Human Shields and Choice

[kandrathe]

Military: We hit what we aim at. Our weapons are that good.
Reporter: But what about those Iraqi civilians that just got killed?
Military: Well, we aimed at them. Too bad.

Yes, that would be callous.

Obviously the military doesn't say that...

Sure, anyone could manufacture any number of inflamatory conversations. I'm not sure what value it adds to the debate. As a real world example; I remember quite a bit of detail regarding the infamous Iraqi bunker debacle. Seems the US military thought it was an Iraqi communications post, but it was actually an air raid shelter. I remember that the military was perfunctory, polite, and showed the appropriate level of sympathy for the non-combatants. We can go back to Occhi's point about their being no such thing as a perfect smart bomb, nor perfect intelligence.

From the CS monitor;

The 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs burrowed through 10 feet of hardened concrete and detonated, punching a gaping hole in the Amiriyah bomb shelter – and incinerating 408 Iraqi civilians.

The Pentagon targeted Amiriyah because it picked up electronic signals coming from the site, and spy satellites could see a lot of people and vehicles moving in and out of the bunker. It fit the profile of a military command center, says Charles Heyman, the London-based editor of Jane's World Armies. The Pentagon didn't find out until much later, says Mr. Heyman, that the Iraqis had put an aerial antenna on top of the bunker. The antenna was connected by cable to a communications center safely 300 yards away.

Of the 250,000 bombs and missiles dropped on Iraq in 1991, only two impacted here at the bunker, on Feb. 13. But those two bombs defined the war for many Iraqis, and, six weeks into the air campaign, prompted Washington to curtail further attacks on downtown Baghdad.

Newsweek reported later that the bunker had been previously identified as one of about two dozen meant to shelter Saddam’s inner circle, the leaders and families of the Revolutionary Command Council and the Baath Party. Saddam himself was reputed to have been spotted at the Amiriyah bunker in the latter days of the Iran-Iraq War, and again at the beginning of February. Asked whether the victims were in fact the families of the ruling elite, a visibly shaken Pentagon source had stated, “I don’t know. [Burned] women and children all look much the same, don’t they?”  After the war, a doctor in Baghdad who was in a position to know admitted that the bunker had been reserved for VIPs up until two weeks before the strike, when the local population had been admitted.

I don't think that shows the US has a callous disregard for human life. On the contrary, if they did they would not have changed their behavior, or even used any precision weapons. Their intelligence assessment was wrong. Does that mean they should not have dropped that bomb? I don't know, but I suspect that even there was a 50/50 chance it was a military C&C site, you would still bomb it. I think when you are the "General", a down side of the job is that you have to decide who dies. The grim calculus of war.