Morality applies to pretty much all human activity, almost by definition.
Why would you purposefully kill more innocent people when the possibility is around to kill less?
If it is possible - for example - to find out where the terrorists live, fire a Tomahawk missile at said location, kill the terrorists - and, say, fifty innocents - why should we instead pick an option that would also destroy the city they live in?
Happily we have reached a time where guided weapons reduce collateral damage - and simultaneously make friendly troops safer (because rather than deploy, for instance, multiple squadrons of bombers to plow everything around the target into the ground with unguided bombs, exposing the bombers to AA fire in the process, you fire just one or two ALCMs from beyond the horizon) and improve engagement effectiveness.
This is not, mind you, some starry-eyed leftist view that 'if one Pakistani child is killed it is a war crime'. Merely pointing out he calls 'to level the entire city' are at the best merely emoting.
I'm not accusing you of being a starry-eyed leftist, MB. However I'm not talking about terrorist-targeted strikes. I'm talking about wars between Nations.
I don't consider these attacks against our consulates/embassies to be terrorist strikes. I'm weighing whether this is a democratically chosen movement in these countries, or not. And I'm trying to balance the anti-US sentiment against the peace sentiment and see where these folks stand. I know that the Occupy movement doesn't represent 99% of the US, and I'm not associating these rioters/murderers with Al-Qaeda immediately, though I imagine there are strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
Fancy guided missiles and bombs do limit collateral damage... but what about wars between disparately equipped combatants? The US has smart bombs and guided cruise missiles and a fleet to carry hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the world and so on, but Iran doesn't.
So when we attack Iran (or Libya or Egypt or some un-named Ickystan), we use all that to our advantage to limit collateral damage. But if an Ickystan wants to attack us back, they don't have aircraft carriers and battle groups and stealth bombers and precision munitions. The best they can put up is some sort of espionage attack based around a manual bombing campaign, or long range missile strikes (if they even have them, which most don't).
A country in such a situation has to throw morality out the window in order to fight. There's just not any means to fight a war, otherwise.
And when a country decides to choose war with a technologically superior enemy (i.e. Libya goes to war with the US), we are likely to use precision strikes against military targets to begin with, but the only way Libya can possibly win such a war is to strike at US citizens directly and make them end the war due to political pressure or "homeland" fear. And when Libya escalates to that level, our military is clear to strike at civilian populations as well since Libya started non-combatant strikes first.
MB: Is the above pic similar to the Ron Edry "Israel loves Iran" youtube campaign?
Are you familiar with that?
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/israel-loves-iran-campaign-gains-force/
(Those of you unfamiliar with it, it is an anarcho-stateless attempt to bypass the State and cause two groups of people to communicate directly and bypass the puppet masters that seem intent on perpetual war.)
I bring this up because I hear that the "R3voLution" is gaining steam in the middle east.
Do you know anything about this above, MB?
So I ponder all of this in the context of: Is the Libyan State being the antagonist here, or the Libyan people themselves? Which direction does democracy and popular sentiment sway? What picture is more accurate for the Saharan African muslim nations: parading our murdered ambassador through the streets, or the photo with english language signs?
I know Libya has a very weak government right now, and I suspect the Muslim Brotherhood movement has a strong foothold in it. I don't know how much control they have over the democratic sentiment of the people themselves, or if the Libyans disapprove of the Muslim Brotherhood or controlling government.
I just consider that the ultimate response of "glassing the city" is directly tied to the democratic feelings of the population of that area towards the US. If the bulk of the population loathes us and supports burning our embassies and murdering our ambassadors with no provocation, then leveling the city might be an appropriate response. It worked in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and changed public sentiment in Japan during WWII (die-hard religious conviction indoctrinated into the population at large), and it worked in Dresden by completely dismantling the industrial capacity of a city that fed Germany's war machine.
Since radical Islam is not tied to a single Nation, however, nuking or mass-bombing a city to attempt to change popular sentiment in that enemy country will certainly provoke radicals elsewhere to attempt a significant bombing in the US.
