Drone strikes. Another one of those things we like to oppose for
reasons with holes in them. Malala Yousafzai, the young Nobel Peace
Prize winner told the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner last Friday that drone strikes fuel terrorism
and kill innocent people. Somehow I recollect the saying that being
against bad doesn't make you good. It doesn't make you make sense
either.
Is it the use of an unmanned vehicle that makes
bombing terrorist targets wrong? Would we be better off using billion
dollar manned vehicles that are less accurate and far more risky for US
personnel? Send in another 100,000 troops? Would we be better off
not doing anything and as she suggests just give Pakistan more money for
"Education" in the phantasmagoric hope that it will somehow not be used
to teach Islamic intolerance for so much of what we hold dear,
including freedom for young women like Malala Yousafzai? Surely that
would work as well as the billions and billions and billions we're
already given them while they housed bin Laden.
Drone
strikes, like Gluten and fruit sugar, is an enemy without portfolio and
it's not surprising to hear it from someone hoping that somehow the
insanity and hatred infesting Islamic culture will simply go away if we
ignore it, or at most address al Qaeda and ISIS and the Taliban with a
little more understanding. Maybe they'll see the error of their ways
if we all are just a little more patient.
Not sure if you are pro or anti drone?
ReplyDeleteIn any case, Pakistan is a savage and backwards place, and was founded in the name of theocratic tyranny and intolerance. It's a country where punishment by gang rape is part of the criminal justice system... and rest assured that girls in Pakistan won't see their fair share of education funding.
CNN is talking about ISIS claiming rape as justified in holy wars. Holy Shit. Don't forget where Osama was living in his last years. How much do any of them care how many of us die in the cause of building Islamic tyranny around the world?
DeleteAnd of course Pakistan has authorized our drone strikes.
Civilian deaths from drone strikes have been documented for some time, and “collateral damage” is the euphemism we use to describe it. No doubt, the presence of ground troops does not make a population friendly: either way, there are no good options.
ReplyDeleteThis weekend, military daughter returned from what may be her last Persian Gulf deployment, and we talked about the current situation in brief. Her belief: Eventually there will be troops on the ground because you cannot clear terrorist havens by air. Must the cleanup crew always consist of our troops on the ground? This time, how about someone else? The alternative according to General Jenn (terms of endearment): After decades of war, perhaps it’s time to let go and let the locals clean up their own mess … even if it means setbacks, massacres, and ethnic slaughter. Question: Are we willing to accept this? Or must we act the co-dependent on a deathbed who always sees other lives flashing by?
Civilian deaths accompany every war and many states of peace. What has not been documented is that using unmanned planes produces more or less of them than manned planes. There is far more time to double check targets, far less chance of error than with a pilot.
DeleteI have to think of all the years of 24/7 air strikes on Nazi Germany from which only a small number returned safely. I have to acknowledge the terrible toll on both sides. Imagine this: A small group of people gather on a balcony of an alpine mansion outside Berchtesgaden. Far above a drone circles while near Fort Knox a group watches a video screen. "yes, that's him, I'm sure of it" Who is that with him? Consensus is Himmler and Goebbels and maybe his girlfriend. We all agree. Do I launch sir? Roger that!
A woman and a dog and the war's over. How many saved? A conventional air raid? Ten thousand of them? And the war drags on and on and on. Some options are better and I wish we had had them sooner.
The tools of war available to us … it begs a question. Regardless of inventive paraphernalia, must we always interpose ourselves as Fixer in every regional conflict - knowing full well that solutions imposed by outside powers breed internal resentments?
DeleteI return to this question: “[Must] we act the co-dependent on a deathbed who always sees other lives flashing by?” My use of the term “co-dependent” is based on a joke about certain types of people who are so invested in living the lives of other people, they forget how to live their own lives. In this sense, our foreign policy/military establishment is “co-dependent.”
On the far right of the political spectrum, there are voices saying, “Cut off all foreign aid.” While I disagree with this sentiment, I don’t feel we should ignore it. In many respects, the quagmire in which we find ourselves today is the result of past mistakes – as far back as the end of the colonialism era, the cold war era, and post WWII realignments. At least we owe ourselves a healthy debate on what our role in the post-modern world should be.
One of the problems we face is the descendent of Western intervention in the Middle East following on the end of Turkish intervention. Nation building -- remember when George Bush promised he'd learned the lesson? Our country was founded on such resentment.
DeleteYours is an essential question of course and of course we have been meddling for a very long time. Most of that time it's been self interest enlightened by the greed for oil. We have fomented wars and taken sides in wars -- have overthrown elected governments and installed kings and they hate us for it. No wonder their religion has made so much capital of the "great Satan" idea, but Hating us is a political tool for their monstrous governments as well.
Is Iraq our problem, now that we've destroyed it's power structure, it's infrastructure, its self-defense capability and divided it into two warring clans? ISIS or ISOL or Isehole or whatever, wouldn't have had a chance before we left Iraq a smoldering corpse and walked away bragging about giving them their "freedom." I think we have some responsibility.
Perhaps another essential question is "is it too late to back away from what we started?" After setting ourselves as righteous moral leaders, do we let the rape, loot and pillage millions swarm over the world? Regardless of why their culture is inimical and antithetical to ours, it truly is and it's getting worse by the day. Will some future historians see al this as the beginning of another World War? Is this the beginning of a centuries long Great Muslim War? And one more question -- can we afford squeamish rules of engagement when so much is at stake?
