Truly informative spot on PRI’s The World this afternoon about the ongoing drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan featuring Wired magazines Noah Shachtman. Here is a link to the PRI piece, here is a link to Wired magazine’s coverage, and here is the interview itself (.mp3) in case you have problems reaching it. Money quote in the interview (about 4 mins in):
“There are certainly very different rules that apply in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the air strikes have got to be very tightly constrained. You really can’t drop a bomb in Afghanistan without layers and layers and layers of approval and you have to be very careful about civilian casualties. In Pakistan, if the media reports are at all correct, you’re having two-three-four dozen people get killed at a time in these drone attacks, and let me tell you, they are not all terrorists or militants. There’s gotta be some civilians involved when you’re getting that many people killed at once. So there’s a very different feel to the air war in Pakistan and they don’t seem to be taking the kind of care that they do in Afghanistan.”
The reason I tell you this is because of this report:
A senior U.S. counterterrorism official has confirmed the identity of a top Al Qaeda operative killed in Pakistan on Friday.
The U.S. official told Fox News that the operative is Saleh al-Somali, the network’s external operations chief for plots outside Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A U.S. government official said early Friday that an American drone strike killed an Al Qaeda operative in western Pakistan. The official did not identify the target of the attack. Meanwhile, intelligence officials confirm that the pace of attacks by such unmanned aircraft has increased during the Obama administration.
While you hear all the anchors giddily report Saleh’s demise, remember what Shachtman said about the outcome of our drone policy- dead civilians. I’m just not sure that killing a few people in leadership is worth radicalizing the entire Pakistani public, which is what I suspect is happening when you are killing dozens of civilians at a time. We have near riots in the US when we try to discuss providing health care coverage for everyone in the country. Can you imagine the reaction if every couple of days we lost twenty people to a foreign air strike?
*** Update ***
Here is a thought experiment for you. How many Israeli citizens were killed by rocket attacks before Israel could no longer tolerate it and launched the brutal Gaza incursion at the beginning of the year?
Take a guess.
Ugh
Out of sight, out of mind. Plus they are scary brown people so who cares anyway, serves them right for being born in Pakistan instead of here.
Yutsano
This right here is the difference between the military and the CIA. The military has to have all their ducks in a row before calling in a strike, the CIA just has to say “GO!” and it happens. I’m not against surgical drone attacks, they are effective tools in areas we simply do not have access to. But if this is true, then the rules of engagement need to be tightened in Pakistan, and if that means the CIA gets the fuck out of the way, so be it.
Parthenon
Putting ourselves in the shoes of foreigners (especially those with funny names and languages) is many things, two most importantly:
1) The sort of thing Noam Chomsky suggests in his books, and therefore both crazee and shrill.
2) ignorant of the fact that we are God’s blessed people and one of us is worth a lot more than one of them.
Punchy
Dobbs and Tancredo just told me that the Mexican Air Force is about to drop cluster bombs and willy pete on Arizona. Please God, let them spare Lake Haivasu (sp?)…
El Cid
I think the Pakistanis should start flying drones into the United States which drop socialized health care on people.
cleek
the only way this makes sense to me is if the military is thinking “well, if the Afghans don’t want to get blowed-up, they better stop giving aid-and-comfort to our enemy!” which is stupid. but at least it lets me think that the military knows that blowing-up an innocent civilian makes her neighbors angry – they’re just hoping the neighbors all come around to fearing us more than they fear the Taliban / AlQ.
which, again, is stupid. because a person can hate both sides of a war that two other parties are fighting, uninvited, in his neighborhood.
Stooleo
Especially if it was from Mexico.
Zifnab
9/11, much?
America is a funny place. We simultaneously put a massive stock in whatever may kill an American overseas and can’t give a flying fuck if “30 people” are killed by a rocket strike so long as we get a bad guy in the process.
It reminds me of the abortion debate. Pregnant women can suffer miscarriages in legion, and it won’t touch the conservative heart. But if they hear about one fetus dying, out come the picket signs and the moltav cocktails.
Anoniminous
This is merely ‘incontinent ordinance’ – bombs that fail to hit their target – causing ‘collateral damage’ – murdering non-combatants.
Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
ellaesther
Oh fucking hell.
I want to read this – no, strike that. I feel I should read this, and I want to have the fortitude to do so. But I don’t. Not today. It’s been a tough week, and it’s mah holiday, y’all, so I’ll skip it — for now — and go get my menorahs and latkes ready.
Happy Hanukkah, my peeps! On this Festival of Lights, here’s my wish (keepin’ it on-topic): May we bring light into the dark place that is our war in Afghanistan….
freelancer
@Punchy:
If they’re targeting Arpaio, I’m fer it.
Noah Shachtman
Thanks for the kind words, John. Folks here might also be interested in this preview of my longer magazine story on the Afghanistan air war…
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_end_air_war/
-nms
Redshirt
Unfortunately, drones are the future of much warfare, and all manners of surveillance. Just wait till the big city police departments start using them. We’re quickly entering our Blade Runner Dystopia.
bago
Obligatory xkcd.
General Winfield Stuck
Because it’s nigh impossible to go to all the trouble of inventing low risk (to troops), high cost (to us) killing toys (to civilians) and then not use them. Buy now, pay later by causing foreign peoples to hate us and want revenge, and then we wonder why, and buy more expensive killing toys. Never ends. This is a shitty way to conduct warfare, I don’t like it despite it’s saving our troops. And am highly dubious of those that claim doing it with ground troops will get even more civilians killed.
And there is no shortage of other terrorist leaders to replace the ones we kill amongst the the civies that also get killed. Obl, might be an exception, but that is just one exception.
Quaker in a Basement
So far, no report that any civilians were harmed in this attack. God, please let it remain so.
