Does a country at war strike military targets, or civilian targets? Does a country, or a warring party, use the civilian population as a shield? Was an object hit by offensive, or defensive weapons? What was the person who fired a weapon aiming at?
In war civilians do get killed, though the risks are smaller in a ‘War of Attrition’ with a clear line of contact. Obama, who cleared the path for killing ‘high value individuals’ with missiles launched from drones, war or no war, had to consider the risk to innocent bystanders who would be killed as ‘collateral’. Hitler, fire-bombing the city of Rotterdam to expedite a Dutch capitulation in 1940, had no intention to save civilians. On the contrary! They were the main target. Ruthlessness to convince an enemy that destruction is assured if they do not give in to demands. And the Western allies did the same when the leveled Dresden, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Porochenko went to war against those who held out in the ‘Donbas’ region after Victoria Nuland’s coup, his military did not shy from using terror-tactics, to say it politely. Yet, in the NATO-controlled part of the world, the hit which is repeatedly presented as a clear display of neglect for civilians, is flight MH-17, shot down over Eastern Ukraine. However, the individual firing the missile has never been identified, and it was actually extremely unlikely that he, or she, targeted this aircraft full with passengers on purpose, unless the operator was Ukrainian after all. Because Ukraine stood to gain from such a mishap, while the ‘rebels’ most certainly didn’t.
To avoid a debate about why that aircraft was allowed to overfly that part of the world, while Western authorities *knew* that air-defense systems capable of reaching higher altitudes were operational on both sides, and had been used against high-flying targets, they subsequently built their ‘case’ around who delivered the weapons system which allegedly fired that missile, based on indirect evidence at best. Was it ‘oversight’? Was it simply irresponsible? Or was it meant to happen? If so, what were those martyring civilians looking for?
Terror is a military tactic. It cannot be ‘defeated’. It is used by ‘terrorists’ as a ‘poor man’s’ alternative to military might, hitting the ‘soft underbelly’ of a formidable enemy which cannot be defeated on the battlefield. And it is used by ‘overbearing’ powers to subdue the population of regions under their control, questioning the legitimacy of those powers to rule over them. To paint an adversary in a corner propaganda is used by victims of violent acts to make it look like ‘collateral’ was not ‘collateral’, but the real target to begin with. To this end the presence of legitimate military targets using civilians as human shields has to be kept from the public.
The recent attack by Ukraine on Belgorod, deliberately targeting a Christmas Market, is a fine example of using terror-tactics. The Russians retaliated by hitting military targets in Kharkov, if you accept that the Kharkov Palace Hotel was identified as the seat of the ‘Main Intelligence Directorate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’, which had been involved in planning the attack on Belgorod, besides around 200 foreign mercenaries. Although the hotel is also used by foreign journalists, to deter a military strike, since that would be bad publicity. These journalists, and other (relatively) innocent civilians are therefore used as ‘human shields’, knowingly, or unwittingly. I’ve been in a similar situation in Islamabad on a business trip, where I was staying in a hotel which was used by FBI/CIA operatives, conferring with the military leadership of Pakistan as they were hunting for Osama bin Laden, who was living nearby. The Russians claimed that their retaliatory strike was a ‘precision strike’, killing those targeted, but it is not unlikely that innocent civilians died as well.
Ukraine has never been shy to target civilians in the ‘Donbas’, or in cross-border raids, and attacks on Moscow, assuming it would help them to break the morale of the Russians, while propping up the morale of their own people, especially now, after a disastrous year. And with every Russian strike, or ‘saturation attack’ meant to make Ukraine waste expensive air defense missiles on cheap drones and old missiles past their due date, whenever civilian objects are hit, by debris, or air defense missiles gone haywire, they mobilize their propaganda forces at the mainstream media, and ‘working’ on platforms like ‘X’, to claim that it was an attack on civilian infrastructure to begin with. Well, it ain’t ‘Gaza’, but the Ukrainians do not shy from using their own people as ‘human shields’, that’s for sure.
Since Ukraine is left without options from a military perspective, 2024 may see increased terror attacks on Russian civilians on Russian soil, if given half a chance. A new batch of 200 missiles delivered by the UK to Ukraine is going to be used for that purpose, and I do expect that if these F-16’s become operational, that they will be used in that fashion as well, since the rest of the military capacity of Ukraine has already been depleted. Interestingly, while the worldwide community responded positively when George Bush announced his ‘War on Terror’, although true experts insisted that you cannot fight a military tactic, and that it was therefore rather *stupid* to launch such a war, the general public is completely ‘lost in translation’. Russia is now accusing the UK and the US, in particular, of openly working with Ukraine to terrorize Russia, since they are out of options. How is Russia going to respond?
Note that perception is everything. The intentions of the person using violence perceived as terror are ultimately not important. As can be seen in NATO’s own ever shifting position on the matter, where they work with terrorists all over the world as ‘proxies’, as long as they refrain from hurting our interests. It is not a ‘terrorist’, if we label this person a ‘freedom fighter’. Capiche? It is not a principled position. This self-serving approach to the use of terror-tactics, enabling its use while maintaining a position as a ‘Force for Good’ and having nothing but the noblest intentions, is no way to get rid of this pest, obviously.
‘Pacification’ is a combination of responding without mercy to terrorists challenging the legitimate authorities, while offering those within a country or group who are willing to do ‘trade’ and adhere to a ‘contract’ a fair chance to limit the use of violence to objectively defensive purposes, in line with well established laws, applicable to everyone equally. Not ‘rules’, as laid down by the dominant party assuming a right to lead based on ‘superiority’, ‘intellect’, or being the ‘chosen’ people, or whatever other Messianic ‘argument’ you can think of.
To stay the course during a ‘pacification’ proces, and not give in to pressure to retaliate ‘in kind’, plus a little extra, or give it all away by ‘electing’ an individual who has imperial motives for himself and his country or ‘sphere of influence’, designing strategies to expand into countries alien to being controlled by an ‘Empire’, through ‘power play’, and ‘regime change’ at first, and war eventually, is hard. The concept of ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’ is not about forcing people to pick a side. Why is that too hard to understand for certain people?