[frabbit]

That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.

[tptacek]

It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action is target selection, not weapons choice.

[frabbit]

I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se?

Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.

The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.

If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.

But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.

[nradov]

Historically there has never been any such moral consensus in the Middle East. It's been a continuous series of wars, massacres, and terrorism going back millennia — since long before Hezbollah or the modern state of Israel even existed.