Zam
OT, but tweety is pissed off at AGW deniers.
FPN
And what many people don’t understand is how it works in the tribal areas-While they are “afghans” or “pakistanis”, most just really care about their tribe. You kill one of these guys, you might add 5 more people to the fight against you, out of revenge. You’re a foreigner and you killed my family/head of my village, now I will kill you.
Zam
@FPN: In addition to that tribal mentality, the second largest ethnic group in the Pakistani Military is Pashtun. This is the same as the Taliban. The Pakistani Pashtun’s are largely refusing to attack the Taliban. So we really aren’t getting the kind of support that we need on the other side of the border.
freelancer
@bago:
They are all Sarah Connor now. And we are all Kyle Reese.
Leelee for Obama
I can’t write about this just now. It’s not my Holiday-(Happy Hannukah, ellaesther)-but I am finding it hard to wrap my head around this, right at the moment.
While I’m not sure about the rightness or wrongness of the Predators, I have to ask how are they different from our air strikes and bombings of past wars? Is the absence of a human in harm’s way somehow more unethical? I’m not making an argument, I’m asking. If those two methods are compared, do the drones kill fewer innocents?
General Winfield Stuck
@Leelee for Obama:
I do understand your question. And one difference is the unmanned nature of it, that rankles some, like me. Making war on others soley by technology has always been creepy to me. Whether it’s cruise missiles or drones, It is a moral dilemna that is increasing every day with better technology.
Or, when countries can conduct warfare from a safe distance, where does it stop? and does it make easier the tough choice? that should be very tough, the decision to embark on such a course.
And these types of insurgent wars that we have been doing starting with Vietnam, have a high degree of hearts and minds factor that is integral to defining winning or losing. If you drop bombs on houses where civilians live to kill a combatant and most assuredly also civilians, what have you gained? One dead soldier, and many lost hearts and minds that undoubtably create more enemy soldiers. This is a pragmatic concern as well as moral.
Short Bus Bully
Here is some insurgent math from the upcoming SAT:
– There are 10 insurgents and you kill 7 with a drone attack. How many insurgents are there now?
a) 3. Go USA!!
b) 10. There are more insurgents joining up now that they saw their friends get killed by dirty foreigners.
c) 200. Extended families and tribal affiliations are a bitch.
d) Yes.
e) Also, Obama is a black man.
MikeJ
I’m with you on this. I don’t understand the focus on the fact that the strike aircraft pilot isn’t there to be shot at.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Anoniminous:
The fact is that aerial warfare on civilians is a form of terrorism. All the word games and denial bullshit on earth (and you are likely to see some of that right here) can change the truth of that fact.
If you or your loved one get blown into meat chunks by a bomb, it makes no difference to anyone how the bomb got to you. Carried by a person, zoomed in on the tip of a missile, dropped from a plane, the result is the same, and the desired effect is the same. Somebody is trading your meat chunks for something they want, and claiming that they have a right to do that. That’s it, there is nothing else to say about it, whether the bomb is blessed by Dick Cheney and the Baby Jesus, or whether it is carried in by a religious fanatic.
Once we can call things what they really are and talk about them in the context of the truth, then we can start to make sense of them. Until then, it’s all about manipulation and coercion.
freelancer
@Short Bus Bully:
There was a Jesuit in prep school that was a big believer in Multiple-Multiple Choice. I learned nothing from him.
Mark
Off the top of my head I recall less than one handful of Israeli’s died in the rocket attacks preceeding their
invasionincursion. Two maybe?scudbucket
@FPN:
You kill one of these guys, you might add 5 more people to the fight against you, out of revenge.
Crystal clear. It breeds a culture of justifiable hatred for the US. Which reminds me, have those who said 9/11 was a response to US assholery been released from the camps they were rounded up in?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
” … cannot change the truth of that fact.”
Please revise my previous post accordingly. I had intended to do an edit. but real life intervened, and then the time expired. As you know, the climate change deniers win if we allow more than 5 minutes to edit a post. Luckily we are not going to let THAT happen.
MikeJ
Why? I can understand weighing the risk of innocent people getting killed against the need to kill legitimate military targets. As far as manned v remotely piloted, we’re not (or shouldn’t be) doing it to prove that we’re macho enough to fight them. We’re doing it to complete a military objective. If you have a militarily sound reason to do a strike, do it in the way that holds the least risk. If you don’t have a justification for the strike, don’t do it at all.
Maude
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: But Hillary Clinton said it wasn’t terrorism.
Linkmeister
I haven’t read above comments yet.
Israelis? Maybe five.
Liberty60
The best analogy I have heard, is comparing the Drone strikes with trying to kill a hornet’s nest by killing one hornet at a time.
They can reproduce faster than we can kill them, since for every one we kill, a dozen more spring up.
This is madness.
And all this, based on the notion that this guy might possibly have sometime in the future planned a bombing attack against us.
Or not.
freelancer
@Liberty60:
Madness?!
THIS. IS. ‘MERKA!
scudbucket
I have to ask how are they different from our air strikes and bombings of past wars?
They aren’t.
Is the absence of a human in harm’s way somehow more unethical?
No. (But I think you might want to rephrase that question a bit for accuracy.)
Drones are intended, like so much of our new Shock and Awe 2.0, to minimize US casualties. See, the elites at the CFR concluded that we lost the Vietnam war (I know, that’s supposed to be a secret) because US citizens grew soft by seeing US soldiers return home in body bags. Apparently the CFR felt that anti-war protesters were agnostic about the deaths of who our bombs were dropped on.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Maude:
Yes, but she also said that she’d been under sniper fire in Bosnia.
mutt
i dont gather people think its somehow WORSE because its a drone- the supporters seem to say its not the same as a conventional airstrike, which is horseshit.
