The US Military Approves Bombing Children

[Vattel]

10. Killing children digging holes for IEDs is bad enough

but the military also has no moral qualms about killing children that are clearly innocent bystanders if that is deemed an effective way to achieve even relatively trivial military objectives. Thus, Peter Singer writes in "The President of Good and Evil:"

"U.S. planes bombed a civilian neighborhood in the town of Basra, killing a number of civilians. The New York Times reported, particularly, on a family called Hamudi, a family of fourteen that had been living in a house in that area. Ten members of that family of fourteen were killed in the raid. Children, teenagers, older people. Ten out of fourteen of the family. They were not Baathists or anything of the sort.

"Why was that area bombed? Because it was believed that the man called Chemical Ali, the Iraqi general who had ordered the use of poison gas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was in that neighborhood. Well, it turns out he wasn't in that neighborhood, because four months later he was captured alive. Or if he was, certainly the bombing didn't get him. But even if he had been, was that so important that it was worth bombing a civilian neighborhood and killing civilians? There was no evidence that he was in control of any particular military forces at that time. The fighting in Basra was really over. The British were already around the city. So what was really the point of trying to kill him at the cost of almost certainly taking civilian lives?"