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> There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers,

> There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Why is the article focusing on the goon pulling the trigger, as opposed to these actual killed-dead casualties?

Ygg2 5y ago
Good question. My guess, the plight of a remote assassin just hit closer to home (no pun).
mattzito 5y ago
Did you read the whole article? It actually covers a scenario where the wrong person was killed-dead due to some bad intel. In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best. This is a completely valid journalistic subject, separate from the people who were killed.
- zeruch 5y ago
  You are asserting a critical thinking skill that really, most folks don't have. You are John LeCarre, most are Tom Clancy.
  - saargrin 5y ago
    hey whats wrong with tom clancy now? (except all that jack ryan trash)
    - zeruch 5y ago
      Le Carre wrote about the fact that espionage or s an allegory for all human interaction) is "all gray" with lots of moral ambiguity and nuance. Clancy's stuff makes for a decent plot for an action movie adaptation, but his ideas and characters are almost all one-note, one-dimensional "popcorn" nutrition conceptually.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  To add, I find the parts which mention the people who were killed or otherwise affected by these strikes deeply moving despite being short and concise. In other words, the painted picture is much broader and deeper than the man itself seemingly put into the focus. In reality, he's just used as an anchor point to tie the big picture, and might be also used as a so-called decoy (or bait) in a narrowly starting, but deeply expanding story. This doesn't make his tragedy lighter, however. To be honest, I feel sad and disturbed for everyone involved in this.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  > there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people Who isn't manipulated in situations like this? Remember Iraqi soldiers killing babies? And Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? The first to get manipulated are always the general public. After that it just matters who does the killing... if it's "our guys", then every bombed wedding and reuters reporter is foreing militant or a terrorist, and if it's "them", then it's a poor civilian. If you bomb a hospital, a civilian train, bus, building, bridge or whatever... again, if it's "our guys" it was "bad intel" or "a mistake", but if it's "them", it's "war crimes for intentionall killing civilians".
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    To be fair, in light of recent events, I think it’s mostly a matter of scale. Indiscriminately bombarding cities feels somehow worse than this targeted killing, and somehow better, because it’s nothing personal.
    - stanfordkid 5y ago
      I mean... it is highly likely such events happened at much larger scale than the US public was made aware of in Iraq. How "precise" was shock and awe? I doubt the incentives are aligned for anyone to know. Even Obama had several instances of drone killings inadvertently killing large groups of civilians -- for example: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral/us-drone-attack-marriage-procession-yemen# https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...
      - zardo 5y ago
        Fallujah and Raqqa were pretty large scale destruction. The official civilian casualties were only in the thousands, but it's not like we dug up the cities afterwards to find all the bodies.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  > In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best I'm pretty sure that's basically standard operating procedure in the military though? Harder to get soldiers to kill people if they think of them as people and not as the enemy.
VictorPath 5y ago
Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler--who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself--was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders! Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Wow this is interesting. Is that a hypothesis or is that according to Himmler's own account?
  - watwut 5y ago
    Himmler killed himself right after being captured, before being investigated right after WWII. So, safe guess is that it is hypothesis. It can not possibly be after war reflection. Himmler was horrified and mentally affected after mass shooting he seen. So, he started to figure out how to kill Jews differently, out of worry for mental health of German soldiers. So, the above is at best him figuring out how to kill more effectively. Definitely not some kind of guilt or regret.
  - fweimer 5y ago
    I think it's a reasonable inference from a speech Himmler gave at Posen in October 1943. That speech was both frank and well-documented, and it was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, so Arendt must have been familiar with it. Himmler speaks of the challenge of remaining a decent person despite witnessing and committing atrocities (the section around “Dies durchgehalten zu haben, und dabei – abgesehen von menschlichen Ausnahmeschwächen – anständig geblieben zu sein”), showing the kind of reversal at work that Arendt describes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kieroda 5y ago
These stories are not mutually exclusive, The New York Times covers a lot of the victims' stories too (and there was at least one daily podcast on the subject within the past few months).
gatvol 5y ago
Sounds a lot like war crimes to me.
- FpUser 5y ago
  They do not recognize ICC and had threatened sanctions and criminal charges should it ever decide to go after the US nationals
  - muro 5y ago
    I am a patriot, you made a mistake, they are war criminals... It's "hilarious" when anyone in the US says about anyone else they are war criminals, since they don't recognise ICC. (Also, hello India and China)
  - zardo 5y ago
    More than that, we have pre-authorized military action against the ICC to extract any US detaniees. https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
taylorius 5y ago
Or indeed, the "customer" who is ordering that these dubious strikes go ahead.
elvis10ten 5y ago
A bit off tangent: Why do we still use the phrase “women & children” in 2022 in times of war? That language seems to exclude men that aren’t involved. Why not innocent adults & children?
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I think it’s a convenience phrase, meant to impart unambiguous innocence. But it’s definitely a little dated, in both directions.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    It’s not “dated.” The mechanics of why you try to preserve the lives of women and children in war haven’t changed at all. I can’t imagine the thought process that says “humans have had a visceral reaction to the killing of women and children specifically in war, across millennia and across cultures, but surely such thinking is obsolete in our generation.”
    - stanfordkid 5y ago
      It's a biological reality that's gotten lost in our modern world. It's kind of funny no one seems to blink an eye that women and children are allowed to leave Ukraine but men have to stay and fight. The idpol segments seem to think that trans men shouldn't have to stay and fight and that is the true outrage. Personally I think men (or any human being that chooses) should be allowed to flee. Honor shouldn't be enforced by the state.
      - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
        Honour in this case is being imposed by the state, but Slavic cultures and national pride are 100% driving this too. Some nations just won’t tolerate their men fleeing a crisis leaving women and kids behind, state or no state. Western Anglo/EU culture skews towards this, but not as hard. Hence the broad support for them.
    - 5y ago
k1m 5y ago
Your comment reminded me of this bit from Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks
- Biologist123 5y ago
  Frankie Boyle. No man says it straighter.
Aeolun 5y ago
I think the point of the article is that the current strategy causes needless casualties on both sides?
- FpUser 5y ago
  How about calling murder what it is.
d0mine 5y ago
Because it is how propaganda works: dehumanize the enemy, and the opposite for your side: make your hangman as human as possible. It is aimed at people who don't believe there were no war crimes and therefore the spin is necessary to get sympathy for the killers. A similar spin was with the Abu Ghraib: torturers were humanized and their victims dehumanized.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  It’s also good for your psychological wellbeing. If you’re just ‘destroying goods’ so to say, you don’t really have to worry about the fact they have wives and children. Conversely, what is described in this article is the worst of both worlds. After spending days looking at their lives you are most definitely killing a human/father/grandfather.
elzbardico 5y ago
When America kills women and children, they are not humanized. Institutional racism goes beyond borders.
akhmatova 5y ago
The thing is they're not "goons". They're good, solid people. Who thought they were actually going to be saving lives, first by going after, you know, the Bad Guys. And then by using (what they were told was) "precision weaponry" to do so. Why is the article focusing on [an uncomfortable but lesser-known side aspect of war], as opposed to [the more obvious bad aspects of war we already know about]? Because war is what you call "complicated". It is this complexity that the article was attempting to address.

