The Problem of Collateral Damage

The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly as possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. “Enough,” editorial in the Jerusalem Post , September 11, 2003, p. 8 I recognized beforehand that someone might be … bringing their kid to work. … However, if I had known there was an entire day-centre, it might have given me pause to switch targets. That's a large amount of collateral damage. Timothy McVeigh, interviewed by reporters for The Buffalo News about his attack upon the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building We have been examining the principle of discrimination, in particular, its prohibition of intentional attacks upon noncombatants. But there remains an important area of contention, even if all I have argued in Chapter 6 about the immunity of noncombatants is accepted. This area is that often covered by the military euphemism “collateral damage.” This phrase is one of those catchwords that help to sanitise the horrible reality of war and other employments of political violence. It has taken its place along with “surgical strike,” “revisiting the area” (i.e., renewed bombing), and “neutralising assets” as part of the linguistic camouflage that contemporary war fighters often use to disguise the human and moral costs of what they do.