Do you believe it possible to kill legitimate terror targets AQ, or Taliban without collateral civilian death in war? And if so, could you point to a time in history, or any other conflict where this is been born out?
Nope, but I also don't think we should set the situation to take out a lot of innocents in our wake. While we can't completely avoid it, we should probably work to minimize it.
Who's contention? The UN's? Pakistans? The enemy themselves?
I believe Pakistan originally raised the complaint.
I don't try to, but if you think that fighting these terrorists that hide among innocents can be taken out without civilians that they hide amongst being harmed, then it is not I ignoring reality sir.
You are if you think that somehow not caring about innocent death is going to help us get to solution. There's a real problem in the ME and a lot has to do with propaganda and overall resentment. To attack the root of the problem, you have to attack that. If we continue to not care that we're taking out innocent people and maybe sometimes getting a terrorist or two; this isn't going to improve that lot. All we'll be doing is setting ourselves up for forever war, and I cannot conceive of a situation in which that is ok.
I see, so if we all just play nice and beg we will get further? is that right?
It's a little bit more than that. We can't expect the situation to change overnight, but we have to do something to get to the root problem. It may be playing nice, it may be economic stimulus (hard now that our own economy is in the crapper), it may be humanitarian aid or what have you. But until we can get people to not think of us as some form of evil empire, we'll have done nothing to get to the root of the problem. At heart is the fact that you'll never eliminate all terrorists. And by killing more and more and more, you'll only encourage more terrorists. It's a vicious circle.
Tell me how would those negotiations go? How would they look? And I never said that actions come consequence free. That is hyperbole disseminated by you, and you alone.
j-mac
It's not an easy row to hoe. And at this stage in the game, everything has been FUBARed. Our intervention in Afghanistan, the side quest off into Iraq; none of it has yielded anything positive. Just more death and destruction. We lost 3,000 in a terrorist attack, and then I'm supposed to be ok with losing over 3,000 more in the war? It doesn't sound like we netted out anything good there. We didn't make the region more stable, we didn't significantly impact terrorism, we didn't really make ourselves safer. And at this point it's hard to see if we can't change any of that.
There are bigger pictures and root dynamics and we're really going to have to get to those, understand them, and attack them to make a real difference. In the meantime, I'm pretty sure we should try to limit how many innocent people we kill.