The Trophy Wife spent the first years of our marriage dragging me out of Neanderthal status and up to a level where I wasn't flinging poo and grunting, and I was probably almost there, when George Bush sent me to Iraq. I got back, and started noting the discrepancies: the "weapons of mass destruction," the central argument in favor of invading Iraq, not only didn't exist, but the evidence that they did was openly fabricated.
Yes, to be honest, Iraq had once had chemical weapons which they'd used on their own people. We knew that, because we sold it to them.
Saddam and his government were cooperating with the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, when Bush finally pulled out the inspectors and invaded anyway.
As I learned more and more, I reached a point in 2004 when my wife came home to find me in tears. It had finally come home to me that George Bush had made us a rogue nation, and we'd invaded another country just because we wanted something from them. Exactly as Saddam had in the first Gulf War. (Admittedly, the tears might have been helped along by the lingering remains of the weakest case of PTSD on record, but there it is.)
But overall, I'll admit publicly to being what Stephanie Miller calls a "happy-clappy liberal." I think Obama has done great things, despite a Congress full of Republicans who would rather watch the country burn than let our first black president succeed.
I like that he dismantled "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." I had a number of good friends in the military who happened to be gay, and their life was not a happy one.
I like that he managed to get health-care reform started, so that poor people don't have to die in pain. Despite what Fox "News" wants you to believe, Obama has managed to do a lot of very important things in the face of uninterrupted Republican obstruction.
I've got to say, though, that of all the policies Obama's put in place, the one I disagree with the most is the badly-targeted killing of civilians using unmanned drones. It reeks of Orwellian CIA assassinations: the actions of a corrupt dictator, killing his enemies with impunity.
I'm also a realist. I understand why it's being done. We do have enemies around the world (moreso since we burned down big chunks of the Middle East), and they would like nothing more than to score a symbolic victory by killing a good-sized group of Americans. But I also believe in these weird foreign concepts like habeas corpus, and "innocent until proven guilty."
I think that murder is a bad thing. So the whole subject leaves me a little torn.
In the end, though, I see nothing good about drone strikes. Are you aware that only one out of every fifty people killed by drones have been terrorists? Instead, we're killing wedding guests, innocent schoolchildren, people attending funerals, or even rescue workers:
Based on interviews with witnesses, victims and experts, the report accuses the CIA of "double-striking" a target, moments after the initial hit, thereby killing first responders.I understand the popularity of the program: no US forces are in any danger of being harmed. But somewhere along the line, we seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture: we're murdering innocent people.
But Democrats don't want to say bad things about Obama, and this program is the only thing Obama does that the GOP actually supports. So nothing gets done.
Weirdly enough, American bigotry is suddenly showing itself to have a stronger moral base than the American government. As long as the deaths were just foreigners and Muslims, nobody cared. But when word got out that the US government was also killing Americans, the possible backlash might just cause the government to rethink their policy.
(The idiot end of the political spectrum, of course, feels an obligation to overreact to this, as it does to everything that the Kenyan usurper does: they're already shrieking about "Drone strikes on American soil!!"
To be honest, if it makes the US rethink its drone program, I don't mind the overreaction this time.
Very thought provoking.
ReplyDeleteWhile I was being born in February of 1945, the Allies were firebombing Dresden and tens of thousands of non combatants were incinerated. We can say "Germany" deserved it or we can ask why those individual unarmed citizens of Germany needed to be burned alive. I'm sure it's accurate to say that the civilian death toll in that war was enormous in comparison to the military. A "good" war is a sick joke.
I wonder at people who think morality is a black and white, look it up in the book process, free of ambiguity. My father, an ex WW II Navy pilot likes drones because you don't have to send pilots into danger. I worry, because not having to send a pilot into danger means you may be more willing to launch into dubious missions. Nintendo wars -- how can you not be worried? The government, guys like W, want to keep it black and white because they don't want guys like you rethinking anything. Good guys Vs. Bad guys.
I read that drones are less likely to cause "collateral damage" and I think it's true but does that matter when you launch so many more missions you make up for it? I admit it scares me even when using them is justified. Much too easy to say it's worth it because Abdul bin so and so is an "evildoer."
At home, a government with so much power to trace and observe its own citizens is just a scary thing, governments being how they are. That said, I remember when Obama was chastised for scrubbing an attempt to get bin Laden because he was in a compound full of women and kids. Maybe it's true, maybe not.
