Civilian Casualties Quotes

Peace” is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence—unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties.

Insurgencies are historically nearly impossible to eradicate, for a few very simple reasons. The insurgents don’t wear uniforms. They look just like the innocent populace. And, they’re the friends and family of that populace. This means that every insurgent killed tends to increase recruiting for the insurgency. So unless you are willing to rack up a sizable civilian casualty count, we can’t just shoot everyone we suspect. If we take the strongest possible response, we stop calling it counterinsurgency and start calling it genocide.

[W]hile the use of non-lethal weapons such as tasers and LEDIs may not necessarily reduce the number of civilian casualties, they have been largely accepted as the humane alternative to deadly force because they make the use of force appear far less dramatic and violent than it has in the past. Contrast, for instance, the image of police officers beating Rodney King with billy clubs as opposed to police officers continually shocking a person with a taser. Both are severe forms of abuse. However, because the act of pushing a button is far less dramatic and visually arresting than swinging a billy club, it can come across as much more humane to the general public. This, of course, draws much less media coverage and, thus, less bad public relations for the police.

The emperor leaned back in his seat. His cup of chocolate steamed, veiling his face as he tipped his chin and studied Kestrel with a slanting gaze."Very neat of you, Lady Kestrel. You solve all my worries. You hand me the plains for the low price of poison. How nice that you minimize our enemy's civilian casualties at the same time.

There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes. Indeed, while the standard of living plummeted for the vast majority of Britons during the war, many if not most Americans lived better than ever before.

civilian casualties n. collateral damage When General Bernard Rogers was asked if collateral damage meant civilian casualties, he said "Yes.

Civilian casualties?” I asked. “There always are.

Somewhere in retirement, Haywood Hansell saw that announcement in the newspaper, and I’m sure he wondered why he didn’t get an award as well for the effort he put toward fighting a war with as few civilian casualties as possible. But we don’t give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.

to be frank when the fire falls and the seas of blood rise you lot are all going to be civilian casualties either way. Between our war and your war, they’re going to kill everyone and let God sort it out—right?

Peace” is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence—unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when “peace” meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it.

Although more Palestinian civilians died than Israeli civilians, Israel was acting within the law of war while Hamas was not. War crimes are not proved merely by citing casualty statistics but by evaluating and understanding the reasons for casualties.

Kyle would point out that snipers, especially in urban warfare, decrease the number of civilian casualties. Sniper teams are generally pinpoint strikers, their jobs the combat equivalent of a scalpel cut. Plus, he said, “I will reach out and get you however I can if you’re threatening American lives.

The foreign policy establishment depends unabashedly on lies.

Peace” is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence

Flares and small incendiary bombs began to fall as the car approached Kreuzberg. The neighborhood was a typical target for the RAF’s current strategy of killing as many civilian factory workers as possible. With staggering hypocrisy Churchill and Attlee were claiming they attacked only military targets, and civilian casualties were a regrettable side effect. Berliners knew better.

Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died. Victory could hardly have been purchased at greater cost: the U.S.S.R. in 1945 was a shattered state, fortunate to have survived. The war, a contemporary observer recalled, was “both the most fearful and the proudest memory of the Russian people.”2

The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin---about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;

It was typical of U.S. strategists, then and later, to leave European, North African, and Asian casualties entirely out of account in weighing the deterrent balance. And I don’t know of any instance of a president or any civilian official raising this point. In retrospect, that’s a startling commentary.

In spite of this firestorm, and even with Israel’s extensive aerial surveillance capabilities and its many hundreds of agents and spies planted in Lebanon16 (the war took place before the age of the reconnaissance drone), not one of the PLO’s several functioning underground command and control posts or its multiple communications centers, was ever hit. Nor was a single PLO leader killed in the attacks, although many civilians died when the Israeli air force missed its targets. This is surprising, given just how extensive were Israel’s efforts to liquidate them.17 Israel’s leaders were clearly unconcerned about killing civilians trying to do so: after an air attack in July 1981 destroyed a building in Beirut with heavy civilian casualties, Begin’s office had stated that “Israel was no longer refraining from attacking guerrilla targets in civilian areas.”18

Even Philip Jones Griffiths, whose portrayal of suffering Vietnamese civilians forms perhaps the best photographic testament of the war, has said, “Your job is to record it all for history. You can’t not feel involved, but you have to steel yourself and do your job, take your photographs. That’s what you’re there for. It’s no use crying. You can’t focus with tears in your eyes. It’s better to do the breaking down later in the darkroom.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

In a 2013 speech, President Barack Obama laid out three rules for deciding whether to launch a drone strike against a specific target. The starting point was the national security, geopolitical, and civilian-safety objectives the president hoped to achieve. Three simple rules translated these broad goals into more concrete guidelines: Does the target pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people? Are there no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat? Is there near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured? Only if the answer to all three of these questions was yes would a drone strike be authorized. The American drone program is shrouded in secrecy, and it is unclear exactly how these simple rules have been used within the chain of decision making. By virtue of their simplicity and directness, however, they could provide a useful framework to structure discussions about these very tough decisions. And there is some evidence that they are working. In 2013, the year Obama articulated these simple rules, there was a sharp decline in confirmed civilian casualties by drone strikes. The concreteness of these rules also makes communicating them, both to U.S. citizens and the international community, straightforward. The United States has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on military drones, but that will not last forever. The U.K., China, Israel, and Iran had operational military drones in 2014, while other countries, including India, Pakistan, and Turkey, have advanced development programs. By articulating and adhering to a set of principles governing the use of drones, the United States has an opportunity to shape the international standards that other countries will use to guide their decisions in the future.

