So we will kill Isis by slaughtering civilians which will create the next version of Isis.

Fuck war, fuck the fucking stupid war on terror

actual declaration. Congress also holds the purse strings and provides oversight. But we have one President / Commander in Chief at a time, not 535 Congressional Co-commanders. The President is the Constitutional Officer responsible for the rules of engagement.

wars. Our military pentagon should not be allowed to act indecently of the rest of OUR Federal Gov.

The Pentagon needs more checks and balances or they'll soon be killing more and more innocents to get one 'mark'. They already squander almost half of Americans Federal money, OUR MONEY- on items for war.

I think your opinion of Obama is very shallow and ignorant of his character.

and retains some authorities that must be personally approved. Nukes, for example, fall into that category. There are many others as well.

The President withholds a significant number of decisions that are made only after the IPC/DC/PC or the CSG processes produce a recommendation.

The operational chain is President > Secretary of Defense > Combatant Commander. There are no service secretaries nor staff officers that are part of the chain.

Zero civilian casualties should always be the only acceptable number. Every other outcome is immoral.

If one imagines another scenario, reverse the roles and imagine further how it would be to be one of those civilian casualties.

Even if the DoD did nothing at all (or even if the Iraqi Govt cedes the Sunni Heartland), ISIL will kill civilians.

How do you morally engage an enemy that rejects conventional morality? How can you operate in an urban theatre without killing civilians? How can you impose morality on warfare when it is by definition immoral?

The act of effectively shooting the hostages is never a moral solution.

Drones after all do not have to fire, and drone pilots are not in harm's way.

On the other hand, if one wants morality-free warfare, the logical extension of that position is to kill everyone present in the occupied area. Given that extreme, how can one afford not attempt to impose morality on warfare?

As generally noted before (but more personally directed here), how would you feel being on the other end of the situation - i.e., having friends or family being discussed as mere unfortunates who became collateral damage? I would not like to have friends or family killed in the name of some bureaucratic policy regarding some abstract greater good - any value of some distant peace would end with their hypothetical deaths.

of course I'd feel angry, etc. it is far easier to abstract the cost of conflict the more removed one gets from it. its a trick that republicans have mastered - denying empathy and embracing indiscriminate revenge.

you can see in the report that the military is trying to impose a moral dimension on this decision. that's what humans, and human systems have always done in war. hence the standing in straight lines exchanging musket fire. it's what ISIL does - they really believe their methods are Islamic and moral as they speed an end to the conflict.

there is no solution here that is "moral". innocents are going to die no matter what we do. what then do we do? withdraw? is "nothing" moral? was it moral when the yazidi culture was destroyed?

I've said elsewhere on DU: bush dug a pit and threw our morals in it.

Wrong.
Say you have a troop of ISIL who are killing 50 civilians avg a week, for 200 a month and 2,400 a year.
You can bomb them and stop the killing but 15 near by civilians will die.
Killing 15 to save 2.400 a year is the right thing to do.
Standing by and letting it continue is the immoral outcome.

If you simply accept what is easy and refuse to try to find other approaches, your approach will not vary from its need to kill innocent civilians.

How would you stop them?
The Taliban is responsible for around 80% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and they hide among civilians on purpose ...not stopping them lets them kill more.

You assume from the start that there would be no way to prevent killing some "acceptable" number of unfortunates.

The second thing that you assume is range.

Better methods of intelligence and of application of force could be developed if one cared to do so, but it is probably cheaper (in the short term) not to consider developing more selective methods.

....'cause someone might get hurt putting a stop to it.

a better way.

If one likes the idea of dropping bombs on civilians, maybe one should go live with those civilians and develop a modicum of empathy for what is real as opposed to the abstract.

"Six Defense Department officials, all speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe how Islamic State, also known as ISIL, targets are selected and attacked, described a sliding scale of allowable civilian casualties, based on the value of the target and the location. For example, a strike with the potential to wound or kill more civilians would be permitted if it prevented ISIL fighters from causing greater harm. "

Pretty sure I read about this a few years ago, though maybe we have different rules for different combat zones, and who is doing the strike. Did Rachel Maddow mention it in her book? I'll have to check.

Didn't mean to reply to you directly.. what tha!?

Sickening.

Their hands are tied to a large extent. Bush dug a pit and threw our foreign policy into it.

Welcome to DU.

Even if we stop doing it, it won't stop. Humans (Men) seem to like it; they never fail to come up a rationale.

... (killing) has never stopped doesn't mean it can't stop eventually.

I thought that we would become more peaceful, in my lifetime.

I'm now 45 and the world is just as violent as ever, and only seems to be getting worse!

I thought, "Great! Now I don't have to worry about a nuclear missile killing me tonight, or ever!" I was waiting for a "peace dividend".

That dividend never came. We immediately went to war in Iraq, and we've been at war ever since. We will always be at war. War makes rich people richer. It kills a lot of people, but it makes rich people richer in the process.

I'm dying to know.

Usually you gift us with cries of child-murderers when it comes to Israel. You let us know hundreds of children in Gaza...

Not so much America or France. Numbers of kids killed suddenly doesn't matter - at all.

Gee - I wonder why that is.

One guess.

Are we sure it's our freedoms they hate us for?