Reynolds believes that the British were ‘distinctive in their experience both of the war and of its postwar impact’. For Britain, alone among the belligerents, was fighting for principle. It had not been attacked and was not seeking more territory. But perhaps he underestimates the acute sense of danger that so many in Britain felt in the face of the possible occupation of the Channel ports by a hostile power. Britain was fighting not just for moral principle, but for deep-seated reasons of national self-interest.
.. In Germany attitudes were quite different from those in Britain. The defeat of 1918 was so sudden and unexpected that it was easy for the army leadership to claim that it had been stabbed in the back by Marxists and Jews. The sentiment ‘Never Again’, so powerful in Britain, found little echo in Germany. Indeed, many on the Right looked back with nostalgia to the wartime experience of comradeship and, like the Italian Fascists, hoped for a return match to secure the gains of which they had been cheated in 1918. The only mistake they had made, they believed, was to have been insufficiently ruthless. That was not a mistake they were going to make again. It is hardly surprising if the liberal-minded men who ran Britain between the wars – MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain – failed to comprehend such a mindset.
The drone war in Pakistan
Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus on children.
.. But he went on to defend drones as the most discriminating aerial bombers available in modern warfare—preferable to piloted aircraft or cruise missiles. Jets and missiles cannot linger to identify and avoid noncombatants before striking, and, the President said, they are likely to cause “more civilian casualties and more local outrage.”
.. The conflict with ISIS once again pits the world’s most technologically advanced military against a stateless guerrilla group. In such a contest, civilian casualties are not only a moral issue; they constitute a front in a social-media contest over justice and credibility.
.. The proportion of civilians compared to combatants killed on the ground during American wars since Vietnam has been disputed by researchers. But even the most conservative estimates of civilian casualties place the ratio at one-to-one. In the 1999 NATO-led war in Serbia, where jets used laser-guided and other precision bombs, around five hundred Serbian civilians and three hundred Serbian soldiers were killed, according to the Independent International Commission on Kosovo.
Temple Essay: Tyler Horst
Conscientious objectors, though they don’t fight in battle, deserve as much recognition as soldiers in combat.
The War Nerd: How do you deal with wannabe jihadis? An upgrade to business class
New recruits, and those who have no useful military skills, are also the ones persuaded to make the ultimate sacrifice as suicide bombers.
Something many people don’t understand about this way of becoming a shahid (martyr) is that it’s the least prestigious, far less honored than death in combat. It’s the least useful recruits who get used as suicide bombers. That’s why Saudi boys are disproportionately represented among suicide bombers; they’re hard to train (as I can testify), not much good for more complex tasks. Almost half of suicide bombers to detonate in Iraq in the last two months have been Saudi.
.. Even when they’re alive and fighting in Syria, these guys are a huge asset to Western Intelligence, because they make an effective camouflage for the real double agents already in place there. You can safely assume that a big fraction of the men fighting with Islamic State are double agents reporting to one or more of the major Western intelligence agencies, covertly photographing and DNA-typing their comrades for future reference.