General Discussion

The word 'genocide' gets bandied about, so frequently, and with so little precision, that one could be forgiven for imagining it will not be too long before it refers to making your little sister cry.

Genocide is the crime of attempting the extermination of a people. Standard definition will include the phrase 'whole or in part', but the 'in part' does not refer to simply killing some people identified as part of a group, but rather to a situation where only part of a group is in your power to kill, and you are endeavoring to kill all of them. The meaning of extermination can include some forms of destruction short of death, such as forced conversion on pain of death, or forced sterilization, and the form in which death is inflicted does not have to be direct killing by weapon, but can be from conditions of famine or disease and destitution created for the purpose.

The situation described regarding the Yazidi in northern Iraq is a classic, clearly defined threat of genocide, albeit on a fairly small scale. The presently dominant military power in the region has declared as official policy that members of this sect must either convert to Islam or be killed, with some provision for women of the sect being assigned as wives to its soldiers after the killing of unconverted menfolk. What is envisioned is extermination of believers in the sect, and no bones are made about it.

The items you mention, though indeed a good many people were killed in them, do not come close to the definition of genocide: no intent to exterminate the people of Iraq or of Viet Nam guided policy and the action of the soldiery, nor does any intent to exterminate guide the aerial bombardments carried out at present by remote control in the Tribal Territories or in Yemen.

If you had contented yourself with saying 'after all, the United States has killed a great many people in wars who were not combatants' then you would have had a point, on some level, anyway. But by reaching for the brass wing of crying 'Genocide!' you slipped and fell down from the heights into a pit of failure and obvious propagandizing of the lowest boiler-plate style.

And of course, the idea that only people with 'clean hands' can do anything to prevent wrong-doing is at bottom an extremely silly one, that collapses immediately it is looked at seriously. For one thing, clean hands do not exist among powers capable of projecting military force any distance in strength. And for another, people who have kept their hands clean are most unlikely to have any idea what to do with them in a fight....