[thematrixturtle]

> There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy.

Why is the article focusing on the goon pulling the trigger, as opposed to these actual killed-dead casualties?

[mattzito]

Did you read the whole article? It actually covers a scenario where the wrong person was killed-dead due to some bad intel.

In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best. This is a completely valid journalistic subject, separate from the people who were killed.

[bayindirh]

To add, I find the parts which mention the people who were killed or otherwise affected by these strikes deeply moving despite being short and concise.

In other words, the painted picture is much broader and deeper than the man itself seemingly put into the focus. In reality, he's just used as an anchor point to tie the big picture, and might be also used as a so-called decoy (or bait) in a narrowly starting, but deeply expanding story. This doesn't make his tragedy lighter, however.

To be honest, I feel sad and disturbed for everyone involved in this.

[ajsnigrutin]

> there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people

Who isn't manipulated in situations like this?

Remember Iraqi soldiers killing babies? And Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? The first to get manipulated are always the general public.

After that it just matters who does the killing... if it's "our guys", then every bombed wedding and reuters reporter is foreing militant or a terrorist, and if it's "them", then it's a poor civilian. If you bomb a hospital, a civilian train, bus, building, bridge or whatever... again, if it's "our guys" it was "bad intel" or "a mistake", but if it's "them", it's "war crimes for intentionall killing civilians".

[Aeolun]

To be fair, in light of recent events, I think it’s mostly a matter of scale.

Indiscriminately bombarding cities feels somehow worse than this targeted killing, and somehow better, because it’s nothing personal.

[stanfordkid]

I mean... it is highly likely such events happened at much larger scale than the US public was made aware of in Iraq. How "precise" was shock and awe? I doubt the incentives are aligned for anyone to know.

Even Obama had several instances of drone killings inadvertently killing large groups of civilians -- for example: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...

[zardo]

Fallujah and Raqqa were pretty large scale destruction. The official civilian casualties were only in the thousands, but it's not like we dug up the cities afterwards to find all the bodies.

[bluefirebrand]

> In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best

I'm pretty sure that's basically standard operating procedure in the military though?

Harder to get soldiers to kill people if they think of them as people and not as the enemy.

[zeruch]

You are asserting a critical thinking skill that really, most folks don't have. You are John LeCarre, most are Tom Clancy.

[saargrin]

hey whats wrong with tom clancy now? (except all that jack ryan trash)

[zeruch]

Le Carre wrote about the fact that espionage or s an allegory for all human interaction) is "all gray" with lots of moral ambiguity and nuance. Clancy's stuff makes for a decent plot for an action movie adaptation, but his ideas and characters are almost all one-note, one-dimensional "popcorn" nutrition conceptually.

[VictorPath]

Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler--who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself--was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Hannah Arendt

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

[missedthecue]

Wow this is interesting. Is that a hypothesis or is that according to Himmler's own account?

[fweimer]

I think it's a reasonable inference from a speech Himmler gave at Posen in October 1943. That speech was both frank and well-documented, and it was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, so Arendt must have been familiar with it.

Himmler speaks of the challenge of remaining a decent person despite witnessing and committing atrocities (the section around “Dies durchgehalten zu haben, und dabei – abgesehen von menschlichen Ausnahmeschwächen – anständig geblieben zu sein”), showing the kind of reversal at work that Arendt describes.

[watwut]

Himmler killed himself right after being captured, before being investigated right after WWII. So, safe guess is that it is hypothesis. It can not possibly be after war reflection.

Himmler was horrified and mentally affected after mass shooting he seen. So, he started to figure out how to kill Jews differently, out of worry for mental health of German soldiers.

So, the above is at best him figuring out how to kill more effectively. Definitely not some kind of guilt or regret.

[kieroda]

These stories are not mutually exclusive, The New York Times covers a lot of the victims' stories too (and there was at least one daily podcast on the subject within the past few months).

[elvis10ten]

A bit off tangent: Why do we still use the phrase “women & children” in 2022 in times of war? That language seems to exclude men that aren’t involved. Why not innocent adults & children?

[strken]

For much the same reason adult men between 18 and 60 are barred from leaving Ukraine at the moment: they're the primary pool of conscripts and recruits. When young men die it's never clear who was a non-combatant, while women are much less likely to be enemy fighters, and pre-teen children even less so.

If a drone strike kills five men, who knows whether they were enemy combatants? Your example is murky and vague, through no fault of the dead men. If it kills three kids under the age of 10 and two mothers, it's more obvious the casualties weren't combatants. If you're a journalist and you're looking for examples of clearly horrific drone strikes, you point to the one that killed people who were most obviously non-combatants.

I think you know this and you're asking a rhetorical question about the value of human life, but it's a question with a real answer. "Innocent adults" is a phrase less self-evident than "innocent women and children" because of the way militaries and insurgent groups recruit.

[elvis10ten]

An adjacent comment just responded with what I was gonna type.

> … All that's being pointed out here is that it can't both be the case that there are no relevant differences between men and women and also that a phrase like "women and children" is useful. You have to pick one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070960

[strken]

I deliberately sidestepped that whole can of worms by pointing out that it's combat presence that matters, regardless of the cause. The relevant difference is how many of them are wearing a uniform.

I would not be more outraged if the Taliban killed an armed American servicewoman than a serviceman. If you would, then that's your opinion, but you should stand by it instead of attributing it to me.

[woodruffw]

I think it’s a convenience phrase, meant to impart unambiguous innocence. But it’s definitely a little dated, in both directions.

[rayiner]

It’s not “dated.” The mechanics of why you try to preserve the lives of women and children in war haven’t changed at all.

