President Obama: Do you really love America?

[Anomalocaris]

Killing civilians because you can justify it by saying you meant to do something else, even when doing something else has generally reliably killed civilians before, is different from doing something with reasonable expectation of not killing any civilians but then unlikely shit happened.

The former is a less honest version of killing civilians and admitting that's what one finds acceptable to do to further a cause.

Are you suggesting that our drone strikes are attempts to deliberately kill civilians? That would be a war crime.

Again, I'm not saying war crimes don't exist. Neither am I saying negligent manslaughter doesn't have any moral culpability. I'm just saying that negligent manslaughter is not the same thing as serial killer.

By definition, terrorists are serial killers. This is not necessarily true for military strikes that have civilian casualties. Please note the word "necessarily".

In the case of recent drone strikes, it does genuinely appear that there is little to be gained by killing truly innocent civilians. So the specific rational motivation for the war crime is not there, although given some attitudes that have been made menifest, one could not really fully discount spite; ideological, religious and racial animosity; or a consciously cavalier attitude leading to lack of attainable casualty avoidance, all of which would still be almost as criminal.

But in the cases where it does seem rationally plausible civilian terror would further our cause, as in Vietnam, and to various degrees at various times in WWII, I do not doubt we would loudly disclaim the possibility that purposely inflicting casualties would serve our cause precisely To create the screen of plausible deniability for the fact that we do purposely inflicting civilian casualties to further our cause.

The main difference between us and many "terrorists" is the fact that many terrorists are either too unsophisticated to effect the screen of plausible deniability, or too crude to appreciate the fact that a screen of plausible deniability does not subtract from the efficacy of the terror upon the intended target, but often serves the overall goal by generating sympathy amongst otherwise marginal constituents.