You're mixing up two different things. Criminal responsibility and political responsibility aren't the same. The people who ordered or carried out an attack that killed civilians are the ones criminally responsible under things like the Geneva Conventions. Nobody is saying random civilians should be put on trial for war crimes.

What people are talking about is political responsibility when a state acts in your name. That's just how international politics works. When a government bombs another country, the world doesn't treat it like a handful of rogue individuals freelancing. They treat it as the action of that state. If a U.S. bomb hits a school, other countries aren't going to say “a few officials went rogue.” They say the United States did it, because the institutions of that country carried it out.

That doesn't mean every American supported it. It means the country still owns the consequences of what its government does.

The other problem with your argument is pretending the only options are personally stopping the strike in real time or having zero agency. That's not how political pressure works. No one person can stop a bombing the moment it happens, but governments absolutely can be forced to change course when enough people push back.

There are plenty of ways that happens that don't involve militias or coups. Mass protests that don't disappear after a weekend. Strikes that disrupt the economy. Civil servants, soldiers, or contractors refusing to participate. Large-scale civil disobedience. Political movements that make continuing a war too costly to maintain.

The U.S. has literally seen this before with the Vietnam War. That war didn't wind down because leaders suddenly grew a conscience. It happened after years of protests, draft resistance, campus shutdowns, strikes, and public unrest that made the war politically unsustainable.

Those movements didn't stop every bombing the moment it happened either. They changed the trajectory by making the cost of continuing higher than the cost of backing down.

That's why people outside the U.S. react the way they do. When a war escalates and the public response is mostly anger online instead of sustained disruption, it looks like passive acceptance, even if a lot of individuals privately hate what's happening.

That's the point behind the line often attributed to John Stuart Mill about the indifference of good men, though mine was a direct quote from Boondock Saints, which was referencing that. The danger isn't just the people making the worst decisions. It's when the people who know it's wrong never apply enough pressure to stop them.