Because he’s good at nailing things:
To increase tolerance for "collateral damage" — a move that Boot implicitly raises, though he does not endorse it (as Steyn does) — would be a substantial change in American, British, and Israeli military practice. But it would be an even bigger change, and a change in principle, if we were to intentionally target civilians whenever we thought that doing so would hold our military casualties down (or even hold the total number of civilian and military casualties down).
We would have far fewer principled limits on the means of war. The only reasons we would have to refrain from killing civilians would be practical ones: Killing them might not achieve our objectives, might generate a backlash that would set our objectives back, etc. Nobody is advocating that we adopt this type of stance. Maybe, based on their arguments, they should.
National Review has had shifting views on the morality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: sympathetic to the moral objections in the late 1950s, glibly dismissive of them in the late 1980s. My colleagues’ latest statement appears in the new issue: "It is no fair to use the bomb, or any other such weapon, in the normal course of war. Against an enemy who launched an unprovoked attack, perpetrated mass slaughters, and was determined to unleash more, the calculus of appropriate response changed. America did what it should have done." So what are we to think about the fact that all of those factors are present in the terror war?
In our previous discussion of this issue, one commentor posed a question which, I don’t believe anyone ever answered (pardon me if you did) – and that was, if dropping the bomb on civilian populations was a morally permissible war tactic (even "just" in that specific context), ….what isn’t?
A harder line from John Zmirak at Godspy
Looked at from the sanest perspective—that of the helpless citizens caught up in the frenzy of war—the duty of soldiers on both sides is to resolve the military decision at minimal cost in civilian life. By deciding to kill several hundred thousand Japanese citizens, in order to spare American troops, we reversed the logic of combat, making civilians hostages to the well-being of men under arms. This hellish inversion defined the Cold War—in which relatively few Soviet or American soldiers would die (save in conflicts like Korea), while the entire populations of both countries stood always an hour or so away from extermination.
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