Israel was able to exploit the deep division among Palestinians and Gaza’s isolation to launch three savage air and ground assaults on the strip that began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swaths of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water.26 Some neighborhoods, such as Shuja‘iyya and parts of Rafah, suffered extraordinary levels of destruction. The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations. The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.

But that could not have been the main cause of the carnage, because in subsequent centuries the technology kept getting deadlier while the death toll came back to earth. Luard singles out religious passion as the cause: It was above all the extension of warfare to civilians, who (especially if they worshipped the wrong god) were frequently regarded as expendable, which now increased the brutality of war and the level of casualties. Appalling bloodshed could be attributed to divine wrath. The duke of Alva had the entire male population of Naarden killed after its capture (1572), regarding this as a judgement of God for their hard-necked obstinacy in resisting; just as Cromwell later, having allowed his troops to sack Drogheda with appalling bloodshed (1649), declared that this was a “righteous judgement of God.” Thus by a cruel paradox those who fought in the name of their faith were often less likely than any to show humanity to their opponents in war.

Kestrel came often. One day, when she knew from Sarsine that Arin had returned home but she had not yet seen him, she went to the suite. She touched one of his violins, reaching furtively to pluck the highest string of the largest instrument. The sound was sour. The violin was ruined--no doubt all of them were. That is what happens when an instrument is left strung and uncased for ten years. A floorboard creaked somewhere in one of the outer chambers. Arin. He entered the room, and she realized that she had expected him. Why else had she come here so frequently, almost every day, if she hadn’t hoped that someone would notice and tell him to find her there? But even though she admitted to wanting to be here with him in his old rooms, she hadn’t imagined it would be like this. With her caught touching his things. Her gaze dropped. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.” He lifted the violin off its nails and set it in her hands. It was light, but Kestrel’s arms lowered as if the violin’s hollowness were terribly heavy. She cleared her throat. “Do you still play?” He shook his head. “I’ve mostly forgotten how. I wasn’t good at it anyway. I loved to sing. Before the war, I worried that gift would leave me, the way it often does with boys. We grow, we change, our voices break. It doesn’t matter how well you sing when you’re nine years old, you know. Not when you’re a boy. When the change comes you just have to hope for the best…that your voice settles into something you can love again. My voice broke two years after the invasion. Gods, how I squeaked. And when my voice finally settled, it seemed like a cruel joke. It was too good. I hardly knew what to do with it. I felt so grateful to have this gift…and so angry, for it to mean so little. And now…” He shrugged, a self-deprecating gesture. “Well, I know I’m rusty.” “No,” Kestrel said. “You’re not. Your voice is beautiful.” The silence after that was soft. Her fingers curled around the violin. She wanted to ask Arin a question yet couldn’t bear to do it, couldn’t say that she didn’t understand what had happened to him the night of the invasion. It didn’t make sense. The death of his family was what her father would call a “waste of resources.” The Valorian force had had no pity for the Herrani military, but it had tried to minimize civilian casualties. You can’t make a dead body work. “What is it, Kestrel?” She shook her head. She set the violin back on the wall. “Ask me.” She remembered standing outside the governor’s palace and refusing to hear his story, and was ashamed once more. “You can ask me anything,” he said. Each question seemed the wrong one. Finally, she said, “How did you survive the invasion?” He didn’t speak at first. Then he said, “My parents and sister fought. I didn’t.” Words were useless, pitifully useless--criminal, even, in how they could not account for Arin’s grief, and could not excuse how her people had lived on the ruin of his. Yet again Kestrel said, “I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault.” It felt as if it was. Arin led the way out of his old suite. When they came to the last room, the greeting room, he paused before the outermost door. It was the slightest of hesitations, no longer than if the second hand of a clock stayed a beat longer on its mark than it should. But in that fraction of time, Kestrel understood that the last door was not paler than the others because it had been made from a different wood. It was newer. Kestrel took Arin’s battered hand in hers, the rough heat of it, the fingernails still ringed with carbon from the smith’s coal fire. His skin was raw-looking: scrubbed clean and scrubbed often. But the black grime was too ingrained. She twined her fingers with his. Kestrel and Arin walked together through the passageway and the ghost of its old door, which her people had smashed through ten years before.

