I’ll agree that, a lot of the time, going out of one’s way to kill non-combatants just isn’t very useful. They’re non-combatants, after all, so they’re much, much less of a threat. It’s generally more efficient to kill only the people shooting back at you. But if your cause isn’t worth killing civilians over, should it become expedient to do so, then maybe it’s better not to resort to violence in the first place. Indeed, you can’t send a foreign army anywhere and expect to be considered liberators, or, at least, you can’t expect to be considered liberators for very long. If you’re going to invade some other country and expect to have a lasting influence on it, you’re a conqueror—so if you want to be successful, you have to admit that conquering is what you are doing, and do the job right!
(The U.S. really sucks at conquering these days; we haven’t conquered anything successfully since World War II ended, and I’m not sure that really counted. I suspect the last time we really conquered something was during the Philippine-American War...)
I’ll agree that, a lot of the time, going out of one’s way to kill non-combatants just isn’t very useful. They’re non-combatants, after all, so they’re much, much less of a threat. It’s generally more efficient to kill only the people shooting back at you. But if your cause isn’t worth killing civilians over, should it become expedient to do so, then maybe it’s better not to resort to violence in the first place. Indeed, you can’t send a foreign army anywhere and expect to be considered liberators, or, at least, you can’t expect to be considered liberators for very long. If you’re going to invade some other country and expect to have a lasting influence on it, you’re a conqueror—so if you want to be successful, you have to admit that conquering is what you are doing, and do the job right!
(The U.S. really sucks at conquering these days; we haven’t conquered anything successfully since World War II ended, and I’m not sure that really counted. I suspect the last time we really conquered something was during the Philippine-American War...)