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A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not. So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command. Apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was injured, was the Iranian ambassador a target? There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.
The insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan also planted many well-placed IEDs which only harmed American military personnel. That is regarded as a terrorist tactic regardless. And obviously this attack is closer to an attack by IEDs than it is to a drone strike.
Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point? It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.
That these particular bombs were a threat to anyone in the market, other than their intended targets.
That is absurd, obviously a bomb in a crowded place is a danger to people standing near the person with the hidden bomb. We don't have any numbers on civilian casualties yet, the ideas that these bombs didn't harm anybody standing near them strikes me as extremely improbable.
The militant : civilian casualty ratio is likely far better than that in many military actions you’d consider just.
Actually, the practice of using hidden/planted IEDs has had a terrible civilian casualty ratio which is why the United States does not use this tactic. That's not to say every single instance has harmed civilians, many IEDs in Iraq only killed Americans. But as a practice it's not considered good to flood public/civilian areas with hidden explosives, that is a terrorist tactic.
That’s because many IEDs are improvised bombs in a crowded marketplace in Mogadishu or Baghdad that kill 50-300 civilians alongside a handful of security staff or military personnel. As far as I know there’s zero evidence of a casualty ratio anywhere near that in this case.
FYI these were improvised bombs detonated in crowded marketplaces. That's why I said they are terrorist tactics. This is not a tactic the US has engaged in in its war on terror.
I don’t know, is there not a difference between carpet bombing a shopping mall that a target is in and killing a thousand civilians and precision droning his car, killing the occupants of his vehicle and an unfortunate motorcyclist nearby, but otherwise nobody else? I think the CIA would probably fairly argue there is.
Has the CIA done this in the war on terror? No, it hasn't. You know who has done this? Insurgents and Mossad.
The US was apparently not even in the loop on this operation, also making this another demonstration of Israel's insolence. The CIA would not have approved of this attack and it has not done similar attacks in its own War on Terror.
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