During the war in the Persian Gulf, massive bombing attacks became "efforts." Thousands of "weapons systems" or "force packages" "visited a site." These "weapons systems" "hit" "hard" and "soft targets." During their "visits," these "weapons systems" "degraded," "neutralized," "attrited," "suppressed," "eliminated," "cleansed," "sanitized," "impacted," "decapitated" or "took out" targets. A "healthy day of bombing" was achieved when more enemy "assets" were destroyed than expected. If the "weapons systems" didn't achieve "effective results" during their first "visit," a "damage assessment study" determined whether the "weapons systems" would "revisit the site." Women, children or other civilians killed or wounded during these "visits," and any schools, hospitals, museums, houses or other "non-military" targets that were blown up, were "collateral damage," which is the undesired damage or casualties produced by the effects from "incontinent ordnance" or "accidental delivery of ordnance equipment.

The first phase of the war was led by the IAF. It targeted Hamas rocket launchers, commanders and command posts that Hamas deliberately embedded in Gaza’s densely populated civilian neighborhoods. It placed its main headquarters in a hospital and its stockpiles of rockets and missiles in hospitals, schools and mosques, often using children as human shields. Before bombing these Hamas targets, in an effort to minimize civilian casualties the IDF issued warning to civilians to evacuate the premises. Hamas continued to rocket Israeli cities. I instructed the army to prepare for a ground operation to take out the tunnels. Our soldiers would be susceptible to Palestinian ground fire, booby traps, land mines and antitank missiles, some fired by terrorists emerging from underground. As casualties would inevitably mount on both sides in this door-to-door warfare, I realized that Israel would face growing international criticism. But there was no other choice. I called Obama, the first of many phone conversations we had during the operation. He said he supported Israel’s right of self-defense but was very clear on its limits. “Bibi,” he said, “we won’t support a ground action.” “Barack, I don’t want a ground action,” I said. “But if our intelligence shows that the terror tunnels are about to penetrate our territory, I won’t have a choice.” I repeated this conversation with the many foreign leaders whom I called and who called me, thus setting the international stage for a ground action. Most accepted what I said. The same could not be said for the international media. It hammered Israel on the growing number of Palestinian casualties from our air attacks, conveniently absolving Hamas of targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians. The media also bought Hamas’s inflated numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties, and even its staging of fake funerals. We unmasked many of those being claimed as civilians as Hamas terrorists by providing their names, unit affiliation and other identifying data. I visited the IDF’s Southern Command to meet the brigade commanders who would lead the ground action. They were feverishly working on the means to locate and destroy the tunnels. They were brave, resolute and smart. They knew very well the dangers they and their men would face. So did their soldiers, many of whom did not return.

These assurances were taken by the PLO to constitute binding commitments, and it was on their basis that it agreed to leave Beirut. On August 12, after epic negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38 This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.

As Hamas’s rocket stockpiles dwindled, it reduced the number of rockets launched nightly but increased the range to Tel Aviv and beyond. Several of my conversations with Obama were interrupted by sirens. “Sorry, Barack,” I’d say. “I’m afraid we’ll have to resume our conversation in a few minutes.” With the rest of the staff I had forty-five seconds to go into underground shelters, returning after getting the all-clear sign. These live interruptions strengthened my argument for taking increasingly powerful actions against Hamas. And so we did. The IAF destroyed more and more enemy targets. Hamas panicked and became careless. Our intelligence identified the locations of their commanders. We targeted them and delivered painful blows to their hierarchy. Hamas then shifted their command posts to high-rises, believing they would be immune to our strikes. Using a technique called “knock on roof,” the air force fired nonlethal warning shots on the roofs of the buildings. Along with phone calls to the building occupants, these warnings enabled them to leave the premises unharmed. The IDF flattened several high-rise buildings with no civilian casualties. The sight of these collapsing towers sent Hamas a powerful message of demoralization and fear. This was literally “you can climb but you can’t hide.” Desperation was seeping through Hamas ranks. Arguments began to flare between Mashal in Qatar and the ground command in Gaza, which was suffering the brunt of our attacks. Eventually they caved. In the talks with Egypt they rescinded all their demands and agreed to an unconditional cease-fire that went into effect on August 26, 2014. After fifty days, Protective Edge was over. Sixty-seven IDF soldiers, five Israeli civilians, including one child, and a Thai civilian working in Israel lost their lives in the war. There were 4,564 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza, nearly all from civilian neighborhoods. The Iron Dome system intercepted 86 percent of them.4 The IDF killed 2,125 Gazans,5 roughly two-thirds of whom were members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups. A third were civilians who were often used by the terrorists as human shields. Colonel Richard Kemp, the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that “the IDF took measures to limit civilian casualties never taken by any Western army in similar situations.” At least twenty-three Palestinian civilians were executed by Hamas over false accusations of colluding with Israel. In reality many had simply criticized the devastation of Gaza brought about by Hamas’s aggression against Israel.6 Hamas leaders emerged from their bunkers. Surveying the rubble, they predictably declared victory. This is what all dictatorships do. They are not accountable to the facts or to their people. Less predictably, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas admitted that Hamas was severely weakened and achieved none of its demands.7 With the

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

Although the Taliban inflicted six times more civilian fatalities, President Karzai escalated his rants about American-caused casualties and released those imprisoned for killing Americans.

It has been estimated that the total of military and civilian casualties in all of Europe’s domestic and international conflicts in the 100 years between 1815 and 1915 was no greater than a single day’s combat losses in any of the great battles of 1916.

