What is the difference? Chemical or conventional?

[Yooperman]

Nothing! They both leave people dead.

1000s of innocent men, women and children dead from bombs and guns....are just as dead as those killed with chemicals.

Just my humble observation.

YM

[msongs]

1. obama kills with drones, assad kills with gas (maybe, unless its a CIA action) nt

[WatermelonRat]

18. Ridiculous comparison

Do you honestly not see the difference between shooting missiles at Taliban fighters and gassing entire neighborhoods?

[Poll_Blind]

26. Somebody tried to shut you down. Jury told them to sit and spin, 4-2:

At Tue Aug 27, 2013, 05:13 PM an alert was sent on the following post:

obama kills with drones, assad kills with gas (maybe, unless its a CIA action) nt
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3543921

REASON FOR ALERT:

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate. (See <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=aboutus#communitystandards" target="_blank">Community Standards</a>.)

ALERTER'S COMMENTS:

I have had enough of this poster and their anti-Obama bullshit. This is DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND, right? Yet all this poster does is bash Obama and Clinton all day.

You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Tue Aug 27, 2013, 05:19 PM, and the Jury voted 2-4 to LEAVE IT.

Juror #1 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: What a pathetic attempt to game the alert system. Alerter, your sad-ass attempt to stifle opinion should get you kicked off here for a week.
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: killing is killing
Juror #3 voted to HIDE IT and said: Over the top.
Juror #4 voted to HIDE IT and said: this is just wrong for DU.
Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: We do use drones, and not always on what most people would call "combatants".
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given

Thank you very much for participating in our Jury system, and we hope you will be able to participate again in the future.

Peace!

PB

[geek tragedy]

28. Perhaps you should just move to Syria then, given your apparent belief

that it's president is morally superior to ours.

[quinnox]

2. it is an interesting distinction

I once heard a program where this was debated, and some of the points brought up were good. Basically, it boils down to that chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction, and also a silent killer. So unlike conventional bombs and explosives, you can't hear them coming or that they might be present in an area, waiting to kill you if you happen to touch it, for example, like a doorknob with it coated in the chemical, unsuspectingly. So it is "unfair" if you will, because well, it is extra-barbaric.

I can see the objection to chemical weapons personally, and make a distinction.

[Arctic Dave]

4. Land mines do that same thing.

A silencer does the same thing.

[quinnox]

7. true, but land mines can be detected by teams with specialized equipment

and sweeped for them before you go on the road. A chemical weapon can be in the air, and you won't ever see it coming. Unless you have gas masks on all the time, which is not feasible. And the equipment and know-how to detect chemical weapons is highly specialized and sophisticated, it is not like the land mine detection which any "grunt" can learn how to use.

[Arctic Dave]

17. It is not speciaized and it is quite portable.

I work on equipment that detects poisonous gases. They can be made as small as a wristwatch are they can be remotely monitored via air sampling pump or passive with a radio signal.

[Yooperman]

6. Agreed...

I can't disagree.... but does it justify any others. Bombs come silently for the most part.

You hear the explosion but I would say you can't hear them coming.

Barbaric is barbaric.... mutilated children blown up is "extra-barbaric".

Thanks for your input.

YM

[quinnox]

10. I hear you, but you can hear the bombs exploding from a great distance away

And you can tell there is danger in that area by this, and seek shelter, or avoid the war zone. A chemical weapon could be present in a little village that has been abandoned, and lets say was evacuated a long time ago because of war, and you won't know it is a deadly area until you see soldiers dropping dead by the dozens when they get close to it, because of it being in the air. It might even kill everyone before they have a chance to react, dependence on the deadliness of the chemical. So it is different.

[Bandit]

20. Gas, unlike radiation, disapates rapidly, within hours usually and certainly no more than a day.

Conventional weapons are far more effective at killing and maiming people than any gas attack. Biological weapons are a different matter entirely.

[Go Vols]

19. Over 150 countries

think that the DU the US uses in war should be banned as a chemical weapon.I agree.

Link to some things DU causes,GRAPHIC

Edit: link didnt work,google "Depleted uranium babies in iraq" and hit images

[MNBrewer]

3. The difference is historical and vicserally emotional

functionally, from the perspective of the dead, there is none.

[The Straight Story]

5. So when we execute inmates we can use razor blades and fire instead of lethal injection?

I mean, why does it matter when the end result is the same?

[krispos42]

8. Chemical weapons are persistent

or at least, they can be made so easily. By "persistent" I mean they can linger and be toxic for days, weeks, or months. Much like the toxic shit the transnationals like to dump in the soil of 3rd World countries.