The major downside is now cowards like Cheney et al can kill peasants from a safe distance. Watch getting to push the “fire” button get auctioned off to wingnut war supporters- theres a tax theyll pay…..
General Winfield Stuck
@MikeJ:
I thought I explained this, but it has nothing to do with “macho”, no such thing in war. sometimes there is exceptional courage, but macho’s usually die quickly.
It is about the philosophy of warfare and not making it too easy, or risk free. If you can’t see the danger in that, there is no way I can explain it so you do.
bemused
@Zam:
Was Pat Buchanan on Hardball? I’m wondering if Chris would be easier on Pat. Earlier in the day Pat was debating with a science guy & said ‘but, but Sarah Palin said the polar bear population has increased, is Sarah wrong?’ I doubt that Pat really believes Sarah is an authority to quote no matter how much he likes to cheerlead for her. Lying sack.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@scudbucket: Actually UAVs have many more benefits than manned aircraft during a counterinsurgency. Minimizing U.S. casualties is way down the list. Endurance, expense, low observability, logistics footprint, intel reachback, all are higher priority in this conflict than fewer casualties. The risk to manned fixed wing aircraft in Af/Pak comes solely from weather, terrain and inflight emergencies.
MikeJ
I’ve not seen anyone say that. The biggest difference is you can leave a predator up over an area for two straight days and strike if you get a good target. Conventional aircraft can’t loiter like that.
Maude
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: WIN.
I was very upset when Clinton said that. Samantha Powers was right.
Air strikes should be banned. The people in those countries don’t have the weapons and they can’t fight off a drone.
Even one person killed is too many.
Cassidy
Good thing that isn’t what’s happenning. Targeting enemy oepratives isn’t terrorism; it’s warfare.
Leelee for Obama
Thanks for all the responses. I think the air war strategy that we embraced early on in the last century is indicative of our desire as a military power to have our cake and eat it too. We can bring another nation to it’s knees and hold our losses to a minimum. We can rail against nations that hold our downed pilots, and get agreement from much of the world. I, myself, have said that Roosevelt was incorrect in not ordering the bomber’s to hit the camps, and the railways that led to them. I have cried with Vonnegut in Dresden, and so also with the German civilians under the firebombs, and yet, I have been glad that war finally ended Hitler’s Reich. I have wept as I ran with that little girl in flames in Vietnam, and with the Japanese civilians we incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I felt equally tortured when I read about the Bataan Death March and the Japanese cruelties to our soldiers and marines in prison camps.
War is the worst form of violence, it is, by its nature, indiscriminate in the dealing of death. We should avoid it, at almost any cost.
We can only win hearts and minds if we can protect the populace. We have to end the people who threaten their security. If we lost a soldier or marine for everyone of them we kill, because we only do that face-to-face, is that a moral victory.
I.Just.Don’t.Know
libarbarian
@General Winfield Stuck
What are you basing your incredulity on?
Chuck Butcher
There are a couple things to consider in this scenario, first there is no mention of civilian casualties – doesn’t mean there weren’t any, but – and secondly that the stuff carried by Predators isn’t large ordinance. The area of effect is fairly small, this will give you some room to claim that “innocent” is a matter of degree rather than absolute and ignorant is quite unlikely.
There is nothing about war that I like and civilian casualties probably least of all, but once you accept engagement you have those casualties as an inevitible. People will just try to hide from getting killed and some will be willing to help them and one of the most efficient ways to do it is to hide among civilians.
So, all complaining aside, what do you propose to do? They will hide among civilians and they don’t give a shit, obviously.
lamh31
Okay,
I’m sorry, I know this is a serious topics, and what I’m about to do is seriously off topic, but if these don’t deserve a post, then I don’t know what does!!!
SERIOUSLY YA’LL GO CHECK OUT THESE PHOTOS OF MC STEELE!!!!
‘Best Boss Ever? Michael Steele & The RNC Interns
The RNC put a password protection ofn the photos online, but TPM through the magic of the internet has got em. This man is a joke.
ItAintEazy
Well, I guess the answer to the question is 19 Israelis, although the data includes those killed in rocket attacks during Cast Lead.
Roger Moore
@Quaker in a Basement:
It seems to me that the major point of this post is that it’s likely to remain so (i.e. unreported) whether or not any civilians were blown up. If it hasn’t been reported, that’s at least as likely to be because the media just hasn’t bothered to report it- or even to find out- as it is because there were no civilian casualties.
Morbo
@bago: Beat me to it.
matoko_chan
Can’t win hearts and minds when the hearts and minds of extended kingroups are being splattered all over the landscape.
Civilians died, fo’ sure.
The military has brutally suppressed embedded videographers since post the “dash across the desert”……why?
because our troops were being greeted with roadside bombs instead of flowers.
Why suppress data?
— so the small screen doesnt get the nightly news feeds that killed our “will to fight” in VietNam
Kevin Phillips Bong
@Chuck Butcher: Let me add some meat to this. Our UAVs carry two types of weapons, Hellfire missiles and 500lb laser guided bombs. We see guys walk away from near-miss Hellfire shots all the time, no way you’re killing dozens of civilians with one, we have a difficult enough time getting just one insurgent. LGBs make a bigger hole, but the only way you’re killing a dozen or more people with one is if they’re all clustered around the target at the same time. Draw your own conclusions about their relationship to the target if that’s the case.
That said, for every noncombatant killed and even some of the insurgents, you probably make two or more new enemies. Wish I knew what the answer is.
matoko_chan
Dr. Cole, could we have a thread on how Allahp and the Butthurt Brigade are stroking out over Avatar?
pleeeeeeeeeez?
scudbucket
@Leelee for Obama:
If we lost a soldier or marine for everyone of them we kill, because we only do that face-to-face, is that a moral victory.
