Minimizing non-combatant casualties
Katie is worried about the mothers and children at risk from an air campaign:
I will sleep terribly tonight, knowing that bombs I helped pay for are dropping on homes where mothers are huddled on top of their terrified children.
They cannot leave or hide. Unlike during the London blitz, when mothers sent their children to the country to protect them, these parents have no options. There are no subway tunnels or bomb shelters to speak of. The dictator who rules them has sentenced them to certain death and our bombs will carry out the execution.
If we must invade Iraq, I believe that this "shock and awe" air assault is the least ethically defensible way to do it. We should go in on the ground, minimizing potential for civilian casualties.
I share Katie's concern for non-combatants, and certainly a WWII style air campaign would cost the lives of thousands of non-combatants. Fortunately we have no plans to launch that type of campaign. The strikes last nght can truly be called surgical in their precision, and there is no reason to expect anything less throughout the conflict. We don't need to carpet bomb cities anymore. Guided munitions and smart weapons allow us to strike military targets, minimizing the chances for non-combatant casualties. Also, our goal, the liberation of Iraq, calls for a different type of campaign, one which is targetted on specific areas and assets. We don't have to defeat the Iraqi people; all we need to do is defeat Saddam. Once we remove his capability to wage war, it's over. Sadly, there will be some casualties among non-combatants, but nothing like Dresden, Berlin, or London. I also believe that fewer will die in the course of liberation than would have tied in Saddams torture rooms, and rape rooms if we didn't act. It's hard to play mathematics with people's lives like that, because none of them deserve to die, but Saddam has left us no other choice.
A ground war, on the other hand, virtually guarantees heavy civilian casualties, particularly if Saddam carries out his plans to create a massive humanitarian disaster to slow down the Coalition advance.
Posted by Rich at March 20, 2003 10:36 AM
| TrackBack