Ygg2 5y ago

Good question. My guess, the plight of a remote assassin just hit closer to home (no pun).

mattzito 5y ago

Did you read the whole article? It actually covers a scenario where the wrong person was killed-dead due to some bad intel. In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best. This is a completely valid journalistic subject, separate from the people who were killed.

zeruch 5y ago
You are asserting a critical thinking skill that really, most folks don't have. You are John LeCarre, most are Tom Clancy.
- saargrin 5y ago
  hey whats wrong with tom clancy now? (except all that jack ryan trash)
  - zeruch 5y ago
    Le Carre wrote about the fact that espionage or s an allegory for all human interaction) is "all gray" with lots of moral ambiguity and nuance. Clancy's stuff makes for a decent plot for an action movie adaptation, but his ideas and characters are almost all one-note, one-dimensional "popcorn" nutrition conceptually.
bayindirh 5y ago
To add, I find the parts which mention the people who were killed or otherwise affected by these strikes deeply moving despite being short and concise. In other words, the painted picture is much broader and deeper than the man itself seemingly put into the focus. In reality, he's just used as an anchor point to tie the big picture, and might be also used as a so-called decoy (or bait) in a narrowly starting, but deeply expanding story. This doesn't make his tragedy lighter, however. To be honest, I feel sad and disturbed for everyone involved in this.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
> there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people Who isn't manipulated in situations like this? Remember Iraqi soldiers killing babies? And Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? The first to get manipulated are always the general public. After that it just matters who does the killing... if it's "our guys", then every bombed wedding and reuters reporter is foreing militant or a terrorist, and if it's "them", then it's a poor civilian. If you bomb a hospital, a civilian train, bus, building, bridge or whatever... again, if it's "our guys" it was "bad intel" or "a mistake", but if it's "them", it's "war crimes for intentionall killing civilians".
- Aeolun 5y ago
  To be fair, in light of recent events, I think it’s mostly a matter of scale. Indiscriminately bombarding cities feels somehow worse than this targeted killing, and somehow better, because it’s nothing personal.
  - stanfordkid 5y ago
    I mean... it is highly likely such events happened at much larger scale than the US public was made aware of in Iraq. How "precise" was shock and awe? I doubt the incentives are aligned for anyone to know. Even Obama had several instances of drone killings inadvertently killing large groups of civilians -- for example: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral/us-drone-attack-marriage-procession-yemen# https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...
    - zardo 5y ago
      Fallujah and Raqqa were pretty large scale destruction. The official civilian casualties were only in the thousands, but it's not like we dug up the cities afterwards to find all the bodies.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
> In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best I'm pretty sure that's basically standard operating procedure in the military though? Harder to get soldiers to kill people if they think of them as people and not as the enemy.

