(December 20, 2013 at 11:02 am)Duck Wrote: Well fuck me, I'm on GC's side (ish) for once! War is indeed a trade-off, and no action is ever really without collateral damage. Given that none of us know what the implication of not doing these strikes would have been, it is hard for us to weigh the consequences against the objective. What if the strikes have prevented five or ten or fifty more 9/11 like attacks?
That's nice and all, but you're weighing "what if's" against knowns. Who's to say that one of those drone strikes that killed an innocent child may have saved five American lives? We don't know that it didn't, but what we do know is that our campaign is taking the lives of innocents. It's awfully arrogant(and easy to do when it's not your family) to simply chalk that up as the price of war. Asshole terrorists targeting us doesn't justify willingly engaging in tactics that take innocent lives.
Try to imagine how you would feel if you and your family were just trying to have a peaceful existence but lived in constant fear from Canadian drones killing one of your relatives. And to top it off, the Canadians see you as a justifiable loss.
Sure, we need to combat terrorism to save Americans, but willingly taking innocent foreign lives in order to prevent a hypothetical American death is not something my conscience will let me live with.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
