(06-03-2014 11:31 AM)UofMemphis Wrote:  Killing prisoners without a trial is murder...plain and simple...we're supposed to be better than that.
We must stop being 'team America, world police'

But they aren't prisoners in the criminal justice sense, and we aren't policemen.

War is played by different rules, under international law. You kill people without trials all over the place. Trying to apply criminal justice standards in an environment where there is no subpoena power or other tools to gather evidence is an exercise on futility and stupidity.

We like to think of ourselves as the good guys who play by the rules. But we're still killing people, so it's hard to say we're really good, and in our quest for "goodness" we self-impose restrictions not required by the rules, and those self-imposed restrictions create quagmires that probably kill more people than would have been killed if we had gone in hard and fast in the first place, and absolutely kill more of our own people.

It's time to quit kidding ourselves that we are somehow the "good guys" in this. There are no good guys in war. We're supposedly going to shoot our way into their country and then succeed because we're going to make them like us? Really? Seriously?

For once, let's go to war to win, and drop all this "holier than thou" crap. We're not going to worry about whether you like us or not, we're just going to make damned sure that you 1) don't want us ever to come back, and 2) understand that the way to make us not come back is to behave.

We'd have to do it once. It would shock hell out of everybody, there'd be more casualties up front, but they'd be theirs, not ours, and in the end the total casualties would be down. We might have to do it one more time, because some wouldn't get the message. But after that, nada.

And if we are not prepared to go to war that way, then the military solution is the wrong one.