Friday, June 17, 2016

To do what how?

I think whenever anyone argues that the U.S. should do a military strike anywhere in the world, they should be required to fill in all the blanks of the below sentence:
The U.S. military should murder human beings in [insert country] to achieve [goal] and the murder will achieve that goal by [detailed explanation of how murder leads to goal].
While most proponents of military force do name the country they want to bomb (but not always!), I rarely see any of them bothering to say what the goal of the bombing is, and even when a goal is named, I never see an explanation of how the military strike would plausibly lead to the goal.

These really are basic questions. If you have a serious policy proposal, you should not have any difficulty answering them.