When America plays cop in the world...

...it can end up having the same effects that cops sometimes do at home.

WaPo:

Ahmad’s relatives are among the civilians killed in events that are being documented with an unprecedented level of precision in a new accounting of the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State. Using U.S. military geolocation data being made public for the first time, U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars has pinpointed locations, some of them to within a meter squared, for hundreds of strikes resulting in more than 1,400 civilian deaths.

Throughout the campaign, strikes took place in crowded urban environments, where it was more difficult to distinguish between civilian and Islamic State targets. They also occurred in remote or militant-controlled areas, which complicated intelligence gathering and target verification.

Let me explain myself.

When police officers in America shoot unarmed civilians, they frequently end up unpenalized because the law gives great leeway to agents of the state who use lethal force when they "reasonably" feel like their personal safety is under threat. As we have seen, that "reasonably" stretches a long way, to almost unreasonable lengths.

Similarly, it appears that in the fight against ISIS -- a genuinely terrible, deadly organization -- the United States has decided to err on the side of its own safety, the the degree that the safety of non-American innocents becomes, well, not nearly as high as a priority as it should be.

It is probably the case that each individual targeting decision can be individually justified. Taken together, though, this number of civilian deaths is unconscionable.