scrutinized in the public square. A criticism I note is absent from, say, the discussion related to the release of the audio transcripts related to the recent killing of the 300 civilians over the Ukraine). You can see similar language from Israeli Defense Force supporters after they finish bombing areas in Palestine / Lebanon, from Canadian Armed Forces supporters after soldiers are caught torturing prisoners to death, etc.
It seems to me to be little more than a circle jerk, where any given inevitable atrocity that occurs during a war is simply used as a way to confirm prejudices. Nobody takes ownership of the fact that people were killed by their state, often for nebulous reasons, that were not combatants - they just rely on nationalism / racism / classism to stay deaf to anything other than the crowd at home that cheers on the war effort.
Collateral damage: it's okay so long as it's your guys doing the shooting part and not the getting shot part?
With Love and Courage
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Like the reasons for the action (civil war vs Vietnam) and the ability to minimize live lost (like carpet bombing durring ww2 being acceptable but not now).
The people involved dont change anything for me. I think that my counties actions are morally wrong a lot of times but I don't think that that makes it impossible to recognize other people's actions as bad.
From an ethical perspective, yeah okay I can see where you're coming from. We really shouldn't be casting stones about this because we've got a lot of innocent skeletons in our closet. I'm also not gonna claim that politicians decrying this are doing it for any reason but to push whatever agenda it is they're trying to push. That's not really anything unique to this situation so there's no reason to suspect this situation is evoking a different response from the many others like it
But regardless of our past fuckups in this category, it is not okay that the Russians are doing it too. That's not how this works. If I were to accidentally hit you with my car and paralyze you, it would not be okay for you to sneak into my house in the middle of the night and break my legs. Our having done these things before does not mean we're somehow not allowed to call out others when they do it.
We have serious work to do in fixing how we handle these situations, both our reactions to them and making them happen less often in the first place, but that has no bearing on sanctioning Russia for it. The two things are not related except in a general sense.
edit: Conversely, the next time we accidentally shoot down a passenger jet or accidentally bomb an Afghan wedding, Russia will absolutely be within their rights to yell at us for it
hitting hot metal with hammers
Note that this was never stated by me.
That's collateral damage.
Shooting at something and then finding out it was civilian isn't collateral damage. It's a fuck up.
That's an extremely arbitrary & uninteresting distinction to me.
You can understand why, when you say it's hypocritical that the for US, the British Government, and really, any non-beligerent state that has engaged in modern warfare in the past...oh I don't know...20-30 years and has specifically taken measures to avoid civilian causalities intentionally and as best as reasonably possible in a battlefield, to condemn Russia (if they are the instigating agents): I don't think you understand warfare or how we conduct war at all.
Guns cause collateral damage. Artillery causes collateral damage. Bombs and missiles cause collateral damage. Just about anything you can think of outside of knives, bats and the such, causes collateral damage. War causes collateral damage and until you invent weapons that have absolutely no collateral damage will the risk of civilians dying in war go away; but at that point those weapons are to be feared more than a war is to be feared. War and hostile acts have an associated level of fear that it should instill in each and every participant, not because it's two actors killing one another; no one gives a shit about that, but because it's only those two actors killing one another and if civilians are hurt during the exchange, that's what draws immediate condemnation. It is because there are civilians that states tend to act rationally when engaging in open warfare with one another. It's because there are civilians that we came up with things like the Law of War, Hague conventions, Geneva Conventions, the Rules of Engagement, and have miniaturized and reduced the killing potential of weapons, all so that when we want to kill one another, we are only killing one another and not a civilian.
If you want to be angry at drones harming civilians, where were you during the naval bombardments, bombing campaigns, traditional air strikes, you know, War stuff, that always occurs during a military campaign? Those have killed scores more civilians than any drone has or will ever have. That's traditional warfare. If you want to be angry at drones, be angry at drones because it's in the hands of a spy agency that does not report to the military, so there's no accountability and no transparency. The military may be agents when conducting the covert drone bombing campaigns, and I would agree with you that it's complete bullshit, but that is for a different thread.
This is a tragedy: 295 unarmed civilians died just for being in the airspace. They had no hostile intent; as far as we know they weren't tailed by any fighters or positively ID, it was purely just a case of being in a plane over Ukraine/Russia. This was not a state actor acting rationally. This is everything that states are supposed to be against when they have hostilities towards one another and whom condemnation is deserved. This was an act of ignorance and haste. This is what a proper military is supposed to train you against, to prevent as much as possible, incidents like these. You wait that extra second to acquire positive target identification before you fire the shot.
So yeah, if it turns out to be Russia whom fired the SAM, then yea, they deserve the utmost criticism and condemnation deserved. This goes against the natural and agreed upon (gentlemen's compact) law of war. You never involve civilians.
* I leave in statements and words like "as much as possible", or "as reasonably possible" and specifically use the word "avoid" because you will never be able to completely reduce collateral damage in war and hostilities. I have seen first hand the effects of collateral damage and I would love as much as the next person to reduce it as much as idealistically possible; but the moment it goes to 0 there is more to fear than war itself.