A frank explanation for this was provided in a US military report published by the Center for Naval Analyses a decade ago: “The Middle East has always been associated with two natural resources, oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).” When it comes to oil, water, and war in the Middle East, certain patterns have become clear over time. First, Western fighter jets follow that abundance of oil in the region, setting off spirals of violence and destabilization. Next come the Western drones, closely tracking water scarcity as drought and conflict mix together. And just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought—so, now, boats follow both. Boats filled with refugees fleeing homes ravaged by war and drought in the driest parts of the planet. And the same capacity to discount the humanity of the “other,” which justifies civilian deaths and casualties from bombs and drones, is now being trained on the people in the boats (or arriving on buses or on foot)—casting their need for security as a threat, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army.

genocidal attack had punched inward past Crestwell to take out three of the Federation’s fourteen major extra-Solar star systems, with one hundred percent civilian casualties. But

Knowledge is more virtue than power.

America has always been hypocritical and violent and still is, every time a white cop shoots a black child, every time an airstrike dismembers an Iraq child. But we have progressed, and perhaps even finer ideas can take root and grow around the central hope. There is no reason why advanced nonviolence can’t have its seeds on the wind, now. Why the turning of the cheek need be religious vacuity or naivete, rather than wobbly next step in a world where it is possible to translate languages instantly and yet remain skeptical of techno-utopia. If Americans are willing to accept greater risk in place of killing, others will take note, and follow, just as they have for two centuries of stumbling toward ideal and impossible equality.

Okinawa was lost on 21 June, after almost 3 months of fierce fighting in wchich 110k Japanese troops and an estimated 150k civilians died. On the American side about 13k were killed and a further 40 injured. These were the highest American casualty figures in the entire war, and suggested the Japanese defense was indeed going to be tenacious.

Sometimes realism seems to mean no more than the advice to plan ahead before you start a war. Sometimes realism means the recognition that the world cannot be divided as neatly into good and evil as George W. Bush's more notorious speeches would suggest. Sometimes realism means nothing more than cynical or even bad, which leaves ultrarealist to mean simply very bad. So ultrarealist methods include 'torture, kidnapping, aggressive war, indifference to civilian casualties, and contempt for democratically expressed international opinion.' Ultrarealism? What assumptions have you made about reality? ..This realism is about as ethical as power is soft. Appeals to the magic of capitalism not withstanding, what underpins these views are the residues of that Marxism that sees no difference between idealism and ideology. To understand what has gone wrong in recent years, and provide a basis for doing better in the future, we must be clear about the difference between them.

Errors in diplomacy, stemming from faulty understanding of the origins of intergroup alliances and the causes of within-group instability, have undoubtedly led to the perpetuation of these wars and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.

In the cockpit of one of the most lethal tactical weapons the world had ever seen, McDowell faced the limits of American conventional military power. He framed his squadron’s place in the Afghan war of 2011 in frustrated terms. A mission from ship to shore, he thought, was like flying in airspace around LAX, one of America’s busiest airports, and then trying to find and attack a gang member with high-explosive weaponry and cause no civilian casualties—in greater Los Angeles. This was not how to defeat a gang.

Counterintuitively for an American and Western mentality, the Russian doctrine envisions infliction of civilian casualties as a way of de-escalating conflict. Russian military planners believe they can compel an adversary to sit down at the negotiating table by targeting civilians and concluding a cease-fire on terms favorable to Russia, because the Westerners cannot stand seeing imagery of human suffering on CNN.

If civilians are present on the battlefield, disproportionate attacks that violate proportionality are possible. The legal standard is whether “a reasonably well-informed person in the circumstances of the actual perpetrator, making reasonable use of the information available to him or her, could have expected excessive civilian casualties to result from the attack.”200

Israelis cannot be blamed for the conflicts and civilians casualties nor do the Palestinians. We can argue endlessly about it, the only one that can be blamed for this lasting battle is the Saudis fueling the conflicts for enduring their supremacy in the Arab world.

The civilian casualties and urban destruction we’ve inflicted make Israel’s battles look like child’s play.

In the twelve months from June, 1940, to June, 1941, our civilian casualties were 43,381 killed and 50,856 seriously injured, a total of 94,237. Except for

The Israel Defense Forces were routinely experiencing ambushes along Sidon Road, their main supply route, that resulted in high casualties. The Marines’ assigned position at BIA was adjacent to the MSR, which led to several ugly confrontations between the IDF and the Marines. Prior to our mission in Lebanon, the Marine-IDF relationship reflected a mutual respect between two warrior cultures. Many Israelis were U.S. citizens, had attended our service schools, and enjoyed a hard-earned reputation for winning decisive victories on the field of battle. The Marines were not alone in embracing the Israelis’ demonstrated courage and sacrifice in defense of their homeland. However, this relationship changed in Lebanon. The Israelis had a long-established policy of mercilessly responding to any attack against them, even minor ones. A sniper round from a village would cause the IDF to open up with .50-caliber machine gun fire from a convoy in many directions. This indiscriminate fire caused numerous civilian casualties, which

Levin had been hit in the neck. PPE wouldn't have helped. But I guess the sergeant major, like most people, needed death to be sensible. A reason for each casualty. I'd seen the same feeble theodicy at funerals in the civilian world. If lung disease, the deceased should be a smoker. If heart disease, a lover of red meat. Some sort of causality, no matter how tenuous, to sanitize it. As if mortality is a game with rules where the universe is rational and the God watching over maneuvers us like chess pieces. His fingers deep into the sides of the world.

