Would you be happy with the people who were killing the bad guys in your neighborhood with missiles?

[NNN0LHI]

Poll question: Would you be happy with the people who were killing the bad guys in your neighborhood with missiles?

Lets be realistic here. I don't care how many of the criminals in my town that someone was able to kill if they accidentally blew my house and family to smithereens in the process. Seriously. Feck that shit.

Who would be stupid enough to expect the Pakistanis to react any differently than you or me?

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. +1

[stray cat]

2. I wasn't too happy with destroying four planes, 2.5 buildings

and the people inside of them either - however, they didn't care about my opinion.

[JackRiddler]

29. Ah. Was that a Pakistani wedding party that attacked the Twin Towers?

After that gem, I certainly see no reason to care for your opinion, either.

[sandnsea]

3. Or the Israelies or Palestinians

or New York City.

I wish it were so simple as to get every human to stop trying to solve their problems with rocks, guns or missiles.

[petronius]

4. If I didn't want the missiles, then I'd just deal with the bad guys myself,

or move to a neighborhood without bad guys. If I didn't take some responsibility, the smithereens thing is really all my fault, isn't it? :sarcasm:

[timeforpeace]

5. If it's Obama's missiles, it's cool. Bush's missiles, not so much.

[BeFree]

20. What a joke.

You are joking, right, tfp?

No missiles are the best missiles.

[Robb]

6. It's a good point, but a rough comparison.

I don't live in the kind of mortal fear a lot of these neighborhoods are used to. I also haven't lived under warlord rule, and I've never hunted boar with AK-47s. Pakistani ex-pats I know, have.

Of course no one wants their families blown up, obviously.

[imdjh]

7. If I lived in El Paso, and my cousin was launching missiles into Juarez, I would not be surprised..

... if Juarez fired back in the general direction of my house. Does that answer your question?

[ThoughtCriminal]

8. Maybe while I'm out shopping

they could take out the house with the loud music, screaming domestic fights and dog that will-not-stop-barking. I'm pretty sure there must be some diabolical terrorist connection. I'd be pissed if they missed and blew up the nice elderly widow across the street though, even if her cookies are a bit bland. And I'm worried about how much shrapnel ends up in my yard.

[boppers]

9. I'd be happy to give them targeting data.

I'd even be willing to "paint" for getting an accurate hit.

[Fumesucker]

11. What if one of your local enemies was giving out targeting data or "painting" your house though?

Who do you trust in this sort of situation?

Whose targeting data or "painting" is accurate and unbiased?

[boppers]

14. There's a whole process for that.

It's not like the predators are just randomly firing based on neighborhood grudges. Assuming such a thing leads to incorrect conclusions.

[Fumesucker]

15. Which process is always accurate no doubt..

:eyes:

I can recall that the Chinese embassy in Belgrade got a cruise missile through the front door.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_embassy_in_Belgrade

We are dealing with a culture we really don't understand, one in which long standing feuds make the Hatfields and McCoys look like the closest of blood brothers.

Mistakes *will* be made, I guess you'd be OK if it was your family that was killed by one of those mistakes.

[boppers]

16. Mistakes are made in war.

True that. Hence, people flee war areas when they can. If I *couldn't* flee, I'd do my best to make sure I wasn't the target.

[Fumesucker]

19. Pretty much the whole damn country is a "war area"..

How would you go about making sure you weren't the target?

Especially considering that the people doing the targeting know virtually nothing of your culture and indeed in many cases despise your culture.

You would think that an embassy would be a fairly safe place, but in Belgrade you would have been wrong.

[Selatius]

21. The problem in Iraq was extremely poor intelligence.

Often, the "informant" the US military relied upon was feeding the US bogus information to settle a grudge. He'd feed them information saying a tribal rival of his was really Al Qaeda in Iraq like showing videos, pictures, and captured IEDs/weapons to demonstrate they are the enemy, and lo and behold they would get blown up once fly-overs determined there indeed were weapons stockpiles, compounds, and lots of men with guns. Then, his enemies became our enemies once they realized who hit them.

The US resolved the situation when it simply started paying protection money to the various resistance groups in Iraq as well as tribal leaders. The problem is once the money stops flowing, the bleeding will likely start again. At any rate, the war is draining the US Treasury.

[boppers]

25. "once fly-overs determined there indeed were weapons stockpiles..."

So, we were blowing up armed groups with weapons stockpiles, and then they claimed innocence?

How about the possibility that groups with weapons stockpiles *are* valid targets?

