If a Iraq militia guy shoots at our forces from hospital should we try to kill him without injuring anyone or level the hospital? I heard a guy on Fox News say we should level the hospital, what do you think?

If we went in and flippantly bombed places where civilians where intentionally I would say we (the coalition) are and could be considered at the same level as the dictator we are trying to remove. I would hate to see us target an area with heavy civilian population and know that those civilians will be killed and say “casualties of war”. I am very proud so far at how our forces are restraining themselves trying to avoid such actions and tragedies. No, I do not agree that we should target a hospital just because soldiers are there. However, that does not mean that at any point in this war that can not be re-looked at. Say for instance the forces learn with good information that that hospital is just a front and that the bulk of Iraq’s army are housed there then it could be viewed as a justified military target. Tragic, but understandable.

Do whatever it takes to minimize Allied forces' casualties. People die in war, the objective is to make sure they aren't our people.

May as well stay home and level the country with nuclear warheads. Hey, total victory, no coalition casualties!

I can't say I'm surprised to hear this from FOX News.

President Bush has placed the forces in Iraq in a very delicate position. Having finally settled on the "liberation" motive (after discarding other various reasons - they didn't poll as well ), one wonders if he has the courage to require our troops to approach this conflict in a way which may indeed increase their risk of casualties. Because we can't go leveling hospitals or destroying the infrastructure (like '91) and still be perceived as liberators.

Your concept would be correct in a situation where the CIC gives speeches saying, "we will win against the Iraqis. We will crush them." (obviously I'm simplifying the supposed speech) Instead of "here we come to save you, we shall liberate you!" Having taken the second route complicates things on the ground in Iraq, in ways that, in order to not be proven wrong as a strategy, probably will increase the risk of allied casualties.

Iraq can't fight America along the rules of war. We put our troops in Iraq and now we need to protect them. If iraq wants to fight dirty many more of their civilians are going to die. I think that is the sad truth. This is war and people die

A better approach would be carpet bombing. Radiation is too messy.

And we can absolutely level hospitals and schools and day care centers and be perceived as liberators. We can also not level hospitals and schools and day care centers and be perceived as goats.

As I stated before, we are ultimately there to clean Saddam out of Iraq. A secondary goal we have is to liberate the people of Iraq. If ultimately the people of Iraq can't reconcile with that goal, it is their loss, we will simply move on to the next rat hole and clean it up. I can understand how the Iraqi people would be very *** NOTICE: THIS WORD IS AGAINST THE RULES. FAILURE TO REMOVE IT WILL RESULT IN A STRIKE. *** off about getting the crap bombed out of them and not want anything to do with America after the war. They will have plenty of excuses to tell us to buzz off, the least of which is some soldier raising an American flag and dubbing an airport Bush International. If they tell us to buzz off, they should remember that we have far less reason to hang around and help rebuild than we had to invade.

We don't need to try and destroy Iraq's infrastructure, Saddam did that for us. We should try very hard not to kill civilians. If they use chemical weapons we will have the support of the world to kill some of their civilians.

No nation in the world goes out of its way to spare civilians the way we do--the way some people are talking, you'd think Genghis Khan was coming to Baghdad. Kofi Annan was spouting off today about his "concern" for the mounting casualties--odd, he didn't seem terribly concerned about the Iraqi civilians Saddam routinely tortured and murdered, nor does he express concern for the bodies of Iraqis, shot in the back of the head by Saddam loyalists--motivators, you can call them. As long as Kofi gets to live a life of luxury in the UN, I don't think he gives a crap about anyone but himself. So far we've destroyed 2% of the structures in Baghdad, and those were all Saddam's palaces or military targets--our smart bombs are amazingly precise. Anyone who promotes the idea that we're gleefully destroying hospitals and schools is either a. an idiot, or b. Saddam Hussein (or Martin Sheen).

I've gone over all the posts on this thread, but couldn't find it. Who promoted that idea? Oh yeah, no one did. You're right, we take great care not to kill civilians. We take even greater care to obfuscate the reporting and tallying of those civilians we do kill.

