....somewhere hemming and hawing about their own exceptions....

...to what Banks was saying, and the tendency of adults to rationalize their own "necessary" killing.

It is a gratuitous addition, like a photo of a cute puppy. Children cry during thunderstorms or when they skin their knee.

...can certainly suffer through your dropped bombs, after all.

Why not stop with the murder part? Why muddy the picture with children crying? I can see you are either unable or unwilling to think very deeply about your beliefs if you can hitch them to such a shoddy vehicle.

..any second of the century.

with a situation of murder and children crying.

The 'shoddy' Iain Banks was a hugely regarded author. It seems incredibly petty to decide to complain about the end of one of his sentences.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/09/iain-banks-dies-59-cancer
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9969758/Iain-Banks-His-ten-best-literary-and-sci-fi-novels.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22835047
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/the-future-might-be-a-hoot-how-iain-m-banks-imagines-utopia/267211/
https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/iain-banks

Thanks for the further illumination, Muriel!

...in the wrong baskets.

OK, I think I get it. We speak a different language.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to live in the Culture!

Clinton's special circumstances

Neither should you if you want to be fair to Banks.

for intelligence fails while having them on the run does cause some concern

zzzz anyone else terrrorist by the daesh yawn. this is why Obama goes to Baseball game. He doesn't play the game of terrorism , wouldn't say ignores it but he doesn't play it.

SC protects The Culture against existential threats of mind-boggling gravity, for the greater good of all.

have a few books (Sci fi / fantasy) books under that one and yes I agree

May he RIP.

For example, doing nothing in Rwanda resulted in hundreds of thousands being murdered and countless others being subjected to rape as a weapon of war because it was decided that doing nothing was the best way to avoid a repeat of the Battle of Mogadishu.

How many people died in concentration camps because the Allied forces decided to not bomb the railroad tracks leading to the concentration camps in the name of trying to end the war faster? Thousands died on the beaches of Normandy because it was decided that was the best way to retake Europe. Were the Allied generals right? I have no idea. But the thousands who died on those beaches aren't any less dead. Their families didn't suffer any less grief.

It's easy to say something as simplistic as "fuck any cause that ends in murder and children crying" and mistake it for being profound. But when you have to take that simplistic moral thinking into the real world, you realize that the consequences of a desire for peace, can often lead to disastrous results. Any action (including inaction) leads to outcomes. Some good, some bad. The best you can realistically hope for is that the good outweighs the bad, but we all work with imperfect information and can't accurately predict the results because we can't always know how other actors will respond.

There is a fundamental difference. The 'cause' in Rwanda was the genocide, not the non-intervention. The cause in the concentration camps was, again, genocide. And yesterday's 'cause' was ISIS's desire to create a caliphate through violence (and, arguably, they think they can bring about Armageddon).

Nice clarity.

Collateral Damage