.....in one of the deadliest strikes since the American-led invasion in 2001.

There are civilian deaths in all wars

There are civilian deaths in all wars. Tragic? Yes. Avoidable? No.

Keep thee far from a false matter; and the innocent and righteous slay thou not: for I will not justify the wicked.

The last time something this bad happened was when the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Clintons Bosnia war.

If the enemy was hiding in my house, my family and I would gladly give our lives in a grisly bombing attack in order to eliminate the enemy. Wait a minute, on second thought, that is absurd.

However, nine times out of ten, if they are 'hiding' in a particular house, chances are the people in "harms way" are aware and in fact are supporters of the terrorists.

even shorter JR...at least we stopped bankrolling the Taliban by 1992.

Bush Gives Taliban $10 Million To Fight Opium

Despite U.S. and UN reports that the Taliban had virtually wiped out the poppy crop in 2000-2001, authorities in neighboring Tajikistan reported that the amounts coming across the border were actually increasing. In reality, the Taliban gave its order to halt cultivation merely to drive up the price of opium the regime had already stockpiled.

...The small Taliban revival is being funded by opium and heroin. Half of Afghanistan's GDP is probably from the drug trade, and there is danger of narco-terrorism on a Colombian scale..... Eradication efforts are not going well.... If the US had not run off to the Iraq quagmire.... Instead, Afghanistan is still a mess, and Iraq is ever more of one. Bush has the opposite of the Midas touch-- everything he touches turns to rubble

No one likes civilian casualties, but here's the question: How do you propose to fight an enemy that hides with civilians?

I know the Taliban, nasty piece of work that they are, had as much to do with 9-11 as Saddam Hussein did.

oh my god! the trained chimp b.b, is imitating ppj's style.

yeah...let's analize this next 'raid' and see if it's really needed.

By using the smaller bombs, planes can carry about four times as many bombs and fire them from farther away. A B-2 Stealth bomber can carry as many as 80 of the small-diameter bombs.

Jenna who graduated with a degree in literature from the University of Texas, is pursuing a career in teaching, said Johndroe.
Barbara who graduated from the prestigious Yale University, where her presidential father and grandfather, George H.W. Bush, studied, will work in a program to fight against AIDS in Africa and Europe.

That said, what's the big concern about "hearts and minds?" I must admit I've never really looked into it, but is that a standard goal of war?

Civilians dead at the hands of the US. Christmas in May for the lefties. You've been dreaming of this.

Posted by bigunit12 May 23, 2006 10:13 AM where's ppj, dead muslim kids would give him a chubby for a month.

JRT, dreaming up a fantasy scenario and then faulting others because in your fantasy they didn't react as they should have, is, how shall I put this, insane. I have an idea: Why don't you ban yourself?

Gee JRT, I hope you won't get banned before you tell us WHAT RATIO OF INNOCENTS TO MILITANTS do you deem acceptable to kill?
None of the wrongwingers have ever addressed that question.

What would you say if the Marines were hold up in an American school?

What do you feel when you look in the mirror?
...
Can you even look me in the eye?

You're a dinosaur. Go find a tar pit and fall into it. Metaphorically speaking.

Civilians dead at the hands of the US. Christmas in May for the lefties. You've been dreaming of this.

Richard, I'll happily pay for your plane ticket to Iraq if you promise to stay there. Posted by: John Yuda on May 29, 2003 at 10:11 AM

It was the second time in five weeks that [President Hamid] Karzai has complained about civilian deaths from airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition.
...
One villager, Haji Ikhlaf, told The Associated Press that 26 civilians had been buried by early Tuesday - higher than the toll given by officials. Karzai's office said 16 civilians died, though a local doctor told the AP a 17th died of his injuries. "We've buried women. We've buried children," Ikhlaf, 40, said by cell phone from the area, which has been closed off to reporters by local security forces. ``They are killing us. We are so angry.'' ... "Karzai's actions are a response to [Afghan] public opinion, which is increasingly resentful of the American presence," he said. Guardian Unlimited, May 23

The Taliban are trying to put take the country back from the current government which was elected, as if elections impress lefties.

If more innocent civilians would die as a result of the Taliban operating freely then from attacking, then we should attack.

The Taliban's trying to promote anarchy is an additional evil which causes suffering among innocent people.

People forget that the Taliban was primarily developed/imposed by Arab outsiders (like Osama bin Laden) and is hardly a "liberation movement" in Afghanistan. In fact, it was a colonial movement run by radical fundamentalist Arabs.

The FACT is...our guys go out of their way (sometimes endangering themselves even more ) to avoid civilian casualties!

Here we go... Yes..GW is the first and ONLY prez to abuse the military! Ever hear of Viet Nam???

