Rules of engagement fir ground troops is off topic. I remarked on our double standards for air as opposed to ground forces. For some reason the fact that you don’t have to look your victims in the eye turns murder into mere collateral damage. There isn’t any other means of explaining your condemnation of My Lai’s 300 or so deaths in caps in light of how you all but elide Hiroshima and its tens of thousands, maybe more than 100 thousand, deaths. Either it’s hypocrisy, or there’s some insane distinction I’ve not been told about.
I don’t get what you’re trying to say about the US never considering collateral innocents expendable, then saying Hiroshima’s population was big enough to sens a message. Well, which one was it? Do we not kill civilians on purpose, or do we kill civilians to send a message? I didn’t think it was possible still not to have learner, but the allies’ major aerial campaigns against the axis homelands were terror bombings. There isn’t any way to call it “strategic” bombing unless the strategy was to scare Germany and Japan by killing a lot of civilians.
“If we didn’t care about collateral damage...we would just literally bomb every city into submission”
No we wouldn’t. Unless you’re Genghis Kahn, and maybe not even him, you don’t go to war for the sake of wreaking the most destruction possible. Were that the case we’d have carpet bombed every enemy nation in every war with nukes since 1945. But we haven’t, because we fight wars with ends other than annihilation in mind.
The goal in Iraq and Afghanistan was to replace existing governments with new, fruendlier ones. Though it doesn’t seem to matter as much in medieval Afghanistan, bombing them out of civilization wouldn’t have prepared the ground well for PRO-US gubmints. There’s also public and world opinion to consider.