@Support the troops.
I would bet that there would be many people who would be saying that even to a father of someone who is serving in Afghanistan, especially if some of their own relatives have been massacred in civilian casualties over there, as in the NATO rocket attack last week which killed 45 mostly women and children. But that's beside the point.
We can justify if we want by bringing up patriotism and the fact that the soldiers are just following orders. The people in suits who authorise these and would never hear of the lives on both sides that they destroy are untouchable to us general population. But the AC@9.55 did not seem to be wishing death on the soldiers to prove the point you seem to be thinking of. What he was saying seemed to be that a few deaths are a reasonable price to pay to maintain the oversight and transparency that is needed in a democracy for the people to know that the government is only killing the bare minimum of their own and foreign people to ensure the peoples' own protection/survival. And if me or a son of mine had to sacrifice the life for such a course, I would consider that an honour.
The worth of a patriot would be how much they care about the welfare of his or her own people, not how obediently they follow the government orders. We have been in so many wars that this point seems to have been removed from the brains of the masses. Instead, the fact that obedience to the government is the absolute patriotism seems to have been pushed in its place. I wonder how that happened...
In the end I guess most of this come down to 'how many innocent Afghan lives are worth one innocent British or American life?'.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