I.Just.Don’t.Know
This is far too nuanced (and also a bit morbid). What, in your own mind, is a justified use of violence? WOuld you, for example, use violence against someone who both had weapons of harm and looked at you funny? That’s the Bush Doctrine. (Except in the case of Iraq he had to lie about the ‘having weapons’ part.) The moral argument for my own use of violence requires that there be an immediate physical threat to my person (or those close to me). Others think that a threat to their property suffices for violence, others a threat to their beliefs. The US govt holds that violence is justified if it results in a government more favorable to US investors. Remember, the Afghan pipeline was a Bush I fantasy, and Iraqi oil was a neocon fantasy. The GWOT provided a parallel – but entirely independent – justification for the use of violence.
In light of that, supposing it was true, does the 1 Afghan:1 Marine calculus make the violence resulting from drones more moral?
John Sears
@Redshirt: The FAA is skittish about allowing them in the same airspace as most other aircraft, but some police and border patrol types are already using them in the US for surveillance.
http://news.cnet.com/Drone-aircraft-may-prowl-U.S.-skies/2100-11746_3-6055658.html
The military is chomping at the bit to use them in the US for various natural disasters; I imagine there’s an ulterior motive there, perhaps to improve the public perception of the devices.
Not that Americans really seem to care how many people we blow to bloody shreds in Pakistan.
Yutsano
Well since Posse Comitatus went by the wayside thanks to King George why the fuck not? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?
Comrade Kevin
@Cassidy:
We don’t torture people, either.
John Sears
@Yutsano: I’m not sure how much to worry about the use of drones for surveillance, in the US. I mean, they’re most useful when you have a vast empty stretch of nothing to cover with limited manpower.
So, Border Patrol is an obvious area that would (and does) have a lot of interest.
But in general, a drone is just a camera way up in the air. They’re not going to be firing missiles into crowds of Americans, no matter how many bad guys they think are in the middle of the throng; they certainly can’t arrest anyone.
The amount of police power already available on the ground, to people who can detain and search you (not just photograph) is already so enormous, most people have no idea… compared to that, drones? *shrug* Meh.
I think the FAA has the right worry, namely that these little devices are small enough, and designed to be inconspicuous enough, that they pose a really nasty mid-air collision risk to everything else in the sky.
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2009/04/24/air-collision-fears-slow-expansion-of-us-drone-use.html
Yutsano
@John Sears: Border Patrol fortunately is not the same as the military, although right now AFAIK the Air Force is the only outfit capable of using drone technology, so I guess there would be some bleed-over there. I guess it’s just my cynicism from the last eight years. Getting over Bush levels of skepticism is gonna take some time. I doubt I’ll be over it even after Obama’s two terms.
BTW you are right that the FAA has every reason to be concerned about their usage but as long as there were restrictions about how high/low they could fly and keep them out of the main traffic lanes it should keep any drone accidents to a minimum.
Leelee for Obama
@scudbucket: I tend to think discussions of war brings on morbid, so, yeah, morbid. My threshold for violence is the same as yours. To protect and defend persons. We shouldn’t be killing for commodities, or land or out of fear of what “might” happen. I think Iraq was a complete lie so there is no defending it. Afghanistan is somewhat different in that the ruling government at the time of 9/11 allowed AQ safe haven there. The populace have always been the innocent bystanders, and that is the real moral dilemma. If we had overthrown the Taliban and left-things might actually be worse now, though, admittedly, it’s bad as it is. All the nations that have inserted themselves into Afghanistan have, historically, left in defeat or disgust, or both, and things devolved into worse chaos. Better for us, maybe, and certainly, for awhile, less costly in blood and treasure. But, there is the history of the last time we left them to their own devices and it didn’t end well.
And yet, there’s Molly Ivins whispering in my ear:”It’s hard to convince people that you’re killing them for their own good.”
Bad subject, I think I can’t solve it.
General Winfield Stuck
@libarbarian:
Because first of all, you send troops to a house THAT YOU THINK might be harboring combatants, you will find out quickly if you were right, and avoid killing civilians for no reason. Second, it gives the opportunity at least for civilians to clear out of the area if there are combatants in the house.
As it stands now, some guy in the states operating one of these drones receives intelligence of unknown certainty that maybe he is shooting at bad guys and then does it. And everyone inside dies and very maybe close by neighbors as well, regardless of any other factor that could mitigate the situation so innocents survive.
To send troops to do this work is not risk free, which is my entire point. When you make wars like this one, of largely risk free it’s tends to be self perpetuating, And if you care about winning insurgent wars, which includes winning large doses of Hearts and Minds of the populace, it seems incumbent to do everything in your power to not lose any more hearts and any more minds. Even if that makes your side more vulnerable to casualties.
You may not agree, but “incredulity”, not hardly.
And then there is Cole’s point of killing AQ Leaders that can and will be replaced likely before the day is done.
Thadeus Horne
@Chuck Butcher: That’s the damn question, ain’t it,Chuck. What’s the fuckin’ answer? I don’t know.
General Winfield Stuck
Think of it this way. We don’t like murderers, or shouldn’t, whether they are American citizens, or not. Killers are killers. What if we employed the same tactics on say a bunch of gang members who have gone on a killing spree, or even a very dangerous individual we think we have cornered in a house, but aren’t entirely sure, and are not sure whether he or she is holed up with innocent women and children.
And say it is fairly certain that if you don’t catch or kill this person(s) sooner rather than later he will kill again, and maybe lots. So you just decide to bomb it with a drone, you know, just to make sure, just in case, because you do have some intelligence he is there. If you get him great, if he’s not there then you can render your resources elsewhere for the hunt. Say he is or isn’t there and you kill a family of children and women. What did you gain or lose by doing it this way? You may or may not have saved a cops life, but ending up losing what you are trying to preserve, which is the whole idea of policing whether it be military in a foreign state, or Detroit. These folks are paid to take the risk, civilians are not.
