Comment by somenameforme
5 days ago
I don't think war is at all about doing the worst stuff you can to the other guy. Different countries approach it in radically different ways. The war in Ukraine is one of the deadliest wars in modern times, but civilians have made up an extremely small percent of all casualties. On the other extreme, Israel's war against Gaza is just a complete slaughter of civilians. And I don't think we should simply lower ourselves to lowest common denominator regardless of whether or not Japan would have done the same. This isn't even necessarily about morality either - it's simply in our self interest. The era when the US was something to look up to was also the time when we behaved in a principled fashion, or at least were perceived to be doing so.
The history of Korea is another example of this stuff, and nothing like people think. After the Korean war South Korea was ruled by a series of US backed brutal dictators. When the first was overthrown, he lived out his final years in Hawaii, just to be replaced by another, and so on. South Korea only started to become what you think of today in the 6th Republic, which began in the late 80s. The only difference between North and South Korea is that we aimed to economically attack North Korea and economically support South Korea. And given South Korea is now having an extinction level fertility crisis, the final page of how things turned out is still yet to be written.
The Ukraine war has a better civilian casualty ratio for a bunch of reasons that are not "Israel is evil and trying to slaughter civilians":
- Soldiers on both sides wear uniforms.
- When they can, Ukraine defends from trenches away from civilians.
- When urban combat seems unavoidable, Ukraine evacuates their civilians.
- Ukraine is a vast country, with plenty of safer areas to move to.
- Other countries have also accepted large number of Ukrainian war refugees.
Gaza is the opposite: Hamas fighters disguise as civilians, they defend mostly from urban areas, they never attempt to evacuate civilians (sometimes the opposite), it's a small territory, and no countries are accepting Gazan war refugees in significant numbers.
There's no military on the planet that could fight Hamas in Gaza without causing significant civilian harm.
Third party observers have observed endless bad behavior from Ukrainian forces. Amnesty International even called them out, in spite of the inevitable blow back it would (and did) receive, for actively locating their military forces in residential areas, launching strikes from civilian areas, turning schools and hospitals into military bases, and more. [1] Ukraine's response was tantamount to saying that rules don't matter for them, because they're the defender and not the aggressor.
Given these behaviors Russian forces would be justified in just carpet bombing these sort of areas that Ukrainian forces are entrenching, but they have chosen not to. By contrast that is precisely what Israel does, and also what the US does not only in WW2 but e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan where killing dozens of civilians to get somebody who might be an enemy is considered a justifiable engagement.
And again this gets back to what I just said about this not even necessarily being about morality or ethics. Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023, and it's unlikely things will be improving for them in the foreseeable future. Behaving good in war is simply in one's own best interest on any sort of timescale beyond the immediate.
[1] - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ukraine-military-e...
> but they have chosen not to
I disagree with this premise. There are many examples of Russia striking civilian gatherings or infrastructure.
For example their Hroza village strike killed 59. If we're trying to be charitable to Russia, it's possible they knew of some important off-duty officer present in Hroza. But with our limited public info, there were no signs of any valid military targets. Can you name any IDF strike that looks worse than that?
> Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023
There was no way Israel could have fought Hamas without significant civilian harm and bad PR. The choice was to fight a very messy war against an enemy that disguises as civilians, or leave them alone to plan the next Oct 7.
As Golda Meir put it: "If we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image."
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