"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"Hawke" wrote in message
...
Yup, war is hell.

--
Ed Huntress

Yes it is, but that's what we say when we really mean tough **** for
the
innocent people we kill as we go after the ones we want.

Or tough **** for us when the killing is on the other side.

Except for one thing, the killing of our people is so much less than it
is
on the other side. Remember we're masters of war, so when we inflict
harm
on
our enemies we do it at a far higher rate than any of them do to us. In
the
process we kill enormous numbers of innocents. Iraq is proof of that.
Look
at the amount of insurgents we killed compared to how many civilians we
killed. It's the civilians who have the high casualty rate.



We offed a whole
lot of them in Panama when we went after one guy, Manuel Noriega. Our
view
is if innocents get killed by us that's just the cost of doing
business.
You'll notice that our attitude is quite different when our people
get
killed as collateral damage.

You have a short-sighted view of civilian casualties, Hawke. There use
to
be
many, many more, in nearly every war.

No I don't. You're looking at war as it is recently. Look at it
historically
and you find that it used to be soldiers and warriors who got killed not
the
civilians. Look at the numbers in WWI.
Relatively few civilians were killed
but millions of soldiers died.

Not so. WWI deaths included an estimated 9.7 million combatants and 10
million civilians. That's a Wikipedia number but it's extensively
footnoted.
That included deaths in combat and deaths from disease and starvation,
which
afflicted both the military and the civilians.

Same with the Civil War. Historically wars
were fought among soldiers and civilian deaths were small.

The most frequently quoted number for military deaths in the US Civil War
is
620,000. Civilians, 50,000.

The 2nd WW was
the aberation.

In the Franco-Prussian War, 1870 - 1871, an estimated 590,000 French
civilians were killed.

You're talking about a tiny slice of human history, Hawke: roughly from
the
30 Years War (early 17th century) to the invention of the machine gun and
the end of conventional troop assaults on open ground. Prior to that,
civilian populations were slaughtered or enslaved. After that, they got
caught in the massive amounts of fire, often at long range and later from
the air.

The norm through the vast majority of human history was massive civilian
deaths.

--
Ed Huntress


No, I think not. First World War stats I've seen are not what Wiki reports.
Besides that starvation isn't the same as being killed in a war. Half of the
Civil War casualties died of disease but that was a direct result of the
war. Neither the north or south killed civilians in large numbers. It didn't
happen in the Revolutionary War either. My reading of history shows that
until recently, last century, most people killed in wars were soldiers. I
know that in the Greek and Roman days armies met for battle in the field and
they were not slaughtering civilians wholesale. Napoleon's armies fought
other armies not civilians. That's not to say that plenty of civilians
didn't die because armies fought. But it was never like in WWII where more
civilians were killed than soldiers. That is not the way it was throughout
the history I've read.

Hawke