But we don’t consider that when it’s in a foreign country with the “war” label on it. Liberals have been vehement since 2002 about using the word “war” that the neocons used to justify all sorts of horrid shit and that anywhere can be a battle field, so it’s ok to do illegal or drastic stuff, even on our own soil with eavesdropping and the like. But some now say, because it’s a war, these drone tactics don’t seem that different than other wars.. Using the term war, to justify, cuts both ways.
The only time I remember such drastic measures was in Philly when cops fire bombed a house with some cult nut in it, that ended up burning down an entire block. And the outrage was deafening. And then there was WACO, and who knows what really happened there. They didn’t drop a smart bomb on it though.
scudbucket
@Leelee for Obama:
Bad subject, I think I can’t solve it.
Fair enough. But I will throw this in too FWIW: Bush (and Donald ‘We will annihilate nations’ Rumsfeld, Dick ‘one percent doctrine’ Cheney, Pearle, Wolfy, and all the rest) entered into the Afghan Trap with carpet bombs and righteous anger. They fucked things up probably beyond repair, and not just because Bush decided he ‘just wasn’t that interested’ in finding Bin Laden. Obama then inherits this clusterfuck, recognizes that the locals have been radicalized by all the violence, and are swarming the AQ recruitment centers. It’s a pretty pickle, one which – in my estimation – was calculated by the neocons precisely to hamstring the next president into keeping troops there. (Remember – who was it, Pearle? – saying that we needed a fifty year time line in Iraq?) It turns out Obama had already decided to fight to the bitter end – which meant bankruptcy for the Soviets – but so be it. One thing I found disturbing in Cole’s post was that drone attacks in Pak. have increased under Obama. This really is becoming his war.
morzer
If Mexico even blinks at us, we can immediately crush all resistance by deploying the ultimate weapon. We have, after all, the only known instance of Michelle Bachmann….
Chuck Butcher
@Kevin Phillips Bong:
Yes, but the real meat to the equation isn’t what don’t you like, it is what do you propose to replace it with? People seem to have gotten the impression that warfare can be waged like some damn video game, guess what the fuck.
Chuck Butcher
Re Pakistan drones, US troops aren’t allowed in country.
Joel
@Cassidy: I agree. There’s not much good to be said about war, although it is at times necessary. The necessity of our current wars is disputable. The best time to debate the necessity of these wars (certainly the one in Iraq) was before we engaged in them.
That said, I think it’s an entirely different kettle of fish than terrorism.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Cassidy:
Sorry, no sale. Civilians are either being killed, or they are not. If civilians are being killed by machines and bombs, that is terrorism. The “collateral damage” smokescreen is lie that the perpetrators are telling themselves.
The lies that the bombers tell themselves don’t matter. If you are the bombed civilian, it’s terrorism. Period.
You and I are not going to agree on this. Ever. Others can judge our assertions and decide for themselves.
If you are standing next to the body parts of your spouse, child, or brother, my argument that I accidentally killed him because I was aiming for someone else isn’t going to sway you.
Well, you, it might. But that says a lot about you. Me, it would not.
Mnemosyne
IIRC … one. There were injuries, but the number of deaths that led to the incursion was exactly one.
Yutsano
@Chuck Butcher: I’d also make the case the Pakistani drones are illegal, although it wouldn’t shock me if the Paki government has a tacit agreement to allow the CIA drones in there. It wouldn’t shock me if we were acting unilaterally there, but I think the Paki government would be making even more of a public stink than they are if that were the case.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@General Winfield Stuck:
Yes, you are talking about the MOVE incident.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
If I am president, I stop the drone attacks tomorrow.
Then I work on a plan B. I am not going to preside over a military model that sends robotic machines into other peoples’ lands to kill them, and calls it progress.
I am close to being an Obamabot, but I don’t approve of this tactic, at all, and never will.
Leelee for Obama
@scudbucket: The setting up of the next President was a given. They were hoping for one of their own, so that there would be little chance that it would end in Iraq anytime soon-so this ending of our Iraq engagement is not to their liking, so that’s a kind of win. Afghanistan, once again, is different. We abandoned them when we had “friends” there at the end of the Soviet occupation, and the civil war continued apace until the Taliban took control. We didn’t “buy” Bin Laden’s head on a platter, or kill him when we should have, late Bush I, Clinton, early Bush II, and so 9/11 gave the neo-cons their new Pearl Harbor and they began to live out their wet dream.
The Afghan War, and by proximity, the Pakistan engagement, were Obama’s before he was elected. He never pulled a punch about that. If it’s ever to end, it must either be ended by just leaving, which isn’t gonna happen, or it must be prosecuted as if we plan to succeed and not prolong it into endless future time. As I’ve been trying to say, I don’t know what’s right. I hate that our soldiers and Marines will be killed, I hate that innocent civilians will be killed. But, extremists are like a cancer on the world, and chemo-therapy sometimes kills the host. Awful, but true.
General Winfield Stuck
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
yes, that was it.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Yes, awful. Awful, in the sense that you have basically declared that some people are disposable. Namely, the ones that get in the way.
That is the true nature of the ‘collateral damage’ argument. That phrase is a disgusting euphemism for ‘we regret that you got in our way and we killed you.’
Tsulagi
Yep.
Wrong. Well, unless you want to class every war or use of military force as terrorism. During “The Good War,” WWII, there were an estimated 35M+ civilian deaths. Unknown number of injured. Damn that purveyor of global terrorism, FDR!
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Nope. I am talking about aerial warfare waged on civilians. Not “every war or use of military force,” which is quite a gross distance from what I said.
