5 Year in prison for the murder of 28,000 people?

[billvon 2,991]

>No one said anything about going in and targeting civilians . . .

Correct. They would have been "unavoidable collateral damage." (In quotes because of course they are quite avoidable, it's just not a path we wanted to take.)

>It seems to me the US had two choices: a shitty one, and a really shitty
>one. they picked the shitty one.

Yes, those were two of the choices. But they were far from the only choices; they were just the easy ones.

>I guess using your analogy, if a fully fueled hijacked 747 was heading
>towards the super bowl, it would be wrong to shoot it down.

Nope, that would be justified provided we had the intelligence to back it up.

Now, would it be OK to shoot down an ordinary United Airlines 747 full of civilians flying from Newark to San Francisco - just to convince Al Qaeda to not try hijacking another airplane?

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

>No one said anything about going in and targeting civilians . . .

Correct. They would have been "unavoidable collateral damage." (In quotes because of course they are quite avoidable, it's just not a path we wanted to take.)

>It seems to me the US had two choices: a shitty one, and a really shitty
>one. they picked the shitty one.

Yes, those were two of the choices. But they were far from the only choices; they were just the easy ones.

so what were the hard ones?

Firebomb more cities like done with Tokyo, Dresden?
Lay siege and wait for millions to starve to death instead?
Let the Russians loose (given what they did to their own in Eastern Europe, hardly a nicer alternative, ignoring the political reasons around beating the Russians)?

[billvon 2,991]

>so what were the hard ones?

>Lay siege and wait for millions to starve to death instead?

Yes, that was one of them. _Might_ hundreds of thousands have starved before they capitulated? Yes, that's possible. Would it have taken a lot longer? Yes.

Is it better than incinerating 350,000 innocent people with weapons of mass destruction? That's a judgment call. I think it would have been, because there is a moral difference in allowing someone to decide to starve themselves or give up, and in incinerating them.

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

Yes, that was one of them. _Might_ hundreds of thousands have starved before they capitulated? Yes, that's possible. Would it have taken a lot longer? Yes.

Is it better than incinerating 350,000 innocent people with weapons of mass destruction? That's a judgment call. I think it would have been, because there is a moral difference in allowing someone to decide to starve themselves or give up, and in incinerating them.

Not possible - pretty much a certainty.

Somehow people have decided that dying from a nuke is worse than dying from starvation, or being suffocated by lack of oxygen, or burned by conventional arms. Dying is dying.