They mis-identified a passenger jet as a hostile Tomcat & just blew it out of the sky. The Bush administration even decided to shift the blame onto other state actors:
The U.S. is not a signatory to any of the conventions you named, by the way, did not invent those conventions and does not consider itself bound by them.
The argument of hypocrisy is a weird one to throw around. The way you use it and the examples you brought up in the other thread (IR655) smacks me of the childish conception of hypocrisy ie "Don't tell me not to get black out drunk and do tons of coke dad. Uncle Bill told me the shit you did in college!" IR655 was shot down during the Reagan administration.
I mean can Germany ever condemn an ongoing genocide?
By contrast, the American administrations never accept criticism of their military operations, no matter how valid, and both the administrations themselves & their public supporters (which tends to be a majority of the American public) create a very strong impression that it's only wrong when the 'bad guys' do it, creating the 'bad guy' image through examples of atrocity that they themselves engage in. I'm not sure what's 'childish' about this assessment - and while that example picks on Americans, you can apply it to any country you choose.
It's not about a specific act of condemnation; it's about how these violent set pieces are used to frame the world in a way that pretends the western world is a brave & benevolent hero combating the sinister forces of terrorism / communism / whatever overseas.
Collateral damage is bad. We try to minimize it. It is unavoidable in war.
This is one of the many reasons that war is a bad thing.
No, they did not; they settled the dispute ex gratia, and denied all responsibility. George Bush himself did not offer so much as an apology.
Yes, collateral damage is bad. The reactions to civilian casualties is much different when, for example, the American military is the guilty party and the American public is fed the information vs when another party is found guilty of a similar if not exactly the same incident and the American public is fed that information. Russia shoots down an airliner; there ought to be sanctions, they are monsters, Putin should be executed, etc. Americans shoot down an airliner, and there's often hardly a peep - and when there is any noise, it's either deflection, apologetics or both (the Iranians are the ones really responsible, war is Hell, let's move forward, etc). Never is there any suggestion of punitive action against the country, administrators, etc.
It's troubling to me, because it suggests that the focus of outrage is not that an airliner was destroyed / lives lost (if that was the case, you would expect to see the same sort of outrage regardless of who did the shooting).
EDIT: Geth, S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to catch on to us if you keep throwing your arms up like that...
I also think it's pretty fucking dumb that you keep harping on something that happened before many of us were born or capable of doing much more than gurgling at a tit full of milk.
It is troubling to me that you're so willing to go out of your way to make the rest of the people on this board look like sociopaths.
Let's do a quick poll, if you think it's perfectly all right for the US to blow up civilians but if anyone else does it they should be burned and piked outside of Congress, go ahead and hail some hydras.
If that's unfair because times were different in 1988, can you provide examples for any of the same sentiment coming from the American press after the Haditha massacre, for example (I'll pick that one because it's less contentious than, say, the killing of Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen)?
I did not call anyone a sociopath, and I didn't mention drone strikes even once. Being blinded by national identity or having a destructive bias towards your own culture / country is not the same as being a sociopath.
yeah go read some Russian Times or Chinese state run news sites or go read some Argentinian press during the the diplomatic spat with the UK last year(2 years ago?). this is not exactly some uniquely western thing. Is RT still trying to spin it as a Ukrainian attempt to assassinate Putin?
I mean the entire Russian justification for there fucking around in Ukraine is basically "The government in Kiev is a bunch of Neo-Nazis planning to cleanse all of the ethnic Russians"
Which is why I said, 'you can apply it to any country you choose'.
Like I can't understand what behavior you are actually looking to curtail. Like how does the news/press/statements stemming from today's events differ in EnderVille?
"Ukrainian rebels shoot down a plane killing 298 people, ohh well USSR did it first, US followed 5 years later"
Oh, is that what you heard the straw man saying? Because it certainly wasn't said here.
Frankly there's an argument to be made that the West shares some blame for this mess, because if the EU / NATO had dropped the hammer on this separatist sham when it started they would never have gotten the launchers.
Well, it's interesting that you only mentioned this here, and not as a reaction in the MH17 thread. And I'm sure you'll agree, then, that since collateral damage is inevitable & there's not much more to it, there shouldn't be consequences for any of the Russian sympathizers / Russia itself / etc, since war is Hell & all that, and this is simply status quo. Right?
IMO we should have started feeding support to the Chechens as soon as Russia pulled this crap.
So, you essentially accused me of attacking a straw man, correct? And yet here is the argument.
The US government does not "blows away civilians with pretty reckless abandon." In fact, the US government tends to do exactly the opposite, and put the lives of its service members at risk to reduce the chance of civilian casualties through a combination of establishing strict rules of engagement, limiting air and artillery support, etc. However, despite this sacrifice, the problem is complicated by an enemy that deliberately refuses to distinguish themselves from civilians for the purpose of causing civilian casualties, who conducts military operations primarily from civilian areas, and who is cavalier with the lives of civilians in their own operations, if not outright murdering civilians who are not affiliated with the enemy.