And WRT WWII, yes, I am including WWII and the mass bombing raids on civilians, “good war” or not. The purpose of those raids was to kill civilians and demoralize populations by the use of terrorism, whether it was done by Axis, or Allied, powers.
I am not a subscriber to Ends Justify Means views of morality.
Tsulagi
Wrong again if you’re referring to UAV use over Pakistan. Well, unless you have an inside line with Obama and he’s told you that’s his directive. I believe the president when he says AQ and Taliban are targeted, not civilians. Why do you call President Obama a liar?
Leelee for Obama
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: So, what would have been our best alternative after January 20, 2009? I hate being on this side of the argument, but it seems that if we had just left both countries after Obama took office, we would have needed to build actual and virtual walls around them to prevent major regional chaos. Not possible, I think. And, to be honest, I could have been part of the collateral damage on 9/11, because I used to work down there and traveled back and forth to my NJ apartment through the WTC. I moved away before it happened, but that was kismet, like most of life. So, I do understand the idea of how much “collateral damage” sucks as a construct.
The question here is not whether war will solve the problem. The question is, what will? If the Taliban comes back to power in Afghanistan, will the Afghan civilians be better off, or will their suffering just not be our fault? And isn’t that fault just a matter of degree?
Cassidy
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: Whatever. You’re still wrong. Civilian deaths in war does not equal terrorism. The direct targeting of civilians does, but that isn’t what happens here. So, very simply, you are wrong. Our [country’s] drone attacks are not terrorism.
Cassidy
We all are. Welcome to reality.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Tsulagi:
He’s wrong. Killed civilians are dead, whether they were targeted or not. Apparently we have a killing technology that cannot always distinguish between targets and non-targets. That fact makes its use unacceptable to me. That fact makes its use no better than deliberately targeting civilians.
It is as pure a case of Ends Justify Means logic and morality as I can possibly imagine.
Ends do not justify means, for me. I consider the view incongruent with a moral civilization.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Cassidy:
As I said, we will never agree on this. I don’t care what you think, I know your arguments from the past. I have no respect for them.
But others can read and judge for themselves. In time, I believe that the view of aerial warfare that kills civilians will be seen as immoral and not consistent with a just view of civilization. And of course, the “whoops, our machine isn’t perfect” argument is useless. It would be more honest to just say, we are going to kill civilians, and we don’t care. Because, saying we do, and doing it anyway, is not just dishonest, it’s evil.
By the way, how much safer do you feel at night knowing that those drones are over there killing civilians by accident? Is it worth it to you? If so, good for you. It’s not for me. I would rather have the additional risk and take my chances. I don’t consider my life worth more than the life of some poor Afghani who gets in the way of our clever machines, enough to make this Faustian bargain.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@Cassidy: This. And again, just so the terms being discussed are clear. UAVs are not robotic, they are remotely piloted. Any weapon that comes off of my aircraft is being released by me and guided by my sensor operator. And terrorism, by definition, is the intentional targeting of civilians to achieve ends not available through the political process. Accidental noncombatant deaths in pursuit of military goals are tragic, but not terrorism.
Tsulagi
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Then we will agree to disagree. I’m not anti-war, but certainly not pro-war. Until everyone on the planet evolves a few clicks up the evolutionary ladder there will be times when force is necessary.
France had at least 250k civilian deaths during the Allies offensive against the occupying Germans. There was aerial bombardment too. Maybe some would have preferred to have left Nazi Germany in control of most of Europe to avoid civilian death in France and elsewhere. Wouldn’t have been my choice.
There will always be civilian deaths during war regardless of how careful it’s waged. I agree with Obama that our action in AF-PAK is necessary. You may not.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Cassidy:
I don’t know whether your “we all are” assertion makes any sense. My gut tells me that it doesn’t, but it’s so hyperbolic that I am having trouble processing it. Your views on life in these situations leaves me cold, and always have. I think you are dishonest, with me and with yourself. But that’s another story.
However, I do know this: I do not have a right, nor can I confer upon others the right, to decide which innocent people are disposable in this situation, and which are not. I don’t take that responsibility, and I don’t give it to you, or others.
If somebody asks me if I want drones killing civilians in foreign countries supposedly to make me “safer,” my answer is simple:
Hell no. Hell no. Come up with something better to make me safer.
Chuck Butcher
If being bombed and shot at doesn’t involve some measure of fear or terror then I’m pretty deluded. That would make any exercise in warfare equal terror. Over the years we’ve made efforts to reduce the levels of unmitigated terror, see gas, bio-agents, things like hollow point bullets. Reduce, not eliminate, the entire object is to make opposition more fearful than surrender. Goddam, that is how it goes when that trigger gets pulled.
If you figure AQ should get left alone, then you do, if not then propose something. It is laughable to propose that you’re going to kill or capture people who hide among “civilians” without that nasty collateral damage.
General Winfield Stuck
@Kevin Phillips Bong:
I do not believe what we are doing with drones is terrorism, though wrong and counterproductive in the long run. But I do believe it is assassination, and not in the heat of battle.
called by any other name.
Cassidy
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Eh. I could give a shit to be honest. Your positions are naive and not grounded in any kind of reality.
Personally, I have something to go home to and nothing is getting in my way. Doesn’t bother me at all really. They are a tool. And tragically, warfare involves casualties, be it friends of mine (which I’ve experienced), civilians (some of whom I’ve treated), and possibly myself (not today).