The Battle of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, was part of Operation Restore Hope. We remember it now as “Black Hawk Down” from the novel (and subsequent film) of that name by an on-the-scene journalist, Mark Bowden. Army Rangers paid a heavy price for not looking “too intimidating” or “like invaders,” valiantly fighting while stripped of the equipment they requested. Had the administration not ignorantly meddled with events, the 160 Special Forces operators of Army Rangers and Delta wouldn’t have taken so many casualties. And here is what the Clinton Machine didn’t comprehend: Our guys wouldn’t have had to inflict as many casualties either, shooting their way out against 4,000–6,000 Somalis with an entire city of civilians trapped in the crossfire. The Rangers became a legend that day but lost eighteen fine men and suffered seventy-three wounded.

Presumption of innocence has also been given a new and useful interpretation. As the New York Times later reported, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

But to suggest this was systemic, to suggest the Western forces were no better, and possibly worse, than the ruthless extremists, or that the West had brought this on themselves, made Blake’s blood boil. The Americans often went to great lengths, and even risked their own lives, to limit civilian casualties.

AFGHAN WAR LOGS (EXTRACTS) These logs consist of a short report on every incident regarded as noteworthy by American troops in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009. Around 90,000 incidents are reported in the document passed to WikiLeaks, though only around 75,000 were released. These seven entries detail incidents of civilian casualties caused by British troops in October, November and December 2008. Like other similar reports throughout the logs, they give an insight into the chaotic nature of the battlefield and the constant risk – and consequences of – mistakes by coalition troops. Some of the information in each report has been removed and some acronyms have been expanded for the sake of readability, but each original report can be identified by its number and read in full on the WikiLeaks website. Some of the logs were redacted by WikiLeaks on release.

Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive [32] in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used [33].

The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.

But on the whole American soldiers demonstrated great sympathy for civilians trapped in the battle, and US Army medical services did whatever they could to treat civilian casualties. The

After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive use of artillery shells and bombs. As a result far more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination.

I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to keep Marines alive,” the sergeant major said, haranguing the men only a few days afterward, “and the fact of the matter is, when a Marine comes in and he wasn’t wearing his PPE when he was hit, because it’s hot, and he doesn’t want to wear it while he’s at the OP, I’m the one who’s got to say the thing nobody wants to say.” Levin had been hit in the neck. PPE wouldn’t have helped. But I guess the sergeant major, like most people, needed death to be sensible. A reason for each casualty. I’d seen the same feeble theodicy at funerals in the civilian world. If lung disease, the deceased should be a smoker. If heart disease, a lover of red meat. Some sort of causality, no matter how tenuous, to sanitize it. As if mortality is a game with rules where the universe is rational and the God watching over maneuvers us like chess pieces, His fingers deep into the sides of the world.

The Chronicle published passenger lists of the returnees, while The Examiner did not shrink from describing the casualties of war: They came back to the mainland yesterday, the maimed and the blinded – the first war casualties to arrive from Hawaii.  Convoyed transports brought them.  And brought to San Francisco and the Nation, the horror and full impact of Japan’s treacherous Pearl Harbor attack. They jammed the ship (sic) hospitals, overflowed into staterooms.              There were men hideously burned by explosions.  There were fracture cases.

Colonel Olds, among many others, was of the opinion that fighter bombers carrying a single bomb flying low and fast would have been far more effective against German military and strategic targets. He said that a single Mustang could have dropped a five hundred pound bomb through the window of any factory in Germany. It was impossible to hit a factory with a huge formation of bombers flying at 25,000 feet without destroying everything for miles around it. He also emphasized that this would have greatly minimized civilian casualties. Perhaps the colonel was naive. Perhaps he did not understand that the very purpose of “strategic bombing” was to maximize civilian casualties. In a word, the purpose of “strategic bombing” was genocide!!

Back then, “cult” merely served as a sort of churchly classification, alongside “religion” and “sect.” The word denoted something new or unorthodox, but not necessarily nefarious. The term started gaining its darker reputation toward the start of the Fourth Great Awakening. That’s when the emergence of so many nonconformist spiritual groups spooked old-school conservatives and Christians. “Cults” soon became associated with charlatans, quacks, and heretical kooks. But they still weren’t considered much of a societal threat or criminal priority . . . not until the Manson Family murders of 1969, followed by the Jonestown massacre of 1978 (which we’ll investigate in part 2). After that, the word “cult” became a symbol of fear. The grisly death of over nine hundred people at Jonestown, the largest number of American civilian casualties prior to 9/11, sent the whole country into cult delirium. Some readers may recall the subsequent “Satanic Panic,” a period in the ’80s defined by widespread paranoia that Satan-worshipping child abusers were terrorizing wholesome American neighborhoods. As sociologist Ron Enroth wrote in his 1979 book The Lure of the Cults, “The unprecedented media exposure given Jonestown . . . alerted Americans to the fact that seemingly beneficent religious groups can mask a hellish rot.