[Fumesucker]

28. How big is the US "weapons stockpile"?

And does that make us a "valid target"?

[boppers]

34. I used to live in Tucson, AZ. Huge air stockpiles.

Yes, those who are guarding the stockpiles are legitimate military targets, as are the stockpiles themselves.

[Selatius]

32. So, you would kill a community's tribal chieftain to win over the community's support?

Wow, that's not a good idea. The people of Iraq aren't like Americans or Europeans. Many of them are still pretty tribal in nature, and killing the chieftain is no way to win them over. Has it ever occurred to you the weapons stockpiles could've been there to protect the community from outside attack? Like when Shia Muslim groups were ethnically cleansing Sunni Muslims out of their neighborhoods in Baghdad?

[boppers]

36. "Protect from outside attack" weapons are not "Predator visible stockpiles",

I didn't say anything about killing a chieftain to win a tribe.

As far as eliminating Shia and Sunni arms caches, it would be a pretty good idea to get rid of both, if possible.


edit:typo

[boppers]

22. How does one get whitelisted? By being an asset, instead of a liability, or an unknown.

The Belgrade embassy wasn't on the white list, for some reason (shitty Intel is a problem). Improving intelligence is a matter of making sure as many records as possible are accurate, and available. On a very practical level this even includes providing accurate "targeting" information, identities of those at the address, etc.

To address the cultural clash, if somebody's lobbing munitions at me, I'm not going to stamp my feet and demand that they learn my language and customs, I'd think it would make more sense to learn theirs, because being dead is a lot less desirable than being morally superior.

[Fumesucker]

24. So, you set out to learn Arabic after 911?

Somehow I rather doubt that.

No, what you do when someone lobs a bomb onto your neighborhood and kills your family is you set out to kill them.

It really doesn't work any differently for Pakistanis than it does for Americans.

I'm amazed at the number of people even here on DU that don't get it.

[boppers]

26. Actually, I did set out to learn more about different mid-east cultures, tribes, languages...

What I do in response to a threat is not what you do. :shrug:

[Fumesucker]

27. You know Arabic or Pashto?

I too went into research mode after 911, among many other things what I found out was that bushie's first business was bank rolled by a member of the bin Laden family.

That's when I started getting suspicious of us bombing the Muslim world back to the stone age, what I have learned since has only increased my suspicion.

[boppers]

33. I've learned enough arabic to follow the gist of a conversation, but that's about it.

My research led me into some pretty twisted passages about the last 1,400 years in the area, concluding that we can't win a conventional war there, it's just not "done that way" in that part of the world (and it wasn't done that way in the US, either). The initial Afghan strategy worked because rather than creating a unified enemy that the people could fight, we set the competing forces against each other.

Once we got massive "boots on the ground", there was a visible enemy to shoot, visible supply lines to disrupt, and we became a visible "target".

edit: typo

[JackRiddler]

30. I'm sure the Mohamed Atta of the official story would have had a similar rationalization.

[Raine]

10. The bad guys in my neighborhood

have created a hell on earth for me ... go ahead ... take them out. :nuke:

[Donald Ian Rankin]

12. Depends how "bad" they were.

The "bad guys" would have to present a really serious danger to me and those around me before having missiles dropped on them became the lesser of two evils.

[lpbk2713]

13. I'm pretty sure it would be a violation of the HOA rules.

But knowing HOA's it would all depend on just who was on each end exactly. :eyes:

[Selatius]

17. The civilian casualties would generate more guerrilla fighters in the end.

If you take a man's family away, he truly has nothing left to lose.

[treestar]

18. I said no

Though if those bad guys had done something like 911, I might be willing to tolerate it to a point. But then I'd be helping those attacked to get a hold of them.

[Fumesucker]

23. Trouble is that if someone comes along and drops a bomb on *your* neighborhood..

Then they become a "bad guy" to you..

It's the old cliche about one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

[Jack_DeLeon]

31. If there were bad guys in my neighborhood causing trouble I would probably help kill them.

[cherokeeprogressive]

35. President Obama is smarter than me.

If he says it's necessary to keep on with the Idiot Son's policy of killing 20 innocents to get one bad guy, then who am I to argue?

[boppers]

37. He's not smarter than me.

However, he has many thousands of people informing him, which means that he is capable of making better decisions.

So, sometimes, killing 21, with one "bad guy", will save 10,000 lives, sometimes it will only save one life. Surrounding yourself with the people who know the answers is the sign of intelligence.