When did knocking people off, without trial, including mucho collateral damage become so acceptable?
The assumed justice of knocking off a troublesome insurgent leader in Iraq depends on one or more of several assumptions:
- The life of an American is more important than the life of a non-American (or we'd consider it ok to knock off American criminals with 500 lb bombs, along with whoever else is unlucky enough to be on the same block at the time).
- "In war, different standards apply". The you-can't-make-omelettes-without-breaking-eggs theory. Forgive me if I missed the step where the US declared war. The whole modern fetish of undeclared war is a mechanism whereby presidents have sidestepped the constitutional requirement for congress to declare war - and congress has colluded with this to avoid the responsibility.
- It is preferable that many blameless people die than that someone we really thing needs to be dead should survive (a sort of twisted inversion of the principal of assumed innocence, wherein the admirable folks who engineered the US constitution wisely decided that it would be better that 100 guilty men go free than that a single innocent man be punished).
- Guilt by association - ie, the collateral damage is acceptable because the dead people we like to call "collateral damage" deserved it, because they must be guilty simply by being in close proximity to the bad guy.
Before 9/11, editorials and news would at least have questioned the collateral damage. Now, mainstream media pretty much accepts the idea that the death of innocents is part of the cost of fighting terrorism. Maybe it is, but that's a pretty big moral leap to take... and it's sad that we've crossed this line without even having a reasonable discussion about it as a society.
