Yeah, I trust this guy. Not.
Posted on 02/01/2016 11:31:37 AM PST by Nachum
Army Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the US commander in charge of the coalition fighting Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, said Monday that carpet bombing the terrorists would be "inconsistent with our values."
The remark is seen as being aimed at Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
In December, Cruz pledged to "utterly destroy ISIS," and vowed: "We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion." He even hinted at the use of nuclear weapons, saying: "I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out."
After being asked to explain why carpet bombing would not be an effective strategy against ISIS, MacFarland told reporters the US was "bound by the laws of armed conflict."
"We're the United States of America. We have a set of guiding principles," he said. "Indiscriminate bombing, where we don't care if we're killing innocents or combatants, is just inconsistent with our values."
MacFarland said that carpet bombing is precisely what Russia is accused of doing in its own air campaign in Syria, in support of Bashar al-Assad.
He added: "Right now we have the moral high ground, and I think that's where we need to stay."
MacFarland claimed the anti-ISIS campaign is making progress in both Iraq and Syria, and that the jihadists had lost about 40% of the territory they had held.
(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
one of the greatest generals of all time Curtis LeMay would role in his grave hearing this nonsense coming from the pathetic generals of this era
Speak for yourself, 0bamorrhoid ...
So I take it it was wrong of us to win World War II.
We had no trouble carpet-bombing Germans and Japanese in the 1940s.
We had no trouble carpet-bombing Koreans and Chinese in the 1950s.
We had no trouble carpet-bombing Vietnamese, Chinese, and the occasional (vigorously denied) Russian in the 1960s and 1970s.
We had no trouble carpet-bombing Arabs in the 1990s.
We’d have no trouble carpet-bombing Arabs and Persians today, if we didn’t have the “muslim brotherhood” running the country.
I predict before long, history teachers will take the side of the Japanese.
“Japan just wanted to kick the European colonists out of Asia, and the US refused to sell them oil.”
Yeah, I trust this guy. Not.
"Japan just wanted to kick the European colonists out of Asia, and the US refused to sell them oil."
I think they already do. At least they don't get the treatment the Germans do. The Germans are, after all, white people, while the Japanese are a quaint "indigenous people" (except they ain't "indigenous") whose unique culture fully justified horrific medical experiments in Manchuria, the Rape of Nanking, comfort women, the Bataan Death March, barbaric treatment of POWs, and the "death railway" in Thailand and Burma. How dare you judge another culture by your own standards, Whitey???
Although I must admit the Japanese--even the most pro-Nazi such as Matsuoka--never advocated or took part in the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish People in toto (G-d forbid!).
just for the record...... who and where would you carpet bomb to get ISIS?
And I disagree we didn't carpet bomb the Vietnamese like we should have because we were afraid on the Chinese entering the war. Nor did we hold to Viet Cong to a strict standard.
"... like we should have." That's an arguable proposition. We did a lot of things we shouldn't have, and didn't do a lot of things we should have in Viet Nam. Kennedy and Johnson were both idiots. OTOH, anybody who was on the wrong end of Arc Light might disagree with the idea that he hadn't been carpet-bombed.
I disagree that we should abandon the 'moral high ground'. I also disagree with this idiot McFarland as to where the 'moral high ground' might be found. If the bad guys choose to hide among civilians, and we bomb the crap out of the bad guys, and some civilians are killed ...
Who is to blame for those dead civilians?
I say it's the bad guys. They're the ones who wallow in immoral conduct unnecessarily endangering civilians.
When national survival is at stake, it’s all good. That is what I mean by abandoning morale high ground. Example: a policy the prevents us from “scaring” prisoners. I am not talking about unlimited murder. Collateral damage is and always has been accepted.
Curtis LeMay must be doing pretty neat 30,000 rpm by now.
L
Trump says he’d bomb the hell out of them.
Which is why he’s got my vote.
L
We (Americans) have generally tried to minimize it. Even in WWII, when we were heavily bombing Europe, we (at great risk and expense) preferred daylight "precision" bombing to maximize bombs on military/industrial targets and minimize bombs on civilian areas. For the most part, we specifically rejected (as immoral and ineffective) the British approach of bombing civilian areas. We were right to do so.
Problems arise when the bad guys deliberately place military/industrial targets within the civilian population as the Japanese and Viet Cong did, and as ISIS (et al) do today. When the bad guys willfully endanger the civilian population, the bad guys accept responsibility for the excess collateral damage.
Bombing the right carpet is the key. Buh-bye, Mecca!
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