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Comment by james_pm | Hacker News Reader

To give some sense of the scale of the disaster that would follow a failure, the US considered bombing that dam and releasing all that water in response to a potential chemical attack on US troops during Gulf War I, according to Colin Powell (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html - search for dams).

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They considered an attack that would have killed ~1M people, presumably mainly civilians? sigh smh

To play devil's advocate here, any competent military would consider possibilities like this. "War is hell" is said so often these days as to be blasé, but it really is true.

Are you saying that any competent military would consider racking up a civilian death toll on the order of the Auschwitz death camp in the matter of days?

Thank god the US military isn't competent then.

Yes. They should consider a given plan and look at the costs and the benefits. Kinda like when they drop bombs. Be it normal bombing, the fire bombing of Kyoto, or using nuclear bombs.

Well we can look at it in one of two ways. You can look at a situation, and ask for all of the options, and their costs and benefits. So that when someone asks "why didn't you do this" or "what if we did such-and-such", you can say that we looked into it and the costs were too high, see report #JF0032-7. Or you can always look for the most evil intent in everything, which may say more about you than the world.

Most major militaries have considered options that are orders of magnitude worse.

Not most, all.

Again, the concept that "war is hell" doesn't seem to hit home for some people.

It's hell because of stuff like this. What doesn't seem to hit home for some people is that maybe your country isn't always "the good guys", and seriously considering a plan like this (beyond investigating what would happen so you can make the right decision when things start happening quickly) is precisely what makes you the bad guy.

The crux of your argument seems to rest on what "seriously considered" means. Not saying the US is the "good guys" here, but they're doing their due diligence, not trying to inflict the most damage purely out of rage or spite.

In my opinion, that's the point. Acknowledging that there is a dam whose collapse is capable of killing a million people is very different from actively assigning military personnel to study how to compromise the dam and flood the population for strategic gain. As the GP said, the statement "war is hell" is only made true by our own behavior during wartime, not by any universal law of the universe.

This is very murky territory no matter how you swing it

...What?

That dam generates a lot of electricity. In war, power plants are strategic targets. It would be an obvious potential target to weaken the Iraqi military and war machine.

So, the U.S. military studies the potential effects of destroying the dam. In the end, it does not destroy the dam.

Fast forward a few years, and people like you are condemning the U.S. military for...what? Figuring out that doing so would have resulted in many deaths, and not doing so?

You're saying that they shouldn't have even studied the issue? What if the enemy starts using it as a base of operations because they don't think it will be attacked? Like people have said, war is hell, it's unpredictable. Something unexpected could happen, something undesirable could become necessary. Without having information like this already available, sound strategic decisions can't be made. Then people like you would be complaining that they acted rashly without studying the issue first.

If you're saying that the very act of studying the issue is wrong, that's simply thoughtcrime, as well as incredibly naive.

There's a huge difference between "thinking" something and actively assigning resources to study it in depth. And I don't see anyone calling for prosecution in this entire thread. Criticizing, sure, but wouldn't you criticize me if I spent time and resources trying to figure out how to kill tons of people? And GP acknowledges the difference between studying what would happen if the dam failed and how to simply kill massive numbers of civilians. Our point is that you can't just say it's okay to kill 1M civilians because "war is hell", "war is hell" because of stuff like that.

You've completely missed the point. "Whoosh."

And--perhaps ironically, from your point of view--the data and conclusions from the military study of the dam probably lends weight to the urgency of repairing it, thereby actually contributing to saving lives.

You've also neglected to consider that the dam could be attacked by anyone, including terrorists, competing regional forces, and (perhaps in Desert Storm) the Iraqis themselves. Imagine if Saddam Hussein had threatened to destroy the dam and kill millions of people unless the invading armies left.

Without knowing what would happen, it would not be possible to make a sound strategic decision, prepare for relief and evacuation, etc. It's better for everyone to know what would happen if the dam were attacked.

What you're advocating is naive ignorance.

How many armies in history have had the power to carry out mass murder on the scale of a million plus civilians in a single day, let alone planned to do so?

Killing such a number of people in such a short time has been absolutely impractical until the last century. Only China, Japan, Russia, and the United States have been able to carry out such destruction and none have been able to do so in such a short period of time except for nuclear weapons in WWII.

How is "War is hell" always used an excuse for everything? It only makes sense if the alternative is a worse hell. Otherwise it seems like a great reason not to do something like this.

People seem to act as if it means that you can call something "war" and suspend all ethics. Maybe if I feel like punching someone in the face, I could say "Hey man, getting punched in the face is hell. What are you gonna do?"

Maybe that's the blasé part of it that you were referring to.

It isn't just about loss of life, the dam constitutes a good chunk of Iraq's power generation. It is still a strategic military target.

I'll concede the point that the military correctly considers everything to understand tradeoffs in advance of the time when a fast decision needs to be made. But to quote Pvt. Ruiz in Tour of Duty, "People are strategic".

Considered means had a study done to see what the effects would be. It doesn't mean that was the preferred strategy.

There are people in the Pentagon considering all kinds of crazy scenarios all the time, so that when crazy actually happens the leaders can make a quick decision based on a briefing book that took a while to put together. It sounds ominous in the press, but it's really innocuous.

They consider everything.

This revolting plan sounds almost like "Dr. Strangelove"...

https://www.google.de/search?q=world+targets+in+megadeaths&t...

(read the title on the spine of the book)

There is nothing wrong considering something.

Just cover all the bases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg

Americans lives are worth much more than some stupid Iraqi civilians.

To Americans? Yes, they are. We are all hypocrites at some level.

Customary International Humanitarian Law has something to say about this[0]. The US military has its interpretation of rule 42[1].

[0] https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_cha_chapter13...

[1] https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_cou_us_rule42

They also have contingencies for several variants of zombie incursions and the arrival of a hostile sentient AI.

The military considers a lot of things.

The next paragraph mentions nuclear weapons. The context is widespread use of chemical weapons (i.e. WMDs) by the Iraqis, and potential retaliation for that.

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