Note Fallujah. Instead of bombing the place flat and only the bomb loaders back at base get sweaty, we sent our young men door to door like Fuller Brush salesmen, taking casualties.

In Fallujah, US warplanes hit what they believed was a safe house used by the al-Tawhid terrorism group. The Gulf Daily New writes: ' Twelve Iraqis, including five children and two women, were reported killed in the airstrike, a doctor said. Nine others were wounded. Iraq's Health Ministry said at least 16 people had been killed in fighting in Fallujah in the past 24 hours. '

AlertNet provides an update on Fallujah. The article says that 70 percent of homes in the city have been destroyed. Something between 160,000 and 210,000 residents, out of 250,000 - 300,000 before last November's assault, are still living in tents or with relatives elsewhere. The article says,

Instead of bombing the place flat and only the bomb loaders back at base get sweaty, we sent our young men door to door like Fuller Brush salesmen

"The Fight for Fallujah," in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, "as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes ...." The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.]

Human Rights Watch has also documented numerous cases in which military authorities have failed to adequately investigate allegations of indiscriminate or excessive force against civilians. In October, Britain's Channel 4 news aired video footage, shot from a cockpit camera, that appears to show U.S. pilots attacking and killing a group of unarmed civilians in Fallujah. The British newspaper the Independent carried a story about the April incident, which has gotten no coverage in mainstream U.S. media.

Note Fallujah. Instead of bombing the place flat and only the bomb loaders back at base get sweaty, we sent our young men door to door like Fuller Brush salesmen, taking casualties. In addition, we stored up further trouble by allowing the civilians to leave, among whom were surely some bad guys.

It was well-known that the Falluja facility was a health center operating as a small hospital, a protected institution under international law. According to James Ross of Human Rights Watch, "the onus would be on the US government to demonstrate that the hospital was being used for military purposes and that its response was proportionate. Even if there were snipers there, it would never justify destroying a hospital."

"The US military is puzzled about the outcry over the use of white phosphorus at Fallujah. After all, a 500-pound bomb is also destructive. My guess? You can't go to war against Saddam on the grounds that he has stockpiles of chemical weapons, and then turn around and use incendiary bombs of a sort that much of the world regards as a form of chemical weapon. It is the hypocrisy factor. Not to mention that the international community is trying to get such weapons banned."... This is a public relations issue, not an issue of war crimes, as Monbiot and many others apparently want to have it.

You will note on this thread an absolute lack of interest in condemning those who choose to fight from among civilians, despite its being illegal, and the primary cause of their danger.

If I were as hard-nosed as an officer should be, I might, depending on the situation, withhold preparatory fires, accept casualties among the guys I led (Field Marshall Montgomery said of the three best commands to have, the best was the platoon, in which an officer could know and love his men more than their mothers did)whose lives were in my hands. I would do so knowing that letting some of my guys get killed unnecessarily--in the limited focus--actually served the greater objective.

Squeaky. If you have to ask, you're not worth talking to.

Peaches. Although on orders for Viet Nam, I did not go. My brother, an Air Force navigator, was killed elsewhere, making me a sole surviving son. One per family was the rule.

During a Fourth of July parade in the farm town where I grew up he turned to me as the paunchy veterans walked past and said acidly, "Always remember, most of those guys were fixing the trucks in the rear." He hated the VFW hall where these men went, mostly to drink. He found their periodic attempts to re-create the comradeship of war, something that of course could never be re-created, pathetic and sad.

If the school the US bombed in Afghanistan recently is a factor in the moral justification of the war, how about car bombs of the Taliban or the terrorists in Iraq which kill civilians. How does that affect your view of the moral justification of their efforts?

I loathe the people who have created this monstrosity.... These bastards and their apologists should be stripped naked and forced to walk the main streets of America, allowing every city and town that has lost a loved one to injury or death in this shameful catastrophe to heap on them the scorn they deserve.

Mike Farrel from MASH discussing Baghdad ER

The United States, as the world knows,will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough... more than enough... of war and hate and opression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on... not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.

"These guys are nuts," this intelligence source said. "Cambone and those guys made MEK members swear an oath to Democracy and resign from the MEK and then our guys incorporated them into their unit and trained them."

Between 1969 and 1973, U.S. bombers killed perhaps three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist. During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of World War II, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. Evidence from U.S. official documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that this U.S. terror was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power.

Who knows how many future Pol Pots/Bin Ladens we are paving the way for in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Peaches. If "being there" is necessary, you don't get to talk. You want the US to operate so that no civilians will ever get killed, knowing it will get more US soldiers killed. Don't you have to be a soldier facing that death to have the right to speak? Or the parent of one? Or the bereaved parent of one? Otherwise, you have no justification for an opinion. So drop it.