I agree completely. We lose the lives of more of our soldiers in order to protect civilians in Iraq. The US spends millions of dollars on "smart" weapons for this very reason. We are not bombing civilian infrastructure because that is not our goal. I saw a video where an Iraqi tank was under a bridge and the smart bomb blew up the tank and left the bridge unharmed. Would it not have been easier just to drop a "bunker buster" on the bridge and demolish it and the tank? It would, but that would also harm the civilians who use that bridge. I also think it is highly possible that the explosions in the markets were caused by Iraqi forces themselves in order to blame it on the Allies. Considering Iraqi troops are dressing up in US uniforms and then executing their own soldiers when they try and surrender, its is not hard to fathom.

Are you sure about that? It seems to me that everytime that I've looked at the UN website in the past several years there is always something about humanitarian and human rights issues in Iraq. Perhaps you never noticed them before, because the US media hasn't picked up on it until recently. We are very short sighted, you know?

Anyhow, I do think the the U.S. is doing what it can to avoid civilian casualties and to avoid taking out infrastructure, which is good since we are going to have to rebuild it.

We might be adjusting our strategy. We might lay siege to Baghdad while taking complete control over the cities we are tap-dancing with right now. I think it might work, but its going to cost civilian lives. It appears we're not going to get the hoped for uprising since the terror-masters are well integrated. It will be even worse in Baghdad, just because of the population size. Unless....

...we really take it to Basra, destroy the enemy. Totally and mercilessly destroy them. The loss of civilain lives will pale in comparison to what may happen if we have to fight our way through the streets of Baghdad.

A total victory in places like Basra and Na..whatever, will help enbolden those in Baghdad to rebel and end this regime themselves. It will also give us time to bring in more troops if we still have to fight our way in.

Buck up people, there's going to a lot of blood shed in the coming weeks. Now, if we can only get the media darlings to understand that's what war is all about.

The news media knows what war is about, but with their leftist leanings it works better for them to emphize on the blood already shed making it sound like the people running this don't know what they are doing. (hence all the "experts" saying I would have done so and so)

Blood will be shed on both sides, this isn't a playground.

I think we try real hard not to kill civilians but it is hard to avoid critisizm when Iraq makes up the numbers of civilians supposivly we killed in Baghdad bombings

Talk is cheap. That is pretty much all the UN does.

You got that right, brother. The UN is a debating society, and I suspect if delegates weren't accorded the finest food, digs, etc. they wouldn't bother with it. During the anti-Semitic race summit in Durban, delegates feasted on lobster and caviar in a posh hotel, while elsewhere throughout the country people were starving. There are delegates on the UN's human rights council from countries where slavery is practiced. These people aren't worth our time OR our money.

Well, in defense of the UN, that is what their goal is to do, talk and solve things.

OK everybody lets get this topic back on track.....We have PLENTY of threads about the merits of the UN.

The original question was "How hard should we try to avoid civilian casualties?"

DTOM,

I think the question was answered a long time ago, before the war began. It went something like US forces will try not to kill civilians, but their safety cannot be guaranteed. As Ranciduncle pointed out, this is the true nature of war.

My personal feeling is that if we do war, it should be clearly a war of self-defense. The war should then be done without artificial, political restraint (in contrast to Vietnam). So how hard should we try to avoid civilian casualties?

As hard as it takes, eh? If the hospital is seen as a serious threat to troops, out it goes. I'd imagine there'd have to more than one sniper in there in order to constitute a serious threat.

An incident like this will be used by anti-American ME groups to make propaganda points. That, too, is the nature of war.

Hey folks, this is a war we are fighting in, whether its to liberate Iraq or to make sure Iraq has no means of weapons of mass distruction, the loss of innocent people should be avoided.But as war is being waged in Iraq many other innocent lives are being changed or forever ruined. Every soldier that dies in Iraq has someone just as innocent here at home as do the innocent people of Iraq. If this war was to be fought here in the U.S.many, many innocent people would be killed. How many innocent people died in Germany in WWII before the advent of smart bombs and laser guilded missiles? or maybe Hiroshima? The fact that wherever the war is being fought dictates that the host country is going to sustain casualties on the innocent civilians. Is it right? No, But to a country that knows it is going to get beat in the end, Why not put forces in hospitals, mosques, schools, etc.. So i guess my answer to the question is if possible yes avoid innocent deaths but stay with our objective.

