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Comment by prvit | Hacker News Reader

> The people remote controlling drones into civilians in Ukraine should be held accountable, just like the people that killed civilians with hellfire missiles in Afghanistan should be held accountable

Typical civilian deaths in Afghanistan would be e.g. families living with high ranking enemy combatants, totally incomparable with Russian forces bombing shopping malls in Ukraine.

At least the US cares enough to have a man in the loop when killing with their drones. Chair force killers actually have to watch and pull the trigger, not like the Russian missile programmers remotely destroying city block sized targets.

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>Typical civilian deaths in Afghanistan would be e.g. families living with high ranking enemy combatants, totally incomparable with Russian forces bombing shopping malls in Ukraine.

This is propaganda, they often kill indiscriminately, and often kill based on extremely flimsy intel. They later try to explain it with 'there was an enemy combatant there', but provide no evidence of that. It's the same crap the Israelis do.

The US has bombed multiple wedding parties, where there were no enemy combatants anywhere nearby. They killed 30 civillians in one instance, in an area which had been abandoned by enemy forces for months!

> Typical civilian deaths in Afghanistan would be e.g. families living with high ranking enemy combatants, totally incomparable with Russian forces bombing shopping malls in Ukraine.

Except that that that's not true. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

Let's be clear, what's happening in Ukraine is abhorrent, but let's also not pretend that the west cares a lot less and even actively participates in atrocities when the victims are not as white.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haska_Meyna_wedding_party_airs...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruzgan_helicopter_attack

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_raid_on_Narang

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azizabad_airstrike

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granai_airstrike

8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...

The Americans made a new type of non explosive payload for a missile to reduce collateral damage.

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2021/08/26/the-...

The Russians target shopping centres with weapons designed to take out American aircraft carriers.

They aren’t really the same.

Those weren't build from the goodness of somebodies heart, but because the CIA realised that they can't win a war against combatants which they themselves created a constant supply of by blowing up their loved ones.

Also, nobody ever argued that they are exactly the same, but both should be dragged in front of the Hague nevertheless. It matters little to the dead, injured, and loved ones, wether it happened to terrorise (as Russia does in Ukraine, or the US did in latin America and Iran) or because of apathy towards dehumanised people (as with the USA, UK, Germany, e.t.c. in Iraq and Afghanistan).

> Those weren't build from the goodness of somebodies heart, but because the CIA realised that they can't win a war against combatants which they themselves created a constant supply of by blowing up their loved ones.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still doing the right thing, anything that reduces collateral damage is good.

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