Anybody with even the remnant of a braincell knows that War is bad but human history is littered with one group of people fighting against another group of people. First with stick, then swords, then with guns and now with missiles and bombs.
As the firepower grows greater, so does the death toll but now it isn't two armies facing each other and blasting holes in one another, now the attacks come from a safe distance and although the missiles are called smart, they aren't particular if it's a civilian or an enemy combatant they rip apart when they explode.
Killing people is easy, but killing only a specific individual isn't which is why we hear almost daily stories of civilians being accidentally bombed and killed in Afghanistan or Libya.
A soldier wouldn't walk into a restaurant with an M16 and kill every person inside, men, women, children, waiters, cooks, etc., simply because one of them might be their target but they do drop a bomb on it from a great height which does exactly the same thing.
You can understand why drones and high altitude bombing is now the way to go for attacking nations, public support drains very quickly when it's our boys coming home in body bags.
Always amazes and disappoints me how shockingly non-plussed we are about killing other countries civilians and about war in general and i will never be able to understand people who call for a war.
Now if it was just two armies, standing across a field just blasting the hell out of each other then good for them, let them go over there away from everyone else and do their macho boy thing, we will stay over here and get on with living our lives.
But it isn't like that, instead cities get firebombed, nuked and 500lb bombs are dropped from 30,000 ft and the majority seem okay with that but most disappointingly, our Governments don't see a problem so we get the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, arguing for NATO to intensify its campaign in Libya and not just go after military targets but move Libyan infrastructure into the gun sights.
Bombing infrastructure targets is not what most people imagined when they first heard the term 'no-fly zone'.
Since the UN signed off the resolution, no fly zone seems to have come to mean all out warfare conducted from the air and now we want to widen the targets to include infrastructure, which just about covers anything and everything.
Very brave of Liam Fox sat a thousand miles way in London to call for a widening of the war, wonder how keen he would be if he and his family was sat in a house by an electrical power station in Tripoli.
Not very i would imagine and would he be willing to sacrifice his wife and daughters for the removal of Gadaffi? If he said yes he is a liar and if he said no, then why is he condemning other families to such a fate?
Not enough what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have to do it all over again in Libya.
Good post. With all the wars we've become entangled in during the last few years, we seem to have become increasingly immune from the devastation that is being caused in our name, and with our tax money. Especially when it's only brown people who talk funny who are being separated from their limbs (I don't recall us ever bombing the Falls Road area of Belfast).
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to remember that even the likes of Churchill and Bomber Harris had very serious reservations about the morality of bombing cities; this is while their planes were dropping bombs on Dresden. Ultimately they rationalised it by considering the manifest danger to the freedom of the entire planet if WW2 was lost, so they concluded that the ends justified the means.
I think the stakes should be equivalently high before our present-day leaders decide to bomb whole populations. It should never just be in the furtherance of a political goal.
Cheezy, it's not just the furtherance of a political goal but is also about the control of scarce resources by a cabal of neo-colonialist powers led by the U.S. and the gaining of military advantage over emerging powers.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you it's a great post!