see my previous post.
your stance presumes we are actually doing some good in combating terror. the statistics do not support the conclusion we are actually doing anything to combat actual terrorism. if we were, or if the statistics reflected we were really disrupting terrorist activities, i think it would all be much easier to digest. the facts actually make it clear we are 1. not really doing anything to disrupt terror–or if we are, not much, and 2. weighing that against the civilian casualties.
about my “strawman,” i’d love you to elaborate.
how are our kids being murdered for no good logical reason any more tragic than hundreds of their kids dying for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time when we drone-struck the wrong joint?
is it “acceptable for the greater good?” what’s the good if we’re not even disrupting real terrorist anything? …if the stats are true and we aren’t getting high-level targets, how is those kids dying any less tragic?
if we WERE getting high value targets, how is killing those kids any less tragic? we can’t even write it off as “too bad you live in a country we’re at war with–” because they don’t. they literally were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, same as the kids in Newtown.
i fail to see what leverages the tragedy of one over the other. i hope you can set me straight.
I prefer drones to invasion becaus of the obvious lack of AMERICAN lives put in danger. But I do have a question about the civilian deaths incurred: Are these people dying because we are shooting at civilian targets, or are the “bad guys” using them as human shields?
Or simply because some of these bad guys are around their families and whatnot a lot, possibly under the false hope that having civilians around will keep them safe, or for the fact that they just love their family.
the thing is it’s not a choice between this or invasion. there’s not enough grounds for legitimate military intervention, so if we didn’t have drones, we’d not really be doing anything. i think pursuing people the old fashioned way would actually cause a lot more certainty about who we were killing.
rationalizing “well this is better than lobbing a ton of missiles or sending my son to go fight” doesn’t sit well with me, because it’s not as if that’s the actual situation. the situation is more like “hey, we can go kill people really easy” and it seems to be TOO easy and is causing a sort of short-sightedness in action.
and it’s a CIA program, not a pentagon program, so it’s not being conducted as a military action.
civilians are being killed because the CIA has no real categorical way to differentiate between “just some person” and what they declare “enemy combatants.”
to over-clarify the whitepaper memo released: these “terrorists” need not commit any crimes. they need not have ever done anything terroristic, nor even be planning to do something imminently. so can you see how wide open that leaves people? “maybe you were thinking about it.” or “we heard chatter of you saying something like what if…”
this is the equivalent of drone striking every person who twittered/facebook/ranted off online about how obama should be assassinated.
so it’s not like legit bad guys are hiding in youth hostels and we kill the bystanders. we often don’t know who we are killing, and clearly there’s little concern. the CIA claims civilian casualties are “in the single digits.” other reports say it’s at near 1000. low end guess is around 500.
and read about double-tap “signature” strikes. we deliberately kill rescuers and first responders, so that makes it easy for more civilians to be killed.
here’s a good article outlining some of this stuff.
The handful of maybe, hopefully, some guy told us, for sure, perhaps “bad guys” we killed LIVE among civilians.
There are no armies here. These guys, for the most part, aren’t at “Fort al Qaeda”. They have normal civilian lives, which they live out among other civilians. If you happen to have one fo these guys for a neighbor, well, the CIA thinks you, your wife, your grandparents, your children, are all expendable. Mostly because you’re brown, because you’re not American. But as we have seen recently, even those qualities might not save you.
My main issue with this, putting aside the barbarity of blowing up innocent people to kill some goat farmer with primitive weapons half a world away, is that the whole process is COMPLETELY lacking in transparency.
NO ONE is accountable, for ANYTHING. The people of the United States of America, for the most part, do not know who is giving the orders, what the orders are, who is being killed, who is collateral damage, what is the basis for a kill order, who is held responsible when mistakes are made, etc, etc, etc.
I have no clue. Do you? The Government in fact insists that none of us should know.
And if their willing to kill a U.S citizen who committed no crimes, what exactly is their criteria for killing people with drones? Is if they have a “hunch” good enough? He said something about not liking america on his facebook? His estranged wife/lover said something incriminating? Some warlord pointed him out after getting paid a few thousand dollars? Is the reason good enough to kill a few dozen innocent people along with the target?
When robots are doing the killing and the ones being killed, “war” will become commonplace. War needs to have a connotation attached to it, it needs to be dreadful. Even now in today’s terms War isn’t nearly dreadful enough.
When (if) we ever go to war, it ought to be to win, quickly. If that means completely annihilating the opposition from the map, then so be it. War ought to be THE last resort, not used as it is today.
I agree the lack of transparency is troubling, and the lack of a need to prove “just cause”, even moreso. BUT I believe people who associate with evil shouldn’t expect to be long for this world. I also agree our armed services are NOT a toy!
Last week’s NYT article talked a lot about the relationship between al Quaeda and civilians in Yemen, and is one of the best articles I’ve read about the drone war. I think the OP is right that many people don’t see what the big deal is, and I think that’s largely due to the distance between us and the drone strikes. Not only are they mostly secreted from the public, but the media doesn’t seem to report much on local conditions in places like Yemen and Pakistan. From the article:
It’s these sorts of anecdotes that start to make people empathize.
I’d be very curious to hear more about this (which, given the secrecy behind the drone strikes, I probably won’t). This does strike me as the kind of callous actions bordering on (if not crossing over to) murder that our “War on Terror” has led us to. But then again, I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Jaber was already dead, and the drone pilot only pulled the trigger after watching the Al Qaeda members silence one of their critics.
maybe they do, but that is a narrative you’ve spun from fiction.
