Originally Posted by FSETH

I may have missed it somewhere in this long thread, but how do you suggest we should have handled the situation? I am all for the U.S. having a better global immage, but crossing that border and killing an upper level enemy while we had him may have helped prevent the loss of many American lives who are over there fighting in Iraq. I am not trying to downplay the loss of innocent life, but this is war and this happened less than 5 miles from the border of a country that has been involved in war for over 5 years now. If it were me and I lived in Syria, I would have moved way out of harms way by now. I don't know the ins and outs of the situation, but it sounds as if terrorists were simply crossing the border and hiding in what they thought was a safehaven and sort of out-of-bounds area, which is garbage. Makes me ask why Syria didn't have better border protection set up to stop terrorist and other from freely crossing borders whenever they wanted? I am not putting the blame on them, but it doesn't sound like they helped prevent the situation and may have brought some danger upon their border residents by ignoring the situation. Now that the U.S. has crossed this boundary, it may change how the terrorists operate as far as simply corssing a border and feeling safe, which is a good thing.

I feel like the terrorist have been using the rules of war against us from the beginning and it does feel somewhat good to turn the tables and get a terrorist that thought he was manipulating the rules of war.

Once again, I do think it is horrible that innocent civilians died, but it may help prevent the loss of many of our troops in the future.