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nradov 13 hours ago

That is such an unrealistic and out of touch comment that I barely know where to begin. The USA (and its allies) killed millions of enemy civilians in WWII. This was not an accident; military leaders knew exactly what they were doing and were proud of it. Strategic bombing campaigns leveled cities. Submarine forces sank unarmed merchant vessels with all hands. This was considered acceptable to win the war. Should we now hold other countries to a different standard?

Hamas is a terrorist organization. There can be no possible debate about that point.

Real life is not like what you see in the movies. Modern militaries are in no way able to consistently do surgical strikes with no collateral damage. That is magical thinking.

Your comparison with civilian law enforcement is so specious that I suspect you're not even commenting in good faith. There no "volunteer SWAT teams", that's not a real thing (the officers on those teams do volunteer for the duty but they get paid). SWAT teams aren't tasked with fighting their way through hundreds of terrorists to capture a suspect; they're generally up against no more than a few criminals armed with small arms. And it's unfortunately fairly common for law enforcement to accidentally shoot innocent bystanders or hostages.

It's cheap easy to criticize and claim the moral high ground when you don't have to make hard choices or deal with the consequences. Again I'm not attempting to justify war crimes but the decisions get a lot messier when you step away from your computer and operate in the real world.

saagarjha 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> This was considered acceptable to win the war. Should we now hold other countries to a different standard?

Yes, we saw what happened and labeled them as war crimes. We don’t consider them to be acceptable anymore.

nradov 13 hours ago | parent [-]

No, we didn't label them as war crimes. None of the WWII Allied military commanders or political leaders were charged with war crimes. They are still revered as heroes today. And if we faced an existential threat we would do the same to enemy civilians again, or even more.

"Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell."

-Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, Jr. 1941

I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but his was quite a popular opinion at the time.

saagarjha 12 hours ago | parent [-]

We do. Look up “Tokyo firebombing” on Wikipedia and I guarantee you there is a modern analysis of indiscriminate civilian casualties being analyzed as war crimes. Of course not everyone is willing to participate in that discussion but it does exist.

nradov 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Nah. I don't know which "we" you're referring to but Wikipedia isn't a valid source for anything more controversial than Pokemon episode summaries. Many of the articles are highly biased depending on which clique of editors managed to gain control. Intelligent people don't take it seriously.

That aside, I have seen a loony fringe of revisionist historians and lawyers level spurious claims of "war crimes" against Allied leaders who are no longer even alive to defend themselves. They had no moral or legal duty to protect enemy civilians, and any amount of enemy civilian deaths were acceptable to save Allied lives.

If you're looking for war criminals, start with Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini and work your way down the list of Axis leaders. The Allied powers were always clear that they would stop the attacks as soon as their adversaries issued unconditional surrenders. Therefore all enemy civilian deaths were 100% the fault of Axis leaders who started and continued the war.