And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives – and sacrificing theirs – on the front lines of the ‘war on terror”. There can be no “equivalence”. “They” kill innocents because “they” are evil. “We” kill innocents by mistake. But we know we are going to kill innocents – we willingly accept that we are going to kill innocents, that our actions are going to create mass graves of families, of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.

This is why we created the obscene definition of “collateral damage”. For if “collateral” means that these victims are innocent, then “collateral” also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill them – even if we knew it was inevitable that we would.

I have mentioned civilian casualties before, especially in Afghanistan, here and here. In the second link, note that in some cases, civilian casualties appear to be very much on purpose, including the subsequent cover-up.

The Fisk quote expresses my basic view. I think it is morally obscure to differentiate between two forms of actively killing a family when there was full awareness of such consequences in both cases. The moral story we tell ourselves is that when civilians die in an air-strike, it was morally justified by the good cause. What is interesting, and as far as I know never mentioned, is that this is exactly the justification for every politically or religiously motivated atrocity. Except in cases of pure sadism (say, a serial killer), no one kills just for fun. No one, for example, flies planes into buildings just for fun. Rather, people fly planes into buildings because they think the ensuing civilian deaths (doesn’t matter who, or how many) are worth whatever they take to be their noble cause (say, opposing American foreign policy, or trying to draw the West into an apparent war with Islam).

If we think civilian casualties can be justified by good causes, then we cannot coherently criticize the bad guys for their methods. We only have grounds to object to their cause. An apologist for state violence might think something like, “Consciously acting in a way that will result in the destruction of the bodies of innocents is justified by democracy promotion in Afghanistan.” Apologists for terrorism employ the same reasoning, but replace what comes after “justified by.” They might fill in “resisting occupation,” “establishing Islamic law,” “making enough money to eat,” “defeating the west,” or whatever.

I don’t think there has been serious discussion of the actual moral equivalence implied in the reasoning about civilian casualties. The self-serving fantasies of just war theorists never do the trick, because either (1) everyone is implicitly condemned or (2) everyone is implicitly justified.

There is at least one substantive difference between Us and Them with respect to civilian casualties, and it is important to acknowledge this difference, because it has an emotional hold on apologists for state violence. Because we have fancy things like an air force, our murder of civilians has a lottery structure: Usually, we know with certainty that, given the collection of stuff we do on purpose (e.g. invade Afghanistan, use drone strikes, etc.), innocents will be killed. However we usually don’t know who or exactly how many (although given experience, prediction is possible). For the bad guys, there is still a kind of lottery structure (e.g. who knows who or how many will be on the targeted bus?), but sometimes there is one difference: there is a goal of killing civilians.

Notice that it seems like the good guys could in principle still achieve their goals without killing a single civilian (arguably, they could achieve their goals better – the military spokespersons talk about killing civilians as a strategic, not a moral mistake), whereas if the bad guys failed to kill any civilians, they might see this itself as a failure in their mission.

But this is a superficial analysis. The bad guys don’t really have an ultimate goal of killing civilians. As for the good guys, killing civilians is a means to an end (say, the withdrawal of American troops). Both agree, notice, that the cost is “worth it.” If the insurgents in Afghanistan thought they could make the U.S. withdraw by dancing around in a circle, they would. Similarly, if the U.S. could achieve its goal by passing out candy, that would be the policy. But in both cases, deliberate actions which are known to cause civilian casualties have been deemed strategically necessary, and therefore morally justified.

On a related issue, I find one critique of prosecuting Bush administration officials very curious. Succinctly and from the pen of a crazy man, the claim goes something like this:

It paralyzes government advisers and intelligence and military operatives out of fear they may be prosecuted for serving their country

To be sure, these sorts of arguments are also offered by people who are not crazy. This is such a bad argument, because it assumes that the torture methods under discussion are either legal, moral, or both, which is of course denied by the people advocating for a special investigator. Only if torture is legal, moral, or both, does it matter that operatives will be afraid to be prosecuted. On the other hand, if torture is illegal, they should be afraid of being prosecuted, just like anyone else in any other position with respect to any illegal action. I’m no philosopher of law, but it seems to me this is partly what the law is for.