Kevin Phillips Bong
@General Winfield Stuck: And here is the grey area. How does one conduct “legal” warfare with a non-state actor like the Taliban or AQ? Is eliminating insurgents during a counterinsurgency assassination? If you can decrease the overall violence and instability in a region by putting a Hellfire through Baitullah Mehsud’s torso is that warfare or assassination or murder? No easy answers I’m afraid, and all I can do is be as sure as I possibly can that I’m taking out the correct target and nothing else around it. And you may be right, this all may be wrong and counterproductive in hindsight, although remote airstrikes have been highly successful at disrupting Taliban and AQ operations across the Af/Pak border.
Cassidy
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: It’s a very simple phrase. We are all disposable. Your’e not special. I’m not special. the world doesn’t stop moving when we are sick, or suffer a personal tragedy, or can’t get our significant other to give us a blowjob. And someone, somewhere (I’m willing to bet a lot) would happily throw your life away as an ends to a means. Hell, it might be me, depending on the situation.
Your attempts at pop psychology aside, I’m very honest. I have no problems admitting that I am no more or no less special than any other life. I just happen to be a better shot.
Cassidy
@Kevin Phillips Bong: It’s definately not murder.
General Winfield Stuck
@Kevin Phillips Bong:
I believe this, and know that you are a soldier doing your job.
But I cannot condone the policy. From a former soldier myself.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@Cassidy: I prefer to think not, but then I’m the one who has to live with it. Isn’t it great that we live in a place with such a vibrant rainbow of opinions?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Nice try, but putting words in my mouth is never a good idea unless I wrote them.
Germany was going to lose the war without deliberatley targeting civilian populations that posed no military threat. The Dresden and Tokyo firebombings are good examples. I grew up with parents and grandparents who were in that particular war. My father flew for the Navy in the Pacific theater, for example. I heard the “we saved American lives” arguments at an early age. After 50 or so years of mulling that over, I decided that I can’t see that we saved enough American lives to justify that level of barbarism. I don’t want a life that is protected by that kind of evil bargain.
Nothing I can do about WWII, but I can speak out against drone warfare in my own time.
It’s my opinion that as we sow, so shall we reap. I think that we have created a bellicose nation here, to our own detriment. We have now descended to the level of going nearly 70 years without a declaration of war as called for under the Constitution, to our terrible detriment *… and I think that this fact is directly traceable to our willingness to raise the bar of mechanized warfare to the level of Horoshima and Nagasaki and then stand back, not in horror, but in apparent admiration of our handiwork.
Sorry, but when we are sending machines to kill people, and we have to have the likes of Alberto Gonzales at our back, I think we are in big, big trouble.
Svensker
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Yes, but better thousands of Them should die, rather than one of Us be inconvenienced.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@General Winfield Stuck: My personal belief is that given the option of a job and a family and some education most of these people would happily stop fighting. But how do we implement this policy in a country that can barely have an intelligent discussion about relatively benign subjects like health care and financial regulation. I’m glad I’m not in charge right now.
Cassidy
@Kevin Phillips Bong: Well, reconciling the committing of a homicide, regardless of justification, is something you have to reconcile for yourself. As an Airman/ Soldier, you’re doing your job and firing at a legitimate military target. But, murder is a distinctly criminal act and firing weapons at a military target is not a criminal act.
Leelee for Obama
@Svensker: I want it understood that I, in no way, believe what you wrote. It is not better that I not be inconvenienced, at the cost of any life. Since you referenced Angus’ reference to me, I just want to make sure you know that your statement doesn’t reflect what I think. Just to be as clear as mud.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
That’s your opinion, I do not share it.
A good reason for that is that you take the opinions of others, who happen not to agree with you, and call them names like “pop psychology.” Do you think that is a worthy response?
I have no idea what pop psychology holds, I don’t check with others before deciding what I think about something. In any case, your opinion is of no value to me, I don’t like you, and I don’t respect you, at all.
You are never going to convince me that good citizenship requires me to ask the government to send machines to kill innocent people, to keep me safe. That’s something you would approve of, which is just another reason why I would never agree to it.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Svensker:
Well, I don’t need the hyperbole to hold the idea together.
It is not better that we have to kill one of them (innocent civilians), to make me safer. I don’t want that safety. At all.
Tsulagi
What is the deal with drones? Not just you but apparently also a few others? They are flown by pilots. Humans. Not trigger happy pilots either. When a target is believed confirmed, they must get authority to release weapons.
Is it the technology? So should we be using abacus’s instead of computers because PCs have less of a soul? Whether someone is killed by a 9kg Hellfire warhead or by a soldier’s hand, they are still dead.
gex
@Leelee for Obama: It is not good for Americans, our ideals, or our souls to make it relatively easy and mindless to just go kill a bunch of people with no risk to ourselves. I should think that would be obvious. Just look at how little many Americans care about the actual boots on the ground wars we have been conducting for the last 6-8 years because they don’t have any skin in the game.
Cassidy
I am really against going and playing in traffic.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@Cassidy: Well, let’s face it, in conjunction with the JTAC on the ground I’m ending these dudes. They were planting IEDs or shooting at our guys or whatever, but I’m making them dead, so it all boils down to whether your personal opinion is that using military means to disrupt an insurgency or terrorist organizations is a valid use of national power. I happen to believe that in certain circumstances it is, so I deal with it. But those who don’t are certainly entitled to their opinion, and they sometimes stand out at the front gate and tell me so. They’re wrong, but I’m glad they get to stand there.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Cassidy:
Hilarious, but knowing you as I do, I don’t believe you.
SGEW
[Just thought I’d drop these lines into this thread. Seemed relevant.]
“The concept of a ‘just war’ [is that a] war is justified only when certain conditions [are] met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”
“We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified . . . . To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
“War itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.”
“Even as we make difficult decisions about going to war, we must also think clearly about how we fight it . . . . Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct . . . . We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend.”
“[But] we are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best of intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.”
(cf.)
Svensker
@Leelee for Obama:
I understand that and didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I’m glad you don’t feel that way.
