hat tip (with strong disagreement that there is anything remotely ambiguous about abortion)
By the way, I have no problem with being anti-abortion and pro-war if the alternative is absolute pacifism. Both involve defending the innocent. But, as I’ve said before, there is no tradition in Christian history of a Just Bombing Theory and Just War Theory is abused until that is admitted. And America has never used war as a last resort for dire threats. It has used it as a policy option to teach others to obey us.
I don’t get this. Does the Just War Theory apply to guns? Arrows? Catapults? Trebuchets? Cannons? Long range artillery? When the firing distance is in excess of 1 mi it is no longer covered by the just war theory? Or 10 miles? Or when the precision is less than 10 ft?
It applies when you blow up a city with a woman, children, (pregnant women with children: abortion from the sky) and other civilians because you think you a leader might be there somewhere or that demoralizing the populace serves in the interest of winning, etc.
So siege warfare has always been against the just war theory? And again, you don’t answer my question with respect to catapults and trebuchets. These weapons were meant to destroy city fortifications and buildings. Wars waged with these weapons violate the just war theory?
In terms of “blowing up a city”, then your critique has much less limited application than you picture implies, no? I mean, we’ve blown up two cities (more if you count the firebombings, but then, to pick nits… we didn’t “blow them up”), and the critique is very historically limited. In our more modern engagements we have not resorted to such tactics.
I don’t know enough about siege warfare and the options that a commander has at his disposal in waging it. You are right that there has to be a moral way of doing so or it wouldn’t be mentioned as normal warfare in the Bible.
I think Dresden and the destruction of other European cities was every bit as murderous and evil as what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and as what I understand (wrongly?) that Truman ordered to be done with napalm in Korea.
Now, it isn’t whole cities, but it is villages and houses where we think maybe there is some Al Qaeda or Taliban leader in the structure with others.
I find it amazing that the mainstream media is getting self-righteous about Cheney and the fact that he considered using death squads, while the drone killings continue under Obama. I think the real scandal is that we didn’t actually implement the death squad program.
You should hit military targets and you should kill soldiers not civilians. I think bombs are not used carefully enough in many cases. I don’t think that is a controversial principle.
If you grant that siege warfare can be biblical and the goal of siege warfare was to literally break a city so that the opposition collapsed…. why is our modern way of doing it any more morally repulsive? It’s not like any of the bombings were surprises. We littered the places with fliers warning civilians to flee. We made it clear that the cities would be destroyed and those that want to survive should leave. And then we did what we said we would do.
I don’t see how this differs, fundamentally, from ancient siege warfare. The fact that we don’t have to spend years building up the siege and years laying siege to the city seems like a “good thing” to me. Do you propose actual ground sieges? Does having planes change how we think about “siege warfare”?
I don’t think this reasoning works at all. Readers can decide for themselves.
This reader is having trouble deciding for himself because he doesn’t understand why you think Jonathan’s reasoning doesn’t work at all. I’m genuinely curious: why is Jonathan’s argument invalid? I have previously considered that Dresden/Hiroshima/Nagasaki/etc. were heinous acts for the same reasons you stated, but I hadn’t considered the idea that a biblical form of siege warfare might be a predecessor to these tactics. I certainly see similarities between the two as far as civilian casualties are concerned, so where does the reasoning break down?
Is it the difference between nuking a city for the purpose of demoralizing the populace versus nuking a city because it contains military-related manufacturing plants, even if (hypothetically) the same number of civilian casualties result from the action? Is there a difference?