That was no easy task, but Clark, along with his fellow senior commanders in the Mediterranean, understood that victory could not be achieved without young men under their command getting killed. To keep the casualties down meant using bombers and immense firepower, mechanization and modernity to do a lot of the hard yards. And if that involved destroying cities, towns and villages which barred the Allies’ path, then it was the price that had to be paid. Better a building than young Allied lives. Better Italian civilians than young Allied lives. After all, the Allies never asked the Italians to enter the war. Yet there was the paradox, for if the Allies

That was no easy task, but Clark, along with his fellow senior commanders in the Mediterranean, understood that victory could not be achieved without young men under their command getting killed. To keep the casualties down meant using bombers and immense firepower, mechanization and modernity to do a lot of the hard yards. And if that involved destroying cities, towns and villages which barred the Allies’ path, then it was the price that had to be paid. Better a building than young Allied lives. Better Italian civilians than young Allied lives. After all, the Allies never asked the Italians to enter the war. Yet there was the paradox, for if the Allies were liberators, was it right that they should be killing the people they were supposed to be liberating?

The subsequent wars in Afghanistan (2001–2014) and Iraq (2003–2011) have collectively claimed the lives of more than 200,000 civilians, based on the most conservative credible estimates—more than sixty-five times as many civilians as were killed in the September 11 attacks themselves. Emerging regional terrorist groups have, in turn, cited these casualties as a rationale for years of horrific attacks that they have perpetrated against other innocent civilians, and so on. As the Nigerian proverb puts it: “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

The Soviets had lost fifteen thousand lives and suffered more than thirty thousand casualties. Between a million and two million Afghans perished, perhaps 90 percent of them civilians. Villages were razed, crops and livestock destroyed, the landscape studded with mines. A third of the population sheltered in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran.

Are all perpetrators alike? No; not everyone feels the need to reduce dissonance by denigrating the victim. Who do you imagine would be most likely to blame the victim: perpetrators who think highly of themselves and have strong feelings of self-worth, or those who are insecure and have low self-worth? Dissonance theory makes the nonobvious prediction that it will be the former. For people who have low self-esteem, treating others badly or going along mindlessly with what others tell them to do is not terribly dissonant with their self-concept. Moreover, they are more likely to be self-deprecating and modest, because they don't think they are especially wonderful. It is the people who think the most of themselves who, if they cause someone pain, must convince themselves the other guy is a rat. Because terrific guys like me don't hurt innocent people, that guy must deserve every nasty thing I did to him. An experiment by David Glass confirmed this prediction: The higher the perpetrators' self-esteem, the greater their denigration of their victims. Are all victims alike in the eyes of the perpetrator? No; they differ in their degree of helplessness. Suppose you are a marine in a hand-to-hand struggle with an armed enemy soldier. You kill him. Do you feel much dissonance? Probably not. The experience may be unpleasant, but it does not generate dissonance and needs no additional justification: "It was him or me ... I killed an enemy ... We are in this to win ... I have no choice here." But now suppose that you are on a mission to firebomb a house that you were told contains enemy troops. You and your team destroy the place, and then discover you have blown up a household of old men, children, and women. Under these circumstances, most soldiers will try to find additional self-justifications to reduce the dissonance they feel about killing innocent civilians, and the leading one will be to denigrate and dehumanize their victims: "Stupid jerks, they shouldn't have been there ... they were probably aiding the enemy ... All those people are vermin, gooks, subhuman." Or, as General William Westmoreland famously said of the high number of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War, "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.

To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines—service troops and civilians.

Total casualties, including civilians, from the Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, were 2,403 killed and 1,178 wounded. Of the number of dead, almost one half—1,177 men—were on the Arizona, out of the complement of 1,514 assigned to the ship. The sinking of the Arizona remains the worst single military ship disaster in American history.

To the noncombatans and those on the periphery of action, the war meant boredom or occasional excitement; but to those in the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines - service troops and civilians.

At first, penicillin was reserved only for the use of war casualties, but by 1944, it was available for the treatment of civilians in Britain and America. When the war ended, in 1945, the use of penicillin spread all over the world.

Even though the casualties, both military and civilian, were massive during World War I, deaths from the epidemic of influenza virus in 1918–19 surpassed the war’s toll: Some 40 to 50 million people died of influenza in less than a year (3–7). This was over four times the number of fatalities during the four years of war. An estimated one-fifth of the world’s human population was infected, and 2 to 3 percent of those infected died.

sense of fatalism. Pvt. Ken Webster of the 101st Airborne expressed his feelings and insights in a letter to his mother: “I am living on borrowed time. . . . If I don’t come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machine-gunned in the face. You have to keep going. It’s not like civilian

