These sinister death threats are not really, to my mind, a humane effort to avoid civilian casualties.

Rather, I think they're an effort to limit the blowback from tactics of war that deliberately attack civilian infrastructure and knowingly result in civilian casualties.

And almost every military intelligence unit in the world thinks about how to get away with killing lots of civilians while giving the appearance of adhering to humanitarian law and so on.

So, for example, during the US bombing of Afghanistan, there was reportedly a rule about civilian

casualties. If the estimated number of deaths from a bombing target was likely to exceed 30,

then Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense, had to sign off on it. And you can imagine how Bleeding Heart Donald would respond to these.

I mean, frequently, US bombs notoriously flattened dozens of people at wedding ceremonies.

But you see, they had a rule, you know, they had lots

of rules guiding how they would use violence in the case of civilians. And then gradually, I think,

as it has been demonstrated time and again, there is this tendency towards what Martin Shaw calls

degenerative warfare, where the distinction between civilians and combatants just disappears, and that's where it becomes

potentially genocidal. So I'd say the point of having these rules is not to protect civilians,

per se, but to protect the military operation, to avoid unnecessary blowback while deploying

strategies that knowingly and deliberately attack civilians. That's how I would frame it.

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