You squared a circle

Submitted by Sully (United States), Apr 18, 2006 at 18:26

You wrote that it was immoral to retaliate for suicide attacks by killing random members of the enemy - surely a truism; but then you wrote:

""Israel will have to do more that just kill some palestinians at random. She will have to build her own credible nuclear deterent and defence capabilities with capacity for a retaliatory nuclear strike. This may not be enough to prevent the crazy ayatollas in iran from trying to nuke her, but in the event of something like this happening , She can at least get even.""

So you seem to be saying that killing a few random civilians in retaliation is wrong, but killing lots and lots of them is okay.

I'm not a theologian, and such thinking certainly screams of dancing on a very slippery slope, but as a practical matter it may be that inflicting pain on relatively small numbers of innocents can be the more moral course because it may forestall and makes less likely an eventual nuclear exchange.

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