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Originally Posted by The Bear
Very true, in fact the Geneva Conventions address the requirement to avoid civilian casualties, but governments do have the right to declare war and in such circumstances they make use of their armed forces.
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Who says? If it is aggressive war, and for it to be declared it suggests it is, I sy they don't. And so I believe does the Kellogg-Brand pact of 1928 which outlawed the concept of war. A pact which was applied at Nuremburg.
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My point is that members of the armed forces have no option under military law other than obey legitimate orders.
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Well they can always stand up for their morals and to attack civilians doesn't really qualify as a legitimate order.
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If the order was to “go bomb this holiday resort” then it would be an illegal order unless it could be shown to be reasonably suspected to be hiding a military installation.
On the other hand if the order was “go bomb X city because it’s got a significant number of enemy combatants there then that would be a legitimate order. In such a case the military forces would have to undertake the task.
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Actually that would also be illegitimate. You cannot carpet bomb a city or even bomb when their is significant risk to many civilians.
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When a democratically elected government decides that an attack on a target is appropriate it IS representing the will of the people who elected the government into office.
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It is not representing the will of the people it is bombing. The Iraqis did not vote for the legitimacy of the Bush regime.
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It may be that many people neither wanted nor expected the government to engage in such activities, and that is why Parliament, as the closest thing to the will of the public as a whole in the absence of a referendum should be the deciding body when war is being contemplated.
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Well representative "democracy" on the scale of the UK is a joke but I was talking about them not representing the people they are bombing. The Americans who attacks Afghanistan or Iraq did not have the votes of the people they attacked.
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It is by refusing to engage Parliament in the decision making process that Blair acted so disgustingly by not seeking parliaments approval for his actions within the coalition forces attacking Iraq and Afghanistan where he instructed British forces to take such an aggressive role.
The bottom line is that the military forces in the west do not use their religion as an excuse to undertake what they do.
Muslims use their religion as the reason to undertake what they do when they individually strap on The Belt and deliberately target civilians.
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The West seems to use excuses like WMD's which turn out to not exist. And it isn't many Muslims just a very small minority.