The actual military legal investigators who I quoted came to a very different conclusion than you, so your weak attempt at an argument from authority doesn't pass muster. The reports I linked and quoted from Just Security are also far more damning than you want to admit, and again, those are people with a much broader view than you ever had.
And your defense for the strike proves that you are failing to read even the basic details. The strike was NOT justified as a pre-planned attack in order to help breach the "island". The strike had NOT been pre-cleared or justified as part of an assault on the camp. The strike was justified under the claim that it was an immediate emergency self-defense need to protect coalition soldiers who were under attack.
Since the unarmed women and children huddled together under blankets there were NOT in the process of attacking anyone, that supposed justification is bullshyt. And your weak-ass attempt to create a completely different justification which bears no resemblance at all to the justification in military reports is embarassing.
And of course I "haven’t mentioned the dozens of illegal things the haqqani and Taliban did, in Khowst, alone". What kind of deranged derailment is that?
I'm gonna highlight the bolded just to point out that you do not know what justification from a command perspective entails - and also that same 'justification' is an issue regarding these post-action investigations because the battlefield picture and associated factors often do not reach an endpoint that allows these clean cut conclusions. And that is good *and* bad for a lot of reasons. What risk a commander is entitled to assume does not translate to what orders a weaponeer is allowed to follow or not follow either.
What that was, was a mess. And there is so such thing as a clean war. Ever. However, the way you go about fighting your war is far more deliberate. If your strategy is to beat a population into submission by targeting civilians directly, using them as body shields, destroying infrastructure, purposeful desecration of historical and cultural sites, organizing efforts to destroy human dignity past anything that is reasonable or ethical, etc - then you're fighting a war outside of what should guide laws of land warfare from the start.
So yes, its worth noting that the 'intent' is a factor and should be brought up with trying to quantify these things.
It depends on whether the "bad decision making" and subsequent cover-ups are legitimate mistakes that couldn't be avoided, or whether they're the direct result of a decision to not care as much about civilian casulties. When a child dies, does the child's brother care if you killed him because you were vaguely targeting civilians, or if you killed him because you didn't care if civilians lived or died? This was the exact topic of the Sam Harris - Noam Chomsky debate, and it's not a question with any sort of simple answer (though the vast majority of observers felt Chomsky won that particular exchange).
From what I posted earlier about Talon Anvil, they were not just killing civilians because they made a few bad decisions. They were seeing civilian deaths increase 10x out of a direct decision to engage in a manner than made avoiding civilian casualties less of a priority.
The thread is over 20,000 comments long with a huge portion of those comments being memes, trolling, lots of petty attacks on posters' ideological foes, and some outright propaganda. It's beyond silly to think that the thread needs to be protected from anything - that's just a way of shutting down actual discussion.
I'll use your own terminology here then. "Not caring", being dismissive of civilian casualties, prioritizing that harm lower than your own personnel or mission is still VERY far away from dodging fights against a standing, uniformed force altogether to choose a much more vulnerable target like a playground, vulnerable peoples, nowhere near the action, etc. Also, you promoting that kind of thing internally? Its a very different structure as you won't make general or be promoted ahead of peers in the US by the quality of your saturation fire against non-military targets on a holiday.
Could the US be better. Absolutely. But this whole thing.... this is a different level.
Furthermore in asymmetrical warfare where the primary belligerents actively used civilians and civilian property as barriers against a better armed foe? Yes, its going to be ugly. You can spell out the harm against individuals here over and over again - but I'd like to emphasize that you're not speaking to an audience that's wholly removed from that kind of thing. Many of us have provided direct aid to the same folks in these situations you're trying to say we don't care about. The reality is, against an enemy willing to kill the same people they're using as a meat shield, you quickly reach a disgusting ground where killing some to save many becomes a reality of the decision making in far too many engagements. And in that sense, encountering people who are vocally towards an 'end the fight decisively and quickly' shouldn't be a surprise either.
I'm not for shutting down discussion. I'm just saying that you're not dumb, so you can realize that what you're saying with some of these guys isn't clicking - at the same time, there's reasons why many feel the way they do and its not because they're stupid either.
and with that im done
especially as I agree with both of yal and wish you'd see that you're not saying vastly points like you think you are
great lad. glad he's back home and among his fellow brothers in arms