Collateral Damage: Casualties of War or Mass Murder?

During World War II, the majority of Germans and Japanese were regarded as non warmongers. But the fact is, warmongers controlled policymaking and they are the minority. The implication is that the United States was right to regard the peaceful majority as nonexistent. That’s exactly what the Allies did.

Under the U.S lead 'Allies', hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians were targeted and killed in bombings that had no direct relationship to military objectives. Most people consider this morally defensible. It’s regarded as a normal part of war. It's forgivable. It's 'Collateral Damage' although it violates traditional just-war doctrine.

But why isn’t it understood to be mass murder? The answer would be that, since the peaceful majority did nothing to stop the warmongering minority, the majority, men, women, and children, were equally responsible and were fair game.

This dubious principle is being applied to the Middle East. If the majority are peaceful, why don’t its members speak out and act against the radical minority? Since they don’t, 'we' (the Coalition) have the right to ignore them when 'we' (the Coalition) devise strategy and tactics to defend 'ourselves.' If they die or otherwise suffer in the attacks, they have only themselves or the radical minority to blame.

For more than a decade after the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. government kept economic sanctions on the Iraqi people. Since the U.S. Air Force had destroyed Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in the war, the embargo meant that Iraqis had to live without clean water, effective sewage disposal, or electricity. As a result, hundreds of thousand people, mostly children, perished. This is claimed as 'Collateral Damage'.

Other examples could be seen in which U.S. policy killed or harmed civilians who had nothing to do with government policy. It’s clear from the U.S. foreign policy record that civilians have long been regarded as fair game. The rationale apparently was that those measures would induce them to replace their governments. If they didn’t do so, the civilians presumably deserved their fate. This fits with the 'Regime Change' doctrine.

This principle goes beyond the deaths of innocents and 'collateral damage', because it suggests that no one is truly innocent and they are all fair game.