More and more reports are rapidly being published that the U.S. will preventively strike Teheran without insisting on a provocation to launch a new war. Most reports seem to put North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons, in a distant second place on the list of likely targets.
We need to get past the headliners including in the title of this article. Let's focus instead on the people who would make war under these circumstances. Take a bomber crew, for example.
Suppose Iran did not counter-attack in the conventional way, which most observers agree would be suicidal. Suppose that instead Iran sued for their damages in U.S. Courts. Suppose further that they sued not the people who gave the orders, but the people who carried them out?
Setting immunity and pardons from liability to one side, if a lawsuit was filed against the bomber pilots and crews for the damages and destruction they caused, would it be "bad faith" to refuse to defend the lawsuits?
Dropping a bomb on targets with whom you are not at war is more than an intentional act. Coverage law ordinarily requires intent to cause the injury or damage that substantially results from the act, in order to void coverage and give a liability carrier a good reason to deny a defense in "good faith."
Dropping bombs in this situation is clearly an act that is substantially certain to result in injuries, deaths, and destruction. It is clearly an act that would not be covered by most insurance.
Neither are alternative forms of unprovoked killing, like launching missiles. The same results -- injuries, death, and destruction -- are likely to follow from that intentional conduct also.
So, whatever coverage there may or may not be for the ones who talk, there will not be coverage for the ones who do the work in this situation.
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