Jaber is exactly the kind of man we need over there, someone who is willing to stand up in the towns where they live against this kind of stuff. blowing him up just weakens our whole effort (at best) and could push anti-american sentiment where there was none before (at worse).
this is the part that troubles me, from the same article:
greater freedom to kill suspects. nothing about that incorporates due process. now that we are killing our own citizens and applying this adjudication, it has honest ramifications we need to consider.
the same article later discusses how the CIA can unilaterally execute a kill list without the other country’s consent, far different than Pentagon Military drone strikes, which require cooperation and permission. in short, letting the CIA run this program absolves them from transparency, permission, oversight or strict parameters.
all of this is why it’s so troubling.
and what these “bad guys” actual involvement is very much dubious. A Q has sort of become this trigger-word for people who hate america and want to shoot you, YOU READING THIS, in the face with an RPG first chance they get. but that’s not exactly the case, as most of these kids joining up have no real concept of what terrorism even is. they simply need money, or hope, or a prospect, and A Q promises these things.
i am not saying we should let “members of A Q off the hook for being naive or misguided–” i’m just not sure drone-striking them and their families “just in case” isn’t exactly making America any safer, and very much might be doing more harm than good.
Basically, we have a low-ideas, touchy-feely president, who encourages personal loyalty to the emotions he inspires rather than moral reasoning, so Obama voters support the drone murder policy because they have no frame of ethical reference outside of “Obama said it, I believe it, that settles it.”
Well, no. We wouldn’t put up with foreign soldiers on our soil either. In fact there’s lots of shit we wouldn’t put up with on American soil that we have no problem doing to other people.
As a liberal, drone attacks don’t bother me at all because I don’t see them as any different than a guy flying a plane dropping bombs on civilians. Just because one of our American lives are in “danger” (when really there is probably very minimal danger) somehow makes murder more justifiable?
Seriously? Why are you getting riled up over drone attacks? They are NO different than anything else we’ve ever done in war. War is murder and terrible and awful, but why hate drones? Just because we aren’t putting a life on the line that some how makes what we are doing worse? That idea is silly to me.
So be mad at Obama that he continues to fight a “war” at all, but to focus on drone attacks is frankly a huge fucking waste of time. Fight the war, not the drones. If the government can actually get everyone to hate drones so much, then at some point down the road they can say “well we won’t use drones anymore, look how nice we are!” and continue then to bomb the hell out of innocent people with our renewed support. Is that what you want? STOP TREATING DRONE ATTACKS AS ANYTHING DIFFERENT THAN ANYTHING ELSE DONE IN WAR. It pisses me right the fuck off when I see liberals pissing away their time and energy fighting things that DON’T NEED TO BE FOUGHT.
How do you fight a war against an enemy which s not a country, but an amorphous group of people connected largely electronically?
Send in infantry to occupy the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan? How how the training camps in Somalia? Those cells in Yemen? Opps - there’s another jihad-hist group in the jungles of Malaysia?
The enemy is not a country, they don’t even all come from the same county or even time zone?
You think American citizens should somehow be exempt? How about the US soildrs who “got religion” and used their weapons to kill US soldiers? One case was in TX. I’d call him a target.
By law, the CIA is not allowed to operate within the US. Fine. We’ll have a few drone pilots get jobs with the FBI - if we need to take out a target on American soil, he/she can punch out as CIA and punch in as FBI for a couple of hours.
New type war. New type warfare.
When the enemy stops using suicide bombers to attack civilians and starts wearing uniforms and amass in fixed bases, I’ff use bombers.
As it is, the drones are probably the optimal weapon for the war we face - they take out small targets - much less collateral damage than a conventional bomb and, should one be shot down, the wreckage doesn’t destroy an entire town.
I don’t know if some people are overly focusing on the drone vs. manned pilot issue. For me, and I think for most people, “drone” is a shorthand for the whole terror-bombing program. There is a difference between what is going on now and what happened under rules of actual war, which is that we are disregarding the inevitability of civilian casualties wholesale, bombing things just for the sake of bombing them, and manufacturing false statistics about who the bombs are hitting. That, and not whether there is a pilot in the seat, is the problem. It’s closely tied to the overall issue of the War On Feeling Afraid Of Things, which is that we’re attempting to bomb an emotion to death by fighting people who don’t exist, and 4 out of 5 times what we actually hit are innocent people with no connection to the so-called conflict whatsoever.
Well, for so long as the prevailing attitude is that Muslim lives don’t count and anything is acceptable as long as Our Troops aren’t put in danger, then yes, it would be better if non-drones were used because it would lead to some meaningful opposition to the entire “turn South Asia into a smoldering crater devoid of human life” agenda.
“The enemy” doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as Al-Qaeda, and if “terrorists” are defined as those both willing AND able to successfully pull off an attack on the continental United States resulting in massive loss of life, they hardly exist either.
You would have…dropped a bomb on Fort Hood because someone there was shooting the other soldiers? OK then. Bring that up at the next American Legion meeting and see how it goes over.
Remember when Democrats viewed the law as something to be followed, rather than a game to see how you can avoid it?
Endless, perpetual war with no definition of when victory can possibly be achieved, against an organization that does not exist, in the name of stomping out a tactic and a bad feeling. “New” type in that it makes Vietnam look like a great idea by comparison–at least there was a defined standard for the POSSIBILITY of that being won/ended.
Who is the enemy? What suicide bombings have taken place in the U.S.? Why do you think chicken farmers and schoolchildren and funeral mourners in Pakistan are plotting to attack the United States?
“Conventional bombs” are what drones drop. They are, as has been pointed out by people on your side, the same as a normal bomber, minus the pilot.
Nope. The day “liberals” think that giving the President unlimited power to kill at will, at home or abroad, with no need for trial or oversight, is the day that word loses all meaning. Democrat? Sure. Obama voter? I’d bet my life on it. Liberal? Not in this language.