It is absurd for Chomsky to compare botched NATO bombings to the intentional slaughter of civilians for blasphemy. He's been making this same argument for decad

It is absurd for Chomsky to compare botched NATO bombings to the intentional slaughter of civilians for blasphemy. He's been making this same argument for decades. The recent atrocities in France are just another opportunity for him to espouse it. Sam Harris addressed Chomsky's points in a section of The End of Faith called Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of "Collateral Damage"[1]. The difference in morals can be made obvious by asking: What would each side do if they had the power to do whatever they wanted?: What we euphemistically describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons – weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we do with such technology? ... A moment’s thought reveals that a person’s use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics. Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.) – in the pages of writers like [Arundhati] Roy and [Noam] Chomsky, in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or not you admire the man’s politics – or the man – there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently. Another way to see the difference in ethics is to ask what would happen if the roles were reversed: Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of zeros. Nothing in Chomsky’s account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could hardly be more distinct. Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools, chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as “skiing atrocities.” But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all. The only reason the Charlie Hebdo attackers didn't kill more innocent people is because they lacked the ability to do so. The only reason NATO forces kill innocents is because soldiers make mistakes or occasionally go crazy. 1. http://books.google.com/books?id=V1NXG1ob-WcC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=V1NXG1ob-WcC&pg=PA142&lpg=P...