They also target a vast area, and even non-persistent ones linger for minutes or hours. They also spread with the wind. Somebody else in the thread pointed out that they are also silent; an enemy could spray toxic chemicals from a tanker truck and wipe out a town with nothing louder than the rumble of the truck's engine.

With bomb, you know the blast radius. But the blast is there for a few milliseconds, then the bomb is spent. The bomb's blast radius does not pack up and drift downwind for an hour or two, killing or maiming everybody that enters the sphere defined by that radius.

When a bomb or bullet goes off, the effect of such a discharge is immediate, but it also is done within a couple of seconds.

This is why a nuclear bomb is not "just a bomb"... the radioactive isotopes that are created by the detonation contaminate the area and move downwind. Those isotopes have half-lives of hours, day, weeks, months, or years. The shorter the half-live, generally speaking, the more radiation and particles they emit.

[former9thward]

9. What about all the Napalm we dropped in Vietnam?

That is certainly a chemical but I guess it was ok because we had total control of the skies and they couldn't drop it on our troops.

[yawnmaster]

11. there is an emotional difference, at the least. eom

[LearningCurve]

12. Check out this link

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/29/usa.adrianlevy

[whatchamacallit]

13. Your observation won't get any more traction than mine

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023542025

now that we're being swept along by the war wave.

[Triloon]

14. The difference is obvious

if you know anything at all about WW1.
Conventional weapons have targets. Bullets and bombs are directed at a specific target to achieve a specific purpose. Chem weapons, particularly gas, are completely indiscriminate and kill very man woman child and animal that are within range downwind.
The end result, death, should not be generalized to equate the causes of death. People die from malaria too, and that does not equate it with sarin gas.
There are very good reasons why these weapons are banned. If you have to guess about it I think you should make some pointed questions instead of blanket assertions.
(I'm not trying to be an ass, most people know next to nothing about WW1)

[oldhippie]

15. Chemical weapons are .....

... more icky. They stir the emotions more. The thought of choking, convulsing, and knowing you are dying vs. being blown up quickly as collateral damage from a hellfire fired by a drone. Most victims never hear a hellfire coming either.

[Agnosticsherbet]

16. Actually there are international legal definitions that place Chemical Weapons use as illegal

That is the difference.

A drone is just an airplane where the pilot stays at home and uses a camera to look at a target and uses weapons deemed conventional and legal by international law and treaty. It is cheaper to use than conventional aircraft because it isn't necessary to include heavy and expensive equipment to keep a pilot alive. There is zero difference between weapon delivery systems.

But the indiscriminate use of conventional weapons can be a war crime if they are used to target civilian targets in order to punish civilians or to terrorize them or have no military value. Chemical attacks are illegal in any circumstance by international convention. Even countries that did not sign the agreement can be punished for their use.

As ugly as this sounds, it isn't illegal to kill civilians in a military strike as long as the essential target has military value. One military leader sitting in nursery makes that nursery a legal target. One solider carrying a rifle into a Red Cross ambulance makes that ambulance a legal target. A rocket launcher set up next to Kindergarten makes that a legal target.

It is not the number of dead that matters, but the laws surrounding the use of warfare.

[Bandit]

21. The laws of warfare....Always reminds me of that famous scene in Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid

"First we must discuss the Rules" as he kicks him in the nuts.

[Agnosticsherbet]

22. But there are laws, and without them it is anything goes on the national arena.

Chemical weapons were used widely in WWI, and the horror of poison gas taught people that even in a something as savage as warfare there are weapons we should not use.

[Bandit]

23. And then the USA, 25 years later, dropped the A bomb on a civilian population.

[Agnosticsherbet]

27. Yes they did, except that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had military facitiles

and industries that made them, under the technology of the time, legal targets.

The firebombing of Dresden would have been a better example to give. There was no need to fire bomb the entire city with thousands of bombs, and that was hidden for decades after the war because that would have been considered a war crime.

If you haven't read it, read Slaughterhouse Five. Great book. Great literature by a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden. Terrible crime.

[olddots]

24. remember the Defense Department was once called the War Department

the irrational little boys who work in the "defense " industry try to rationalize their insecure bullshit any way they can .
We come up with atomic bombs and they realize that could be the end of the party so they don't allow their use .We have come up with technology that out reaches human intelligence so here we are in a big baby game .

[Posteritatis]

25. We're minimizing the deployment of nerve agents in urban environments now. Nice. (nt)

[Just Saying]

29. Why question a ban on horrible weapons?

We have a large scale, organized and international campaign to get rid of a category of awful weapons that are often used on civilian populations. Yes, we all have other ways to kill each other but I guess I'm missing your point. Don't make any illegal? Make all weapons illegal?