I can’t imagine the thought process that says “humans have had a visceral reaction to the killing of women and children specifically in war, across millennia and across cultures, but surely such thinking is obsolete in our generation.”

[stanfordkid]

It's a biological reality that's gotten lost in our modern world. It's kind of funny no one seems to blink an eye that women and children are allowed to leave Ukraine but men have to stay and fight. The idpol segments seem to think that trans men shouldn't have to stay and fight and that is the true outrage. Personally I think men (or any human being that chooses) should be allowed to flee. Honor shouldn't be enforced by the state.

[gunfighthacksaw]

Honour in this case is being imposed by the state, but Slavic cultures and national pride are 100% driving this too.

Some nations just won’t tolerate their men fleeing a crisis leaving women and kids behind, state or no state. Western Anglo/EU culture skews towards this, but not as hard.

Hence the broad support for them.

[jimmaswell]

> “humans have had a visceral reaction to the killing of women and children specifically in war, across millennia and across cultures, but surely such thinking is obsolete in our generation.”

This sounds pretty much right at least as far as men vs women, though. If you truly want equal rights then that should come with equal privileges. Historically or evolutionarily, women were valued more in such a situation because they make babies - now, so what, we're clearly not running out of babies if you look at population trends. Either everyone fit to serve should have to stay or nobody should have to stay, not based on the circumstances of their birth.

[xyzzyz]

Ukrainians are very much running out of babies, desperately so in fact. Average Ukrainian woman has just 1.2 babies on average. You cannot make up for that shortage with Nigerian babies (of which the supply is high) any more than you can make up Ukrainian war casualties with Russian settlers moving in — or, I guess, you can, if you don’t care about Ukraine as a nation in the slightest.

[dionidium]

I think you can imagine it :) Our culture conceives of a universal egalitarianism across all domains of human interest, but it hasn't really thought through all the implications of that, which is why a phrase like "woman and children" can still be used in an era where it's supposedly abhorrent to make those kinds of distinctions.

All that's being pointed out here is that it can't both be the case that there are no relevant differences between men and women and also that a phrase like "women and children" is useful. You have to pick one.

[rayiner]

> Our culture conceives of a universal egalitarianism across all domains of human interest, but it hasn't really thought through all the implications of that, which is why a phrase like "woman and children" can still be used in an era where it's supposedly abhorrent to make those kinds of distinctions.

I think most people even in America embrace a pragmatic egalitarianism where they think it's okay for women or men to be lawyers or politicians, but men continue to have a unique role when it comes to fighting wars or fixing power lines in the middle of a storm, while women continue to have a unique role when it comes to reproducing the species.

I think it's a small minority who think the difference between 1930 and today is solely due to us being more enlightened about gender roles, and nothing to do with the fact that the primary achievements of that age had to do with things like building thousands of miles of highways, while the primary achievements of this age are quite different.

[Larrikin]

People have owned people for generations, people discriminated against people based on how much melanin their skin had for generations, people have went to war with each other because they believed their person living in the sky was more correct for generations.

Doing things for a long time is never justification for thinking about them uncritically.

[dahfizz]

> Doing things for a long time is never justification for thinking about them uncritically.

In the same vein, something being old does not mean you can dismiss it out of hand. There is wisdom in thousands of years of human existence, and plenty of people have the hubris to dismiss it all.

[woodruffw]

That’s a remarkable misinterpretation. What I meant by “dated” was that it’s no longer the case that women don’t serve in militaries. “Women and children” in a military context is historically a term to distinguish men (who can fight, or are expected to know skills that can help in a war effort) from everyone else.

[karlmedley]

Men are presumed to be combatants https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/handle/11375/24294

[k1m]

Your comment reminded me of this bit from Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks

[Biologist123]

Frankie Boyle. No man says it straighter.

[akhmatova]

The thing is they're not "goons". They're good, solid people. Who thought they were actually going to be saving lives, first by going after, you know, the Bad Guys. And then by using (what they were told was) "precision weaponry" to do so.

Why is the article focusing on [an uncomfortable but lesser-known side aspect of war], as opposed to [the more obvious bad aspects of war we already know about]?

Because war is what you call "complicated". It is this complexity that the article was attempting to address.

[d0mine]

Because it is how propaganda works: dehumanize the enemy, and the opposite for your side: make your hangman as human as possible. It is aimed at people who don't believe there were no war crimes and therefore the spin is necessary to get sympathy for the killers.

A similar spin was with the Abu Ghraib: torturers were humanized and their victims dehumanized.

[Aeolun]

It’s also good for your psychological wellbeing. If you’re just ‘destroying goods’ so to say, you don’t really have to worry about the fact they have wives and children.

Conversely, what is described in this article is the worst of both worlds. After spending days looking at their lives you are most definitely killing a human/father/grandfather.

[gatvol]

Sounds a lot like war crimes to me.

[FpUser]

They do not recognize ICC and had threatened sanctions and criminal charges should it ever decide to go after the US nationals

[muro]

I am a patriot, you made a mistake, they are war criminals...

It's "hilarious" when anyone in the US says about anyone else they are war criminals, since they don't recognise ICC. (Also, hello India and China)

[zardo]

More than that, we have pre-authorized military action against the ICC to extract any US detaniees.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...

[taylorius]

Or indeed, the "customer" who is ordering that these dubious strikes go ahead.

[Ygg2]

Good question. My guess, the plight of a remote assassin just hit closer to home (no pun).

[elzbardico]

When America kills women and children, they are not humanized. Institutional racism goes beyond borders.

[Aeolun]

I think the point of the article is that the current strategy causes needless casualties on both sides?

[FpUser]

How about calling murder what it is.