If anybody shoot's at you, you shoot back.

85882 - Please read the section in our Rules and Guidelines about CONSTRUCTIVE posts.

When you think about it, trying not to shoot at civilians is our Achillies Heel.

So Saddam or whoever is currently alive to take charge willl take that in mind & move all SAM sites into Baghdad & put them near Mosques or Hotels or Market places because they know we wouldn't dare take a shot at them if we knew our JDAM's were presise enough to blow up the SAM sites without hitting the Mosque or Market Place

We are trying to avoid killing civilians at the expense of lives of American soldiers. We do so because we are in a tough situation. If we make Iraqi citizens legitimate targets or indiscriminate targets in this war, then we will not gain their trust in our goal to be their liberators. We can go in an destroy Hussein's government and we can be more blunt and truly deliver shock and awe, but if we do so we cannot play a strong role in the formation of the new government in Iraq. We risk putting ourselves in a longterm occupation over a guerilla resistance movement. So for now we are putting our troops at a greater risk to their lives to accomplish our longer term objectives of convincing the Iraqi people that they want the American army to liberate them and playing a strong role in the reconstruction/nation building process ahead.

I think that we should minimize the army's contact with civilians and try to reduce the ability of Iraqi agents to kill our citizens with these guerilla warfare tactics. We will lose soldiers either way, but their is no reason that we cannot make surrendering citizens be laid prostrate and carefully searched. There is no reason why we need to be assisting Iraqis with their vehicles.

I also think we should be open to abandoning a unilateral postwar role in the government. This would free us to wage this war with more focus on the military objectives, which I believe to be removing Saddam Hussein and capturing the Iraqi stores of WMDs. The sooner Hussein is out of Iraq, the sooner that we should be able to capture the WMD stores. If our war has angered the Iraqi people by that point, let's just step aside and put things in the hands of the UN to reduce a debilitating string of attacks on American soldiers during a postwar occupation of Iraq.

I think if someone is shooting at our soldiers, then we have the right to shoot them, no matter what. We need to protect our soldiers, at all costs.

CP

I think some here would argue that that would be a human rights violation.

I agree that this is our Achille's heel. But a necessary one. We certainly are damned if we do, damned if we don't.

If it gets out of hand (i.e. many GI deaths), things could get really ugly.

EDIT: It just got a little more ugly...Women and Children killed at checkpoint

They already announced a "shoot to kill" policy for those who don't stop at checkpoints...

Chaulk up more victims to terrorist activities....

Amlord

I think those troops in that Checkpoint incident were justified because according to This Article,

They were afraid after that suicide attack that occured the other day.

I would have to agree with you goamerica, At what point do we stop and think- Are the people in this car or van good folks or are they going to kill me?-. The press is going to crawl all over this incident and demand the soldiers who are responsible face charges. As i stated earlier this is a war and innocent people are going to be killed. If the driver of that car or van will not stop when ordered to in a war zone then i feel our soldiers are within their rights to stop them.I feel bad that women and children died in that incident, But all they had to do was stop. The most important people in Iraq right now is our fathers , sons, mothers, daughters, and loved ones.

I agree it was justified and that proper restraint was shown. Some will be all over incidents like this, however.

Is there even a question here? You cannot kill every one in a hospital just to get one enemy soldier! thats mass murder.


Cyclone


This is certainly not true! There are many countries which will not even go to war at all rather than kill civilians.

Clearly if the air force is directly bombing the Medina and Hammurabi divisions of the Republican Guard, we are bombing and killing Iraqi soldiers. I think part of the opposition is coming from the lack of Iraqi officers we seem to be killing in our bombing of downtown Baghdad. Are Saddam and his sons, or any other top official of the regime, in these buildings we're bombing? How many military personnel have been killed within the city of Baghdad compared to civilians?

