Alas, this has never stopped to be part of warfare. When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?
I had thought an example could be the Falklands War, but the Argentine soldiers booby trapped some civilian homes once they knew they were going to lose.
These are very different. Yeah, yeah, I know, "tell that to the mother who lost her child", but you would much rather be a civilian in a war in which the military is not intentionally targeting you.
So, when was the last war of which civilians did not die at all? Maybe the Cod Wars between the UK and Iceland.
I did not claim they were not different. Your last sentence is broadening the scope considerably. I was talking about bombing civilians. But still, it is hard to come up with wars where that did not happen (which does not make it any less horrible).
It's ridiculous that civilized nations have strict rules for war. There should be no war.
Except there is war and no one has yet figured out a way not to have war. Given the reality of war, we are profoundly lucky to live in an era where civilized nations have agreed on rules for war, and many of those rules forbid the intentional targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.
This is unprecedented. And fragile. There are uncivilized nations which do not follow those rules. They find the idea of not targeting civilians quaint at best. They love those rules, only because those rules hamstring their enemies, not themselves. They happily target civilians. Not coincidentally, these are the most venal, corrupt and incompetent of nations, and fortunately they are handily beaten by their moral betters, rules notwithstanding.
Still, implying as you did that one is like the other is confused, at best. On principle I disagree with conflating the two kinds of civilian deaths: collateral damage (unironic, no scare quotes) and intentional atrocity are not the same. Conflating the two gives aid and comfort to bad actors, to morally confused souls who support uncivilized nations in their adventurism.
> I did not claim they were not different.
I claimed only that you conflated them, and you did, quite casually. The stakes are too high for that.
I reject your notion that I have to add a detailed paragraph about those two different ways civilians get bombed, when my point was that they are getting bombed, practically always.
Also, "collateral damage" is on a spectrum, in my opinion. How much collateral damage is acceptable before you can call it an atrocity in itself? So, that is much less of a black-white distinction as it seems to be in your statement.
Of course "collateral damage" (with scare quotes) is on a spectrum as is "consent". Those with sinister motives make sure to emphasize this "spectrum" in order to diffuse and confuse its meaning. They also reject the necessity to be precise with their terms.
Collateral damage (no scare quotes) on the other hand, like consent (no scare quotes), has a very precise and important meaning with real, binary values. A civilian death is either collateral or intentional. Consent is either knowingly given or withheld.
Let's live in a world where these distinctions are clear.
The Paris Gun would seem to qualify as an attempt to bomb civilians in WW1.
>...When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neither an airplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used during the war by barrel length, and qualify under the (later) formal definition of large-calibre artillery.
>...The German objective was to build a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians, not to destroy the city itself.
>...The projectile flew significantly higher than projectiles from previous guns. Writer and journalist Adam Hochschild put it this way: "It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of 40 km (25 mi) at the top of its trajectory. This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where the shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth. For the first time in warfare, deadly projectiles rained down on civilians from the stratosphere"
Uhh, just yesterday when Iran only bombed Israel's military installations and Mossad Headquarters
The whole of the past year Hezbollah also saved it's high quality missiles (the ones that would make it past the Iron Dome) for targeting military structures.
They also hit a school building a few hundred meters from my parents house. No military building anywhere in town.
As for Hezbollah - they definitely destroyed a lot of civilian houses with missiles that passed Iron Dome. The whole area is empty of civilians, which is why there often weren't casualties.
A year ago, Iranian militias staged an attack on civilians - which this strike on Israel by Iran was retaliation for Israel killing the leaders of Iranian proxies as Israel’s retaliation. Hence part of a war that started with an intentional attack on civilians.
Alas, this has never stopped to be part of warfare. When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?