Naval strategy, naval power: uses & abuses

[wm]

You really need to check out the meaning of "self-defense", for to you guys it seems to mean something like "we are allowed to kill you if we can make up an excuse".

Fuchs,


The citations used in your discussion of self defense apply to "domestic" law, or laws governing the interactions between individuals, in various USA jurisdictions, not to international law, or laws governing the interactions between nations or their agents.

In traditional just war theory, actions normally considered to be homicides are justified by appeal to a domestic analogy, not a domestic identity. Your points about self defense might have more impact were they drawn from international law or law of land warfare cases rather than those dealing with domestic homicides in the USA.

I am reminded of the story that in Bavaria, der Fhn may be used as a defense in a homicide case. Should one have allowed that defense to the leaders of the Third Reich during the Nrnberg trials? By parity of reasoning from your examples, it seems so.

[Fuchs]

Dunno what's "Fhn", but international law (which is not universally respected in this forum) is about states.

The IIRC rather customary maritime laws are hardly legalising killing pilots of a plane that didn't even open fire, for otherwise there would be massacres over all seas all the time.


One of the ever-astonishing things in discussions with anglophone people about military stuff is how wrong it is to just assume that they apply basic human decency a, respect and civility when it comes to foreigner's lives.
The whole idea that the shootdown of an airliner or even only the shootdown of a harmless fighter in peacetime could be justified is totally ridiculous.

Those officers were intent on killing foreigners in wartime without any legal justification, period.
The bomber pilots over AFG who bombed civilians 'due to muzzle flashes' were intent on killing and jumped on a flimsy excuse for killing.

Besides; half of the people whom I've met discussing these events and claiming self-defence for the U.S. troops readily dismissed any legal argument whenever it pleased them in other cases.

Now I could write a lot of much more harsh comments, but those events are old and by now everyone who hasn't a plank on his eye should know that those were gross mixtures of incompetence, lack of discipline and lack of respect for human lives.