[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by ghuLail: *
i dont know the issue for me isn't what to expect in return etc., only that
why is attacking civilians considered out-of-bounds for normal warfare in the first place?
why this of all things is considered so unhumanitarian and wrong,
even in war!
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Attacking civilians is considered out-of-bounds (in the west), due to World War I.
It was the first war in history where the people of a country who were not directly involved in fighting wars were capable of being attacked.
This occured righ from the beginning of the war, when a German warship sailed up to Scarborough, a British town of no military value, and began to shell the residential areas. This continues later on with German Zepplin raids on british and French cities, which were too inaccurate to have any chance of damaging industry, but were successful at randomly killing city residents.
Britain, the USA and france, of course, retailiated by similarly inaccurate bombing of German cities.
After the war, it was recognised that the nature of war for the first time had achieved such destructive power as to require regulation - the Geneva Convention was born.
Part of this established the criteria for the safety of civilians.
The principle laid down is that it is illegal to attack civilians, except where the strategic benefit outweighs the number of civilian casualties.
In short, you're only allowed to attack civilians when it's worth it. So you're alllowed to bomb a weapons factory, though you'll kill the civilian workers working there.
You're allowed to bomb a bridge, and deny its use to the enemy military, even if civilians use that bridge too and will be killed during the attack.
This is why no Germans were ever accused of war crimes, for Germany's decision to bomb British cities (destroying British industrial capacity was the primary target of the raids), why no German government ever accused the US or Britain for war crimes over the bombing of german cities, and, crucially, why Japan has never declared the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a war crime (the strategic benefit of those bombings definately outweighed the casualties - it ended the war).
In fact, this is quite in line with Islamic principles of warfare. The Prophet (SAWS) very clearly forbade the killing of civilians by his soldiers, but did not object to the use of catapults at the siege of Taif - despite someone asking him if they were lawful, since projectiles that missed the walls and landed inside the city would kill civilians. The death of civilians in Taif through the use of catapults would have been outweighed by the strategic gain of breaching the walls.