. Recommendation: One avenue for ensuring that all civilian CCTV equipment is SCORPION STARE compatible by 2006 is to exploit an initiative of the US National Security Agency for our own ends. In a bill ostensibly sponsored by Hollywood and music industry associations (MPAA and RIAA: see also CDBTPA), the NSA is ostensibly attempting to legislate support for Digital Rights Management in all electronic equipment sold to the public. The implementation details are not currently accessible to us, but we believe this is a stalking-horse for requiring chip manufacturers to incorporate on-die FPGAs in the one million gate range, re-configurable in software, initially laid out as DRM circuitry but reprogrammable in support of their nascent War on Un-Americanism. If such integrated FPGAs are mandated, commercial pressures will force Far Eastern vendors to comply with regulation and we will be able to mandate incorporation of SCORPION STARE Level Two into all digital consumer electronic cameras and commercial CCTV equipment under cover of complying with our copyright protection obligations in accordance with the WIPO treaty. A suitable pretext for the rapid phased obsolescence of all Level Zero and Level One cameras can then be engineered by, for example, discrediting witness evidence from older installations in an ongoing criminal investigation. If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals—or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link—will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

Sometimes realism seems to mean no more than the advice to plan ahead before you start a war. Sometimes realism means the recognition that the world cannot be divided as neatly into good and evil as George W. Bush's more notorious speeches would suggest. Sometimes realism means nothing more than cynical or even bad, which leaves ultrarealist to mean simply very bad. So ultrarealist methods include 'torture, kidnapping, aggressive war, indifference to civilian casualties, and contempt for democratically expressed international opinion.' Ultrarealism? What assumptions have you made about reality? ..This realism is about as ethical as power is soft. Appeals to the magic of capitalism not withstanding, what underpins these views are the residues of that Marxism that sees no difference between idealism and ideology. To understand what has gone wrong in recent years, and provide a basis for doing better in the future, we must be clear about the difference between them

Equally important, downsizing is mimicked by a politics that consistently sacrifices the needs of the poorer and often the more vulnerable classes—the counterparts to civilian casualties. Reduction of social benefits, lax enforcement of workplace standards, preserving a scandalously low minimum wage, all these are part of strategies devised to achieve an electoral victory and demonstrate the political superfluousness of the working classes.

A short time later, Haganah officers came to take the village from the Irgun. One officer remarked, “All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women, or children.” He noted, “The dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands.” Another Haganah commander sneered, “You are swine,” and ordered his men to surround the militiamen. A tense standoff ensued as the Haganah commanders debated about forcibly disarming the dissidents and shooting them if they refused. At last, the Haganah commander ordered the Irgun to clean the village and bury the dead. They carried the bodies to a rock quarry and set them ablaze. “It was a lovely spring day,” the Haganah commander recorded. “The almond trees were in bloom, the flowers were out, and everywhere there was the stench of the dead, the thick smell of blood, and the terrible odor of the corpses burning in the quarry.”8 The next day, the Haganah commander issued a communiqué: “For a full day Etzel [Irgun] and Lechi [Stern] soldiers stood and slaughtered men, women, and children—not in the course of the operation, but in a premeditated act which had as its intention slaughter and murder only. They also took spoils, and when they finished their work, they fled.” Irgun and Stern leaders denied that any deliberate killings of civilians occurred at Deir Yassin. Menachem Begin noted that they had set up a loudspeaker at the entrance of the village, warning civilians to leave: “By giving this humane warning, our fighters threw away the element of complete surprise, and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle. A substantial number of the inhabitants obeyed the warning and they were unhurt. A few did not leave their stone houses—perhaps because of the confusion. The fire of the enemy was murderous—to which the number of our casualties bears elegant testimony. Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of hand grenades. And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable casualties.”9 The Jewish Agency did not accept Begin’s explanation and immediately condemned the killings. Regardless of which view was correct, the events at Deir Yassin would have a more far-reaching impact than anyone could have imagined.

We bomb homes, and these people have families -- and the U.S. refuses to apologize for these civilian deaths. The absence of concern makes their actions almost equal to a deliberate targeting of civilians.

For the last 20 years, America’s elites have talked feverishly about police racism in order to avoid talking about black crime. On March 11, 2015 – only hours before two police officers were shot at protests in Ferguson, either targeted directly or the unintended casualties of a gang dispute – a six-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed by a stray bullet in a St. Louis park. There have been no protests against his killer; Al Sharpton has not shown up to demand a federal investigation. Marcus is just one of the 6000 black homicide victims a year (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined) who receive virtually no attention because their killers are other black civilians.

