Can anybody in the MidEast conflict claim to be compassionate if they knowingly *accidentally* kill innocents?

Question

The Q above is the headline Q. This is the full Q that I wanted to ask, but couldn't because of the Q-box limit: Can anybody involved in the MidEast conflict *truthfully*claim to be compassionate if they knowingly *accidentally* kill or maim or support the killing or maiming of innocents caught in the middle?

TWH 08142006

My Q asked about the justification of compassion by those parties in the Middle East killing innocents by accidents and nobody answerered the Q. All I got were rationalizations and Q criticisms. I will award best answer to one of the A's, the one which condones a lack of compassion the least. TWH 08212006

Answer 1

Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of innocents were killed by allied
forces during World War II.

However, by defeating Hitler, the allies stopped him from killing
millions more.

War is hell. There are times when you have to fight wars.
By the way, World War II was one of them. The current wars
are nowhere near as obvious.

Answer 2

Compassionate people must kill innocents all the time, accidently or otherwise. Consider the surgeon who can only save one conjoined twin (recently happened in the US) or must perform a partial-birth abortion to save the life of the mother.

Or what if we knew the hijacked planes were going to hit the World Trade Center? Killing a few hundred (by shooting the planes down before they reached their target) would have saved thousands.

Or can a compassionate person shoot a pregnant woman who has been forced to strap herself with explosives, if it will save an entire busload of people?

Or can a compassionate person administer a socialized medical program if it means s/he must choose who gets their ration of insulin and who gets access to the MRI machine and who has to wait and possibly die?

A compassionate person might have to choose which innocents must die and which could live. We can only hope they make the right choice.

In the case of the middle east, a compassionate person might have to choose between killing "their" innocents and killing the "enemy's" innocents. If the combatants hide among their own innocents, while firing on their enemy's innocents (a war crime), then a compassionate person may have to kill some of the combatant's innocents to protect his own.

"If you hide behind your baby to shoot at my baby, you are responsible for getting children killed. You and you alone." Naomi Ragen, Haaretz, August 1, 2006.

Answer 3

"War is merely a continuation of politics," while accurate as far as it goes, was not intended as a statement of fact. It is the antithesis in a dialectical argument whose thesis is the point—made earlier in the analysis—that "war is nothing but a duel [or wrestling match, a better translation of the German Zweikampf] on a larger scale." His synthesis, which resolves the deficiencies of these two bold statements, says that war is neither "nothing but" an act of brute force nor "merely" a rational act of politics or policy. This synthesis lies in his "fascinating trinity" [wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit]: a dynamic, inherently unstable interaction of the forces of violent emotion, chance, and rational calculation.

Compassion is NOT part of war. In fact, it is not part of war's vocabulary.

Compassion only happens, although rarely, when one of the two opposing sides emerges victorious and extends charity to the vanquished.