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Saturday, April 1, 2017

It's Not A Game, It's War

The New York Times is getting heavily into discussions of "civilian casualties" in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.  It's amazing what a difference a president's party can make on this subject.  During the days of Obama's administration, Syria lost more than half a million people who were, almost entirely, civilians.  Obama did nothing to stop the killing or even reduce the number of dead, but the Times said nothing to criticize that failure.  In Iraq, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, most by ISIS but some by those fighting against ISIS.  There is no way that a city filled with people can be retaken from a bunch of crazies like ISIS or any other military force without civilian casualties. Many people died when Tikrit, Ramadi and Fallujah were retaken from ISIS.  Again, most of the dead were civilians.  The Times said nothing.  The eastern half of Mosul was also retaken under Obama.  It was the same story.

Now let's change one factor:  Obama left office and President Trump took over.  In battles in Western Mosul, there are still people being killed.  In Syria, there are also people being killed.  Civilians are not targeted, but many are still being killed in the fighting.  It's an unavoidable part of war.  So what happens now?  The Times starts hyperventilating over civilian deaths, and then it starts blaming Trump for them.  Apparently it's only acceptable to see civilian deaths, indeed hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, if there's a Democrat in the White House.

The real point here is that ISIS is being pushed out of all of its strongholds.  It will not be that long until we reach a day when the ISIS caliphate is just a memory.  Remember that in the ISIS caliphate thousands of civilians were killed or enslaved.  ISIS used ethnic cleansing to get rid of Yazidi men and children and took the Yazidi women as sex slaves.  Christians did not fare much better under ISIS.  Then there's the victims of all those car bombs set off by ISIS in Iraq and Syria; the thousands of dead are almost all civilians.  By defeating ISIS, the deaths of civilians will finally end.  That's the goal:  erase ISIS from the Earth, end the fighting and the killing.

For the longest time, the leftwing media has used the issue of civilian deaths as a way to bludgeon those engaged in war.  It began with Vietnam.  It continued in conflict after conflict.  For example, when the Israelis fought Hamas in Gaza a few years back, the Hamas forces placed themselves in hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings in order to generate civilian casualties from Israeli attacks.  The Israelis had a choice of letting the Hamas soldiers use human shields to shoot at Israel with no response (out of fear of civilian casualties) or to fire back and risk those casualties.  Although the Israelis used care to prevent civilian deaths, there were many nevertheless.  The leftist media then publicized civilian casualties as if they could be avoided.  Of course, they cannot.

War is not a pretty thing.  It's not safe to be in a war zone.  People die.  Civilians die.  Unlike the Islamic terrorists like ISIS, America does not target the civilians.  Nevertheless, it is the height of hypocrisy for media like the New York Times to start complaining about a few civilian casualties now when they kept quiet about hundreds or thousands times more civilian casualties when Obama was president.

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