This magnificent city that I only knew from photographs had been devastated. The infamous submarine bunkers had been bombed, and the bunkers that survived were later dynamited. I could understand this, but why civilian houses had also been leveled and set afire by incendiary bombs was beyond me. Each British Lancaster bomber delivered up to 8,000 pounds of bomb loads each night, with as many as 1,000 bombers over the target on a given night. During these raids, this great port city was set alight like a Roman candle! American B-17 and B 24 bombers also came during the daytime. Operation Gomorrah was conducted day and night causing a howling noise as the Feuersturm firestorm sucked the air out of the city to feed itself. With surface temperatures reaching 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, asphalt streets actually melted, leaving people trapped in the black molten gunk. Winds of 150 miles per hour fanned flames that reached an altitude of over 15,000 feet! I lost an aunt, who was a beautiful young woman in her twenties, along with her husband and baby. Her older sister also perished in the flames. They all now lie buried in a mass gravesite, which I visited in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. The stories I heard from people who could still talk about them, without totally choking up, were unbelievable. It was said that over 50 miles of street frontage were set ablaze and totally reduced to ashes during the raids, and another 133 miles were severely damaged. An estimated 1,500 people were killed on the first night of the raids and many more were wounded. Those who survived were suddenly homeless and without possessions. The total casualties were estimated at approximately 45,000 people. At the end of it, Hitler refused to come to the city and sent Hermann Göring instead! This was never forgotten or forgiven by das volk, the people. What is it with us? Why do we as human beings have to experience war after war? It seems that we never learn and so perhaps we will have to witness even worse in the future.

Gang or individual rapes by soldiers -- whether or not these end in the woman's murder -- have never been counted as civilian war casualties. Psychological injuries to the surviving rape victims are often lifelong.

Military force is another element of power. It provides a nation the capability to impose it's will on another nation through the threat or use of violence. Military force also provides a state the capability to resist another's coercive actions. The types of military forces required will depend on the state's physical characteristics and its enemies' capabilities. A landlocked state has little need for a navy. If a nation's opponent has a strong air force, then the nation should have strong air defenses. The size and composition of military force available will dictate the types of operations a state may conduct. A landlocked power with no navy will never dominate the seas. A state without an air force or navy today will have great difficulty projecting and sustaining military forces over great distances. A strong army with no ability to move to another area has little impact on foreign policy, except on protecting its homeland. The technological sophistication of its weaponry versus that of an opponent's will provide a state an advantage or disadvantage in projecting its will. All other things being equal, a state weapons that can kill an opponent's soldiers faster and more efficiency that those of the opponent's has an advantage. Of course, rarely are all other things equal. Technological superiority can provide an advantage, but it cannot guarantee success. Technology will also affect the state's ability to sustain its forces. Commonality of the civilian and military technological base will enhance logistical capabilities by making it easy for civilian industry to provide military forces the equipment needed. The location of military forces with respect to the theater of war and the enemy is another component of military power. If the military forces are near their warfighting positioning, their deterrent and warfare capabilities are greater. The degree of civilian control and willingness to employ military force prescribes the manner in which a state may employ its military power. This point relates to the national will element of power. If the will to employ the military force available does not exist, the military force has no utility. No power results from the simple existence of the military force. Power results from the will to use military power, or at least an enemy's perception of the willingness to do so, and the capability of that military force to defeat all enemy. Available reserves limit the duration of combat a state can endure. Once all the trained or trainable men and women are casualties, a state cannot continue. A state's manpower pool always serves as a limit on the size of the military force it can raise.

spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, who have pushed civilian casualties in Afghanistan to a new high in the past year, posted a Twitter message criticizing the attack as un-Islamic and expressing shared pain with the victims’ families.

I am alleging that Israeli troops do not care very much if they happen to kill civilians while getting at what they think of as Hamas targets. They are not doing due diligence to avoid civilian deaths and casualties. The difference between Israeli military action in Gaza and most U.S. operations in Iraq is not a matter of national character or some other essentialist attribute. It is the difference between imperial occupation for specific purposes and settler colonialism. The Israelis are both an army and a settler movement. The U.S. never considered flooding Iraq with colonists from Alabama and Mississippi. When threatened by an indigenous population trying to expel it, settler colonialism is vicious. It is after all facing an existential threat. The U.S. can withdraw from Iraq with no dire consequences to the U.S. In 1954-1962, the Algerians claim that the French killed at least half a million, and maybe as much as 800,000 Algerians, out of a population of 11 million. That is between nearly 5 percent and nearly 10 percent! The French military had been enlisted to fight for the interests of the colonists, who were in danger of losing everything. (In the end they did lose almost everything, being forced to return to Europe, or choosing to do so rather than face the prospect of living under independent Algerian rule). The brutality with which the British put down the Mau-Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s is another example of massive human rights violations on behalf of a settler population. This latest sanguinary episode is a further manifestation of Israel's insecure brand of settler colonialism, in which the lives of the indigenous population are viewed as worthless before the interests of the colonists. The Israelis have not killed on the French scale, but I would argue that they kill, and disregard civilian life, for much the same reasons as the French did in Algeria. Settler colonialism is unstable in the contemporary world because of the facilities subject populations have for mobilization and resistance. Conflict between colonizer and colonized has only ended in one of three ways: 1) The expulsion of the colonists, as in Algeria; 2) the integration of the colonists into a nation that includes the indigenous population, as happened in South Africa; or 3) the expulsion of the indigenous population, as with the Trail of Tears in the nineteenth-century United States.6 Prominent journalist Bob Simon told Charlie Rose that the 'two-state solution' in Israel-Palestine is dead, which is likely correct.6 He suggested that the most likely outcome is Apartheid. However, I would argue that Apartheid is a phase and is itself an unstable situation, and that only one of the above three

The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.27

It seems that in the historical game of politics and contests for territories, it is almost always the guiltless who die in greatest number.