Down, down into a burning ring of fire

His argument went down, and the flames went higher...

As if the previous post on this subject weren't bad enough, history actually proved me right, as one commenter rebuked Zippy's tendency to say I was speaking from lala land when it was shown that Saddam Hussein actually planned to tie American POWs to his vehicles and roll them on into Saudi Arabia.

I wonder how or even if he will respond to my point that defending against several thousand main battle tanks raining uranium-depleted shells onto your position, while covered in noncombatants you cannot maim or "murder" amounts to a strategy based on "if by a miracle." I also pointed out too that another nasty tactic his enemy could use against him is to tie infants to their paratroopers, and have the air force continuously drop them by the battalion in your capitol. You might as well open up the city gates to them and roll out the red carpet since you can't knowingly shoot down their plane, let alone risk shooting them in mid-air since you have a high probability of accidentally shooting the infant.

I have a PDF copy of the updated conversation in case my comments get deleted >:)

Update: Perhaps I am now just being a sadistic bastard:

However, if an aggressor were to hide behind an innocent individual and I were to shoot through the innocent in order to accomplish the end of eliminating the aggressor, then the killing of the innocent would indeed have served as a means to the end. -aristocles

That would serve to create a pacifism mandate if one faced an enemy willing and able to exploit that.

It also raises an interesting theological situation. Would the genocide of the Canaanites that God ordered have been morally licit according to your model if the Canaanites had hidden behind imported human shields? -Me

So, now, can the will of God functionally contradict itself? If arrayed such that the Israelites had to fight around the human shields, their chances of victory would be largely taken away from them, which would make their campaign illegitimate according to Just War theory.