Thread by @sethjlevy

For those of you saying that civilians near an ISIS leader deserved to die or that their death is their own fault, your knee jerk point of view is mostly a function of long term exposure to neocon political theory.

Until you know what the imminent threat was that drove the decision to launch this attack yesterday, it is impossible to know whether the killing of civilians was a worthy trade off to killing a leader of ISIS.

If the position is that killing leaders of ISIS is of such importance and value that civilian death is always an acceptable trade off then these attacks should be much more frequent.

The decision to attack shouldn’t just be a function of knowing where a person is but also an assessment of the collateral damage potentially done in our attempt to accomplish the outcome.

When Trump took the shackles off our military in Syria and empowered them to destroy ISIS and end the caliphate there existed both the threat of ISIS gaining a stronghold in the Middle East and the fact that the civilian populations had been effectively kidnapped.

So there are circumstances where some civilian death is terribly unfortunate but an acceptable price to pay given the risks of inaction.

But just because a person is a leader of ISIS in today’s circumstances isn’t enough to justify civilian casualties. Other elements must be present and we don’t know whether they were.

What was the imminent threat that motivated the Biden administration to act yesterday? Where they aware that this person was strapped with explosives? Was it deemed highly likely that when confronted he would detonate himself?

Ultimately was this just another action in a desperate attempt to revive Biden’s estimation in the eyes of the American public or was there a real imminent danger that made acting now necessary assuming we knew the high likely of civilian casualties?

Some say “if civilians were around an ISIS leader then their death is their own fault”. This point of view assumes that these civilians were aware this was an ISIS leader and that they had some choice about being around him.

As long as we knee jerk how great it is when we take arbitrary actions around the world that lead to the murder of civilians, as also happened during the Afghanistan withdrawal, we will be led by psychopaths seeking to embroil us in endless wars.

This isn’t an argument for permanent inaction. It is to say that we need to have a much higher standard for when we praise actions particularly if they include civilian deaths.