[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.