I understand that civilians are going to die in war. And most reasonable people aren't going to hold us accountable for incidents like the van that failed to stop after repeated warnings. And while the market incident seems to be questionable as to the source of the missile, things like that are what people get upset about. As long as we are going to bomb the actual city, there will likely be some misses or further casualties the same way not every Patriot missile intercepted missiles fired at Kuwait.

If we aren't getting the Iraqi officials in our bombings of downtown Baghdad, though, I would question why the bombings persist, running the risk of more civilian deaths. Perhaps there are some Iraqi officials being killed. I would have thought we'd report something like that rather than bomb presumably abandoned buildings while Iraqi officers are in the field or secured in fortified bunkers.

[Note: other nations do take as much precaution if not more than us in limiting civilian deaths; America is far from being any kind of saint in this regard.]

Who? No other nation has the technology that allows the type of precision bombing that we do.

Sources?

It seems I'm going to have to wait until another nation, or nations, decide to bomb as much as we do. I can't very well measure the precision of another nation's technology until they decide to use it.

We've honed our technology the same way we've demonstrated to the world how precise it is: by constantly using it. In this application to perfect our weapons we did kill civilians. Only after this fact are we parading around our precision weapons and our ability to minimize civilian casualties. The lives of civilians today were already paid for with the lives of civilians yesterday.

There's a comfortable self-delusion that superior technology can minimize the inevitable brutality of war. All this blather about "smart bombs" and "surgical strikes" sanitizes the messy detail of blowing men, women and children into bloody shreds.

Civilians have become targets of opportunity because just as Americans are demoralized and disturbed and whipped into a blood frenzy by the sight of one of our dead soldiers, the "enemy" experiences the same emotions when it's his friends, family and neighbors slain.

Old Joseph Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

I don't believe for a second that 99.9 percent of the posters on this board are going to lose any sleep over seven Iraqui women and children slain by our troops in a tragic accident. We don't see the Iraquis as full human beings with rights to be respected or lives we can't extinguish if they should get in our way.

Funny thing about war. When you no longer see the other side as human, it becomes so much easier to kill them without regret.

Patriot Missile 1991 - 2003

Now, that was the first Gulf War...

And more recently...

[Bold, italics edited for AD debate forum]
The military continues the cry of precision weaponry. Reporters inquiring of civilian deaths in the Iraq war are placated with series of films from the Dept. of Defense showing three or four targets being hit directly by Coalition forces. But haven't we launched several hundred thousand missiles and dropped several hundred thousand bombs in Iraq?

Now, as I've said before, I understand there will be civilian casualties in war -- especially when invading a sovereign nation. But our military is extremely hesitant to take any responsibility for any civilian casualties or destruction of civilian locations, separate from military interest targets. They insist the weapons have pinpoint accuracy, but as the articles above show they've told us this before. The consensus here (in America) seems to be that the civilians shown on Al-Jazeera and American stations is propaganda for Saddam's regime. But outside of military insistance, how can we be sure?

While I do think the military isn't intending to strike non-military targets, I think they're exaggerating the precision of these weapons and underreporting the civilian casualties resulting from their use. Perhaps it is possible that the military labeling of Al-Jazeera (among other Arab news stations) propaganda is instead American military propaganda...

News released by the military (either side) during war is propaganda. The truth, obviously, is somewhere between the claims of the combatants.

Of course, the US military emphasizes its precision. It scares the enemy and placates the skeptics. Of course, some of our missiles and bombs (thousands, not hundreds of thousands) hit unintended targets.

I do know that the military has been pleasantly surprised by the Patriot's success in this war.

Either way, I do think it is clear that we are at least trying to limit civilian casualties, which is admirable.

Eh... they were pleased with the Patriot success in the first war, too. As I quoted in the previous post, the military claimed a 70% success rate while post-war investigations by Congressional committees revealed they may have had no better success than 9%.

I don't believe we're targeting non-military targets, but I guess I'm questioning if we're doing anything different in this war than any other war. I'm not so sure we're minimizing civilian casualties anymore than in previous wars but rather putting more effort into conveying that image to the public.