This article makes some excellent points regarding the de-humanisation of soldiers defending their country from imperialist attack and the complicity of liberals in these wars however I feel it to some extent inadvertently plays into the NATO narrative that precautions were taken to minimise civilian casualties... the widespread civilian deaths caused by NATO bombing and their rebel shock troops isn’t addressed. [Nasser]
Of course, civilians were killed by NATO as well - and not just mistakenly either. Defence Secretary Liam Fox effectively admitted that Gaddafi’s baby grandchildren (all aged between 6 months and 2 years), blown to pieces by NATO in late April last year, were deliberately targeted as part of a strategy to “put psychological pressure on Gadaffi”. But these deaths were at least reported as deaths in the Western media, and briefly caused some controversy. Likewise, the Guardian reported on its front page the news that NATO had deliberately left 61 migrants to die of thirst in the Mediterranean, some of the 1500 civilians estimated to have died there whilst attempting to flee NATO’s war.
Deaths of Libyan soldiers, however, were never reported by Western news corporations as deaths of human beings. At best, there were veiled references to the ‘degrading of Gaddafi’s military capability’ or of ‘Gaddafi’s capacity to attack civilians’. The latter is particularly odious. Soldiers have become, it seems, not human beings - people with lives, feelings and families – but merely the ‘capacity to attack civilians’.