The "cut all foreign aid" people, and I know many, seem to be very unaware of how much we give, what strings are attached and to whom we give it. They are usually clueless as to what private "aid" comes from America and what it does to the people involved, but what they really hate is spending money on anything from public broadcasting to school lunches, to public health. It's more of a phobia and miserly selfishness dressed up in academic robes. It's an odd combination of isolationism and imperialism, methinks.
"they really hate is spending money on anything from public broadcasting to school lunches,"
DeleteIn these specific issues, I have some agreement. We need to zero out taxpayer funding of government broadcasting. There is no need for a government propaganda ministry. Leave such things to North Korea, which has high spending on "public broadcasting".
School lunches? I strongly support a form of this for the poor. I strongly oppose free school lunches for those who can afford it. But this is part of my opposition to welfare for the rich.... something I find myself on the opposite side of so many on the Left right now.
dmarks: “There is no need for a government propaganda ministry.”
DeleteOn this point, we are in partial agreement. I recall the 1970s when a former president kept an “enemies list” and abused the powers of office to attack, spy upon, or silence the loyal opposition. It is conceivable that any government funded news network could be hijacked for partisan purposes. Yet, in other ways, we don’t need a propaganda ministry to advance the political goals of a president when we have what is loosely called, “The Power of the Pulpit.”
Our so-called “independent media” failed us in 2002-2003 during the Iraq War run-up when our news outlets failed to fully vet the WMD claims of the administration. And the administration steered uncomfortably close to another Watergate style cover-up - vis-a-vis the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby affair.
Yet, I have another – somewhat different - experience of state-sponsored news media. In the 1980s, I lived and worked in the UK and turned to the BBC every night for news and standard TV faire. Chartered to be fully independent of government – and independent of any party – I found that the BEEB practiced a very high standard of objective journalism – certainly far more objective than competing independent media outlets.
Would an American-style BEEB work as well here? I think PBS does a credible job but it is also subject to a great deal of partisan pressure, sometimes bordering on intimidation. Americans are not as civil, nor as circumspect, as the Brits.
PBS is subject to more pressure now that it has to rely on corporate sponsors - the Kochroach brothers included. I've never seen it as anything nearly like government propaganda, but the point is the government spends less on them than it does on toilet paper for congress - and there are a hell of a lot of assholes there.
DeletePersonally I've been watching Al Jazeera and have yet to see any lack of objectivity and the number of stories covered is a thousand times what you hear elsewhere where it's all ebola, all the time. As to the fake news - Fox - it's all Obama's fault all the time.
We have some differences over the scandals you described (i.e. the WMD claims which came from Democrats as well), and whether or not the media failed us. But I agree with your general point.
DeleteI do like the BBC, don't get me wrong. But as it is government funded and controlled, I do not agree that it is "fully independent of government". It is, though, a part of their government with a fairly strong firewall to protect it from influence and micro-management of other parts of the government.
I'm willing to entertain this idea, though. Are you thinking of a full-blown American "Beeb" with our own commercial programming (a la Eastenders, Doctor Who, Blue Peter)? Or just using this approach strictly for a news and documentary service?
Cap'n said: " As to the fake news - Fox - it's all Obama's fault all the time."
DeleteAnd the same is true of MSNBC. Just change opposition of Obama to defense of him. Anyway, in regards to both the BBC and Al Jazeera, inclusion of them brings up a point: we can get the news from both, for free. Right now. Is there even a need for an improved US government media ministry?
How much of PBS programming is news? What evidence is there that any of that programming is edited, biased or in any way influenced by the 15% of the budget provided by the federal government. Is that countered by the large amount of corporate funding and private donation? In many decades of watching, I see absolutely nothing that would suggest it being like Pravda -- a government news outlet. MSNBC? Seriously? Compare anything to Fox and it might seem biased in the other direction, but Fox, according to allegedly neutral sources makes up more than half of it's stories or twists them beyond recognition so in comparison the truth seems biased. MSNBC seems driven by the same need for ratings and resorts to the same sensationalism for the same reasons. A news outlet that does not rely on ratings would in theory be more likely to be neurtal and of course the animosity to it shown by Republicans would hint that PBS would have to favor them to keep them from pulling the plug. But it's all theory and speculation and conjecture and as biased as anything else in politics, but my own observation shows far less nonsense about the war on Christmas, how Christians are being persecuted, plots to round op conservatives and completely made up hoo-ha about the need to arm ourselves against the government we get from the "fair and balanced" insurgents.
DeleteWhen Public TV and Radio began there was no competing coverage of the arts and sciences now available on cable and satellite. There now is, I admit, but it's not free. Cable costs money and increasingly more of it. One could bey a car with what I pay for it every month.
Cruise the news this morning and note which outlets are still ignoring the endless stories of importance to pump up irrational fear of ebola, which are trying to blame it all on Obama and which are telling you the news. All else is dialectic.
DeleteOn Fox of course, after calling him a tyrant for appointing special advisors, after preventing every one of his appointees from being approved and calling a long standing and specifically constitutional practice "trashing the constitution" -- after blocking the appointment of a Surgeon General and an Ebola Czar, now they're blaming it all on the failure to do that.
Does this compare with any other news outlet anywhere and does it seem a bit exaggerated to set the possibility of government pressure on PBS up against it as a defense? Are we comparing apples to Galaxies?