Ben Carson: Bungling Surgeon

The issue, for whatever it is worth, is not killing innocent civilians. It is targeting them.

 

Agreed. Trump wants to kill terrorists' families.

 

That sounds perilously close to the textbook definition of "state-sponsored terrorism."

 

Trump wants to kill everybody. Don't get wrapped up in the details.

 

Whoever decided on the background music to this did a masterful job with the choice.

 

That's exactly what it is. It is targeting innocent people in order to scare the other side into doing what you want. By any reasonable definition, major GOP candidates are now pro-terrorism.

 

Thank you. This is the basic distinction missed in the prior three pages of blather. Big difference between collateral civilian deaths during warfare and "we should target their families."

 

We targeted civilians in the bombing of Tokyo, and when we dropped nukes on Japan.

When you launch "signature strikes" via drone, you don't know who the target is. The difference between targeting civilians, and targeting people you cannot define as combatants is marginal:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/w...th-us-is-often-unsure-about-who-will-die.html

When 90% of those killed, aren't even the intended target, you can't pretend that civilians are not targeted:

Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.

Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target

(Apologies for the link being to a summary of another article.)

I'm not advocating for the targeting of civilians, but you're ignorant if you think it doesn't already happen.

It's also absurd to tell the enemy what is on and what is off the table, as far as what we're willing to do to defeat them.

To often, we've told the enemy what the rules of engagement will be, how many troops will be in the fight, and what our schedule for withdrawal will be. That's no way to win a war.

 

Oh, I should also add, that part of Trump's argument is that if you're living in a bomb factory, you can't claim ignorance, or claim to not be a combatant.

If you're married to a combatant, at that combatant is living at home, and not at a military installation, you're home is a military target.

If your home is used to store or build bombs, your home is a military target.

 

Should we withdraw from the Geneva Convention?

 

Then what the hell are we fighting for? Land, I guess. Certainly not ideals.