VictorPath 5y ago

Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler--who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself--was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders! Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

missedthecue 5y ago
Wow this is interesting. Is that a hypothesis or is that according to Himmler's own account?
- watwut 5y ago
  Himmler killed himself right after being captured, before being investigated right after WWII. So, safe guess is that it is hypothesis. It can not possibly be after war reflection. Himmler was horrified and mentally affected after mass shooting he seen. So, he started to figure out how to kill Jews differently, out of worry for mental health of German soldiers. So, the above is at best him figuring out how to kill more effectively. Definitely not some kind of guilt or regret.
- fweimer 5y ago
  I think it's a reasonable inference from a speech Himmler gave at Posen in October 1943. That speech was both frank and well-documented, and it was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, so Arendt must have been familiar with it. Himmler speaks of the challenge of remaining a decent person despite witnessing and committing atrocities (the section around “Dies durchgehalten zu haben, und dabei – abgesehen von menschlichen Ausnahmeschwächen – anständig geblieben zu sein”), showing the kind of reversal at work that Arendt describes.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kieroda 5y ago

These stories are not mutually exclusive, The New York Times covers a lot of the victims' stories too (and there was at least one daily podcast on the subject within the past few months).

gatvol 5y ago

Sounds a lot like war crimes to me.

FpUser 5y ago
They do not recognize ICC and had threatened sanctions and criminal charges should it ever decide to go after the US nationals
- muro 5y ago
  I am a patriot, you made a mistake, they are war criminals... It's "hilarious" when anyone in the US says about anyone else they are war criminals, since they don't recognise ICC. (Also, hello India and China)
- zardo 5y ago
  More than that, we have pre-authorized military action against the ICC to extract any US detaniees. https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...

taylorius 5y ago

Or indeed, the "customer" who is ordering that these dubious strikes go ahead.

elvis10ten 5y ago

A bit off tangent: Why do we still use the phrase “women & children” in 2022 in times of war? That language seems to exclude men that aren’t involved. Why not innocent adults & children?

woodruffw 5y ago
I think it’s a convenience phrase, meant to impart unambiguous innocence. But it’s definitely a little dated, in both directions.
- rayiner 5y ago
  It’s not “dated.” The mechanics of why you try to preserve the lives of women and children in war haven’t changed at all. I can’t imagine the thought process that says “humans have had a visceral reaction to the killing of women and children specifically in war, across millennia and across cultures, but surely such thinking is obsolete in our generation.”
  - stanfordkid 5y ago
    It's a biological reality that's gotten lost in our modern world. It's kind of funny no one seems to blink an eye that women and children are allowed to leave Ukraine but men have to stay and fight. The idpol segments seem to think that trans men shouldn't have to stay and fight and that is the true outrage. Personally I think men (or any human being that chooses) should be allowed to flee. Honor shouldn't be enforced by the state.
    - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
      Honour in this case is being imposed by the state, but Slavic cultures and national pride are 100% driving this too. Some nations just won’t tolerate their men fleeing a crisis leaving women and kids behind, state or no state. Western Anglo/EU culture skews towards this, but not as hard. Hence the broad support for them.
  - 5y ago

k1m 5y ago

Your comment reminded me of this bit from Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks

Biologist123 5y ago
Frankie Boyle. No man says it straighter.

Aeolun 5y ago

I think the point of the article is that the current strategy causes needless casualties on both sides?

FpUser 5y ago
How about calling murder what it is.

d0mine 5y ago

Because it is how propaganda works: dehumanize the enemy, and the opposite for your side: make your hangman as human as possible. It is aimed at people who don't believe there were no war crimes and therefore the spin is necessary to get sympathy for the killers. A similar spin was with the Abu Ghraib: torturers were humanized and their victims dehumanized.

Aeolun 5y ago
It’s also good for your psychological wellbeing. If you’re just ‘destroying goods’ so to say, you don’t really have to worry about the fact they have wives and children. Conversely, what is described in this article is the worst of both worlds. After spending days looking at their lives you are most definitely killing a human/father/grandfather.

elzbardico 5y ago

When America kills women and children, they are not humanized. Institutional racism goes beyond borders.

akhmatova 5y ago

The thing is they're not "goons". They're good, solid people. Who thought they were actually going to be saving lives, first by going after, you know, the Bad Guys. And then by using (what they were told was) "precision weaponry" to do so. Why is the article focusing on [an uncomfortable but lesser-known side aspect of war], as opposed to [the more obvious bad aspects of war we already know about]? Because war is what you call "complicated". It is this complexity that the article was attempting to address.