Honestly, "Collateral Murder" is the perfect example of how not to discuss potential collateral damage issues. The reporters, with full knowledge of the consequences and long term deliberation, voluntarily put themselves right into the middle of a battle to the death, while carrying around items that appear to be weapons from a distance. Would I prefer every war reporter go home unharmed? Absolutely. Do people who intentionally insert themselves into lethal combat deserve the least consideration of any potential third parties affected? Also, absolutely.
Militaries own fuckups like shooting down the wrong airplane, or cases where they allow expediency to triumph over reasonable safeguards of civilians, but it's important to evaluate any collateral damage using actual warfighting experience and international law. International law does allow for some civilian casualties, in proportion to the anticipated military benefit, because it recognizes that zero collateral damage is simply childish naivete, and that ending a war decisively can ultimately save lives in total.
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And what about all of the other civlians just walking by? The guys in the van? The reporter laying injured on the ground? How was it reasonable to shoot at a man on the ground, unarmed, being taken into an impromptu ambulance?
And you claim that this action is justified because more lives are saved int the long run, somehow. What evidence do you have to support this claim?
It's not just about George W. Bush. Polling done at the time revealed about 75~ percent of the American public supported the actions in Iran - and we had two people in the thread, just now, also engaging in the 'war is Hell' apologetics. And then two others agreeing with the sentiment.
Why is the sentiment when an American ship shoots down an airliner this:
And the sentiment when a separatist Russian rebel group shoots down an airliner this:
The amount of civilians killed was exactly the same. Your government killed 300 people, after mistaking an airliner for a strike aircraft.
I'm less interested in that there wasn't any justice than I am that there was no interest - at least not on this continent - in any justice. Why do we hand-wave away one tragedy while screaming with outrage at another when they are exactly the same incident, but the perpetrators are different?
I mean, people in the Malaysian air thread right now are talking about how they would like to go and bomb the Ukrainian separatists. Where was that same violent reaction / impassioned indignation when our own state actors crossed that same line?
If you want to keep beating down the straw man argument I haven't made about the degree to which one incident or another is a tragedy, I guess you can go ahead, but that's not what this thread is about.
It's complicated but it boils down to "I believe the people I am looking at are enemy combatants and my superior officer also believes they are combatants (I believe they got permission to engage first, but I don't want to sift through the garbage google would provide to confirm, so I'm going off memory), so they must die before they kill one of our soldiers." Which is, ya'know, how war works.
If I remember correctly, when I watched that video for the first time I didn't know anything about it. I just had the impression that it was a gunship doing it's thing in Iraq. When you approach it from the mindset of the pilot and gunner, who thought they had The Enemy in their sights, it really takes away most of the outrage you think it should produce. If they didn't kill the bad guy they thought they had in their sights right then and there, then the bad guy would kill their buddy tomorrow. When that van showed up I was absolutely certain they weren't civilians but combatants coming to take their wounded buddies away so they could live to fight another day. There was nothing to tell the gunner they were anything but more people he needed to kill before they killed his buddies. There is a reason we have medical transport painted with a giant red +, and it's not to make them easier to target.
So yeah, journalist wrong place wrong time. Civilians on sidewalk, wrong place wrong time. Dudes trying to be heroes, tragically also the wrong place wrong time. It's incredibly unfortunate, but shit really does happen and war makes that shit so much worse.
Well, that video wasn't about ending a war decisively, it was only about decisively ending the lives of the enemies the gunner thought he was shooting at.
Oh, and all the propagandized hate the editors hoped it would create.
So, if I replace the words 'journalist' or 'civilians on sidwalk' with 'MH17' in that assessment, do you nod in agreement? Why or why not?
Well, trained servicemen on a Ticonderoga cruiser made that same mistake, so plainly it is a thing that can happen. 'Wrong place, wrong time,' implies the happenstance nature of it. The crewmen of the SAM system (it appears) mistook it for a transport, and fired as a result. War is Hell, don't you know?
If you don't accept that line of reasoning here, I question why you accept it when it's your guys doing the killing.
1. Wrong Bush.
2. How many people here were alive and politically active thirty years ago? I'm 21, both acts disgust me, shockingly I'm going to focus on the one that happened in my lifetime less then two days ago.
3. Why the fuck do you keep going on about the hypocrisy of the West and never once mention how totally fucked it was that the Seperatists shot down a passenger jet?
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It's fucked up that seperatists shot down a jet and murdered 300 people.
I'm talking about the hypocrisy of the west because it bothers me that people seem so propagandized, and have very different reactions to similar atrocities so long as they perceive one actor to be on 'their side'.
Fair enough. I assumed you were agreeing with VeeVee's sentiment.
I fail to see why, simply because I'm American, I can't be angered by everything you listed, but mostly concerned with the most recent event because it's the most recent event. How on Earth am I being hypocritical here?
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Edit: Ender not Nemo.
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So basically this entire thread is nothing but service to your ego, and how much better you perceive things than everyone else who is blinded by propaganda. While you of course have no such fettering.
It's essentially a SKFM thread, or you are Britta Perry.
People need to accept that bad decisions were made in the past and work around them, try to fix them and provide recompense to the victims of those injustices. They need to admit they were wrong. Nothing can ever be done about injustice without that happening first.