stevecook172001 wrote:Whoa, hang on there, I did not say killing was irrelevant of motive or cause. I said, with the qualifications given, killing, in the context of conflict, was irrelevant of method.
Yes, sorry, thanks for the clarification. I think I do agree with you, but unfortunately even within conflict there seem to be acceptable and unacceptable deaths.
The ethical debates around non-lethal weapons raise some interesting questions. It seem to be acceptable to shoot someone in the head with a bullet, or even drop a bomb on them, but less acceptable to blind them with a laser.
It's clear that the west does consider the use of chemical weapons even though in this case only a few hundred have been killed, to be a very different to thing to the preceding conventional warfare that has killed many tens of thousands. Rational?
Post WWII chemical weapon use does seem to have been very rare. Other than sketchy accounts of the Soviets using them during their war in Afghanistan. Only Saddam Hussain's Iraq used them in a serious way against Iran and the Kurdish Iraqis. During the Iran-Iraq war I guess 'we' were rather rooting for Iraq so the use seems to have been silently condoned. It's the far smaller use in Halabja that seems to be the case the west focuses on.
What happened in Syria last week is exceptional, is unusual so we should expect to see an exceptional response. People often talk up the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as failed interventions which must never be repeated. However, this situation does seem to have more in common with Bosnia and maybe also but on a smaller scale the British intervention in the Sierra Leone civil war.