Moral ambiguity is inseparable from war and words like murder become so qualified I have to think it's useless. In any war, we have to trust "military intelligence" to tell us who needs killing. That's scary enough right there.
On one hand, I do wish we'd been able to fly into Hitler's mountain top living room and blow him to hell before he could murder millions instead of using fleets of bombers and taking 75% casualties, but the potential for misuse of these things is staggering and we only know about the drone use they want us to know about.
With drones the size of hummingbirds it's too easy to imagine a surveillance state Orwell on acid couldn't have dreamed up, but from the day we started shocking and awing Baghdad, it seemed obvious to me that any contrived reason for that damned war wasn't worth what we did to Iraq.
I've also read in No Easy Day that when planning the raid on Osama, some generals wanted to use hundreds of 'bunker buster' bombs and stealth bombers, but cooler heads prevailed and Obama agreed that we needed to use a method that would not kill thousands if things went wrong and of course would keep us from knowing just who was in that building. Same with drones - there's just no substitute for men on the ground calling the shots and taking the risk.
As for American citizens making active war against the US - f*ck 'em, I don't care, but there's no safe way to conduct war and no way at all to do it without a slaughter of innocents. Yeah, we need to rethink a lot of things, including who we let do the thinking for us and how easily we let ourselves get talked into another conflict.
Drone strikes are necessary and much less likely to kill innocent civilians than what large numbers of heavy bombers and small numbers of ground-attack aircraft did in the past. A review of the incendiary bombing raids that decimated Dresden, Germany, and Tokyo and other Japanese cities will confirm that. In those raids, people were killed by the tens and hundreds of thousands. In World War II, B-17's forced away from their target by flak damage, under attack by fighters and challenged to make it home with limited fuel would jettison their bombs wherever. Sometimes those 500- and 1,000-pound bombs hit farm fields. Other times they destroyed residential areas, leveling many blocks at a time.
ReplyDeleteWar is deadly, ugly business, as you surely know. "Civilizing" it by drastically reducing the number of innocents endangered, injured and killed might reduce the pain, or, it might make things ultimately worse. That's because if war becomes too "civilized," there will be less incentive to avoid getting into wars.
Like most war operations any more, drone strikes depend heavily on intelligence. In the Middle East, I'm sure accurate, timely intelligence is harder to come by than gold. It's good that people of conscience question and criticize drone strikes. Doing so puts pressure on those planning and carrying out the strikes to be as careful as they can be, to not let these attacks become humdrum routine and the people killed just abstractions. I think the public should be better informed about how these strikes are planned and what, if any, safeguards are in place to minimize killing the wrong people.
Despite some misgivings and regret, I think the drone strike is a tool we need and should be able to use, especially in the extremely treacherous and dangerous Mideast. On balance, flights of B-52's dropping 2,000-pound bombs in large quantity, wiping out whole cities to get at a few bad guys, or air-ground bombing and strafing attacks by A-10's, FA-18's or C-130 gunships, would do far more unwarranted harm.
I would like to add that Capt. Fogg's excellent comment was evidently being written and posted as I was writing my comment above. I hadn't read it yet when I clicked "publish." ;)
ReplyDeleteThank you sir. I agree about the worry about war becoming so quick and easy with combat robots and unmanned planes that the temptation to get into another misguided adventure for insufficient and perhaps criminal reasons might be too much for the next "warpresident" to resist. I fear my countrymen will be less concerned if war is cheap and sanitary, at least at home.
ReplyDeleteThe 'Big Dog' robot is pretty impressive, but I'm sure we'll have something like the Terminator all too soon. Maybe without the accent though.
Domestic surveillance is scary too and if and when we start weaponizing drones at home, it will be time for old Fogg to be on his way to far away. Actually, like NC I'm not altogether pleased with Mr. Obamas apparent lack of concern with misuse of these machines and all the other spy apparatus to keep tabs on us all. Our county sheriff already spends a lot of time with the county helicopter making sure there's no funny business in your back yard. I'm not looking forward to those bird size drones with HD cameras. I'd hate to have to start wearing a bathing suit.
Bush cried "mushroom clouds" a more deadly WMD than chemicals. Years later it was Bush himself that said (after a two year search of Iraq by our military) that there were no WMD's found in Iraq. Of course we might have surmised as much watching Bush publicly destroy his own Ambassador (and his wife) when he gave evidence that Saddam had no atomic capability.
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