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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
That 'caused' in your assertion carries some enormous assumptions - that there would have been no civil wars in Iraq or Syria without Western meddling, and that civilian casualties in war are morally equivalent to deliberately targeting of civilians.
There really is a difference between attacking military targets, trying to minimize civilians casualties, but causing civilian casualties anyway, and deliberating making every effort to maximize the number of civilians killed. If the West had the same goal as the jihadists - to maximize the number of civilians killed in a war between the West and Islam - the death toll in the Middle East would be in the millions.
At some point, we could see jihadists get their hands on biological weapons and kill millions. Would that stop the "but they do it too" false equivalence?
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If we start a war, which we did in Iraq, it makes no difference if the civilians we killed in our aggressive actions were an accident, we are morally culpable for all of them just as much as the suicide bombers, we only get to hide behind 'it was an accident' if we didn't start the war.