quote:Letting people die whom you have sworn to protect is also wrong no matter what.
That's clearly false in the right circumstances, if letting your sworn charges die will save enough other lives. The Russians would be wrong to nuke Chechnya even if doing so might protect a few Russian lives.
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posted
People use that argument for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it always sickens me. As if American lives are worth more than people of other countries? Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
In accord to some Americans, they seem to... But don't worry. It's not an American thing. It's a human thing. I know people over here who cheer everytime an American soldier dies in Iraq. I'm also appaled by that. (feeling a little bitter today)
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posted
Don't exaggerate what the topic is. No one is defending or justifying murder.
If you have to exaggerate your cause to get sympathy, you are showing that you don't believe your cause deserves sympathy on its own.
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posted
I'm trying to understand Syn. In your mind torture=murder?
I think torture is rephrensible, but they are not 100% legally equivalent. People *can* recover from torture, they probably will have psycological scars but they will still be alive. No one has ever recovered from murder.
posted
I think the other thing that Kat is trying to point out, is that there are shades of grey, all along the way.
Obviously it would have been nicer if they could have just called a halt to WWII, and everyone laid down their arms and played hopscotch. But, if as it was thought at the time, the Japaneese Islanders would have fought down to the last woman and child breathing and dying because it was their culture and quasi-religion, isn't it better to have bombed, and broken the will to fight, rather than ending up killing every last one of them, and losing millions of allied lives in the process? More people lived and didn't fight because of the drop of those bombs than the number that died. Yes, every death was a tragedy, but those are the facts of war.
It's *always* a choice of "fewest casualties" and whose they are. There's never a "no casualties" situation. Interrogations are part of the "least casualties" process and making those judgment calls and as a result *always* end up being a "least bad" choice. There is no good choice.
posted
Also, knowing what we know now, should we have gone into Iraq? Probably not. However, we are there now. So what are we going to do about it?
Do you really think it is practical or stable just to move our troops wholesale out of the region, because "war was bad and this was an unjust war to begin with". I hear that all the time on the news but no one is proposing any new solutions. Since we are now there we *can't* leave. Once again it is a "least bad" choice.
If we started removing troops now, and were out by next year, it is a certianty that Iraq would degenerate into a bloody civil war nearly instantaneously. That entire region is way too unstable, it could easily sprawl over into neighboring Middle Eastern countries and be a horrible horrible blood bath. Since we can't go back and change history, what is the "least bad" thing to do? The answer is stay and try to fix our own screwup. If we stay there is some hope. If we left now, I believe the outcome would be certain and have horriffic numbers of Iraqi casualties.
AJ
You know, I'm going to ammend this slightly. The screwup really isn't just ours, though it is ours in the shorter term. The ScrewUp is a global one for letting Saddam get away with the crap he did for as long as he did (yeah we helped but the US isn't soley responsible). However brutal dictators do create a calm environment. They squelch all dissenters so that anything that was fomenting before (tribal disagreements etc.) are pushed under the rug in praise of the Glorious Leader, who is only torturing a few of them...and not allowing them to think for themselves. And once again, until we actually start dismembering people, our "least bad" torture is much much much less than the stuff that Qusay and Uday were pulling before. Do I think we should be torturing people on principle? No. But the stuff the US is getting called on is stuff that other countries who *have* signed the Geneva convention pull all the time anyway...
quote:Don't exaggerate what the topic is. No one is defending or justifying murder.
(Assuming this was directed at me...)
I wasn't talking about "my cause." You cited as backup for your position a moral principle that I know is false. I was correcting a misstep in your argument.
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Added: However, I don't agree with you. Just because something is the best choice of the possible choices and the least of the several evils, that does not mean the best choice is Right. It may be justified, but the lesser of two evils is still an evil.
Hmm...I should start thread on the difference between innocent and justified.
[ January 28, 2005, 05:53 PM: Message edited by: Lady Jane ]
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posted
I saw what seemed to be a well documented story on the History channel that there was a planned coup attempt that failed because of some amazing luck. The purpose of the coup? To keep the emporer from surrendering after the second bomb.
If this mentality was wide-spread enough, then the U.S. would have either had to invade, or literally starve Japan into submission to end the war.
I can't really judge the truth of the plot, of course, but it was quoting researcht that had been published in some journals that seemed reputable. It didn't strike me as a "Dillinger survived and lives in Oregon" type of thing.
posted
I'm just frustrated, because there really isn't a thing I can do, and that drives me insane. I don't support this war. I don't agree with it, and I fear the aftermath of it but there literaly is nothing I can do. I'm not the president or the secretary of defense or someone who can actually influence things. Still, I cannot support torture, or this kind of interragation. But, we are screwed. We can't leave until things are stable, and things are anything but stable in Iraq right now... *sigh*
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