But I see that we reacted to the death of some 3000 of our people by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, plus all the Afghanis we’ve killed, now all the Pakistanis. I have two close family members who have said that we should just “wipe out” all Muslims. I just can’t comprehend it. What would the world be like if they reacted to our killing of their innocents as we have reacted?
The older I get, the more Quaker I become. There is no WAY to peace: peace IS the way.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@gex: Read P.W. Singer’s Wired for War. Best discussion of the “unmanned” warfare issue I’ve seen.
agorabum
That’s the guy who crashed the White House dinner, right?
A few civilian casualties is a small price to pay for ensuring no breaches of the villiager’s protocols. Huzzah for America.
Cassidy
heh
mey
Yes, John, yeeessss, embrace your inner Dirty Fucking Hippie…
AngusTheGodOfMeat
It is my opinion that it is not. If the bargain includes the killing of innocent civilians just because there is no convenient way to prevent doing so, then I do not hold it to be a valid use of national power. I do not approve of it, and I don’t want the supposed “benefit” being tied to that use of power. I don’t approve of the use of terrorism to combat terrorism. The fact that the killing machines are not aimed at civilians deliberately does not excuse what I consider to be the immoral use of the machines. Either get better machines that don’t do that, or get rid of the machines. That’s the only policy I approve of, and no other.
terry chay
This was the definitive reporting:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer
or…
http://www.xkcd.com/652/
Kevin Phillips Bong
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: You’re fixated on the machine aspect of things to the detriment of your argument. Trust me, if we sent a couple MH-47s full of Delta guys over there every time we identified a target, how many noncombatants would you think get shot when they kick down the door? Or when they come running to the sound of a helicopter with their family’s AK-47? My estimate is about the same amount that die during these very precise airstrikes. You’re certainly entitled to oppose the whole counterinsurgency process, but the machines aren’t why there are civilians getting killed. There’s no completely clean way to do this.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@SGEW:
Yes, it was a fine speech. Unfortunately, the president, who I generally support enthusiastically, has not deigned to address the point being addressed here.
I don’t agree that drone warfare that kills civilians is worthy of being included in the phrase “the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Nope. I am talking about mechanized warfare, but whether the machines are manned, or not …. unless you know of some other context in which civilians are going to be killed literally out of the blue by an unseen weaponry, or by force against which they have no defense? I am fixated on the moral aspect of this kind of force, no matter how it is brought to bear.
Your assertion is false.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: So if I follow you, it’s morally OK to send the Delta guys and have them waste the same civilians in pursuit of the target because they’re on the ground with guns?
Leelee for Obama
@Svensker: I know people who think exactly the same thing. They are directly descended from the people who said:”The only good Indian, is a dead Indian.” or the famous: “Nits grow into lice.” The aftermath of 9/1 gave birth to invading Afghanistan, that’s true. With all the arguments throughout this thread, there was a context there, not just a faux-pretext. Iraq was facilitated using 9/11, but by 2003, many were not on board for that reason, and many were not on board at all. The deaths in Iraq are on the heads of the liars, even though Heschel’s axiom that in a democracy some are accountable but all are responsible is the truth, we all bear the responsibility. We also bear the burden of trying to curtail unnecessary deaths, ours and theirs.
I want the Afghans and Iraqis to have a chance at the kinds of lives they want. We have fucked it up, and will likely do so some more. At least, under this administration, I believe they are trying to get it right. I can only hope.
SGEW
Civilian casualties during eight years of conflict in Vietnam: 2,000,000+
Civilian casualties during eight years of conflict in Afghanistan: <50,000
“Let us focus on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.” – J. F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963 (cf.) (a few months later, President Kennedy characterized the war in Vietnam as “their war,” for the Vietnamese people themselves to “win or lose” (cf.); two months later he was assassinated)
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Kevin Phillips Bong:
I don’t think that a valid comparison can be drawn between ground warfare against assumed immediate targets, and mechanized aerial warfare that cannot distinguish between a military target and a civilian who is not a target.
I think that it is an inapt comparison, and that it lends itself to the entire Ends Justify Means nature of the justification for this drone warfare, and aerial warfare in general.
Tsulagi
And if a combat medic is a better shot than you, you’re in deep shit. J/k
Family units are calling me to join in the holiday stuff. I’m out. So peace on Earth, good will toward men and all that.
Cassidy
Hey, the will to survive transcends all MOS’s.
These drones are piloted by people. It’s not like we’ve uploaded a picture into a hard drive and said “go kill it”.
General Winfield Stuck
@Kevin Phillips Bong:
I don’t foresee any scenario as being free of civilian casualties. However, by sending troops, if you believe your enemy is at some location offers the possibillty that either you are wrong about combatants being there along with civilians, and the intelligence was wrong, and that civilians have some possibility of getting out of the way.
With a Hellfire from a drone, everyone dies, no exceptions, except your soldiers, regardless of the reality of the presence, or not, of the enemy. And if it’s a house or place of dwelling, the likelyhood of civilians being inside is pretty high.
Chuck Butcher
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
With a pretty good hunting rifle I can blow you out of your socks at 600 yds, you will lie on the ground dead or dying before the sound of the shot reaches you or your neighbors. You are a dumbass convinced of some moral superiority that does not exist in the world of warfare. Defend against? That is the entire basis of military training, that your opponent dies and not you and your squad. You act as though this is a game of fucking tag.
(most of basic is about doing what is unnatural)
Kevin Phillips Bong
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: OK, again you’re fixating on the machine thing. When we got Mehsud we knew it was him through various sources. When we take IED emplacers we watch them put the device in the ground or otherwise reveal themselves as such. I’m not sure you fully understand the process so let me clarify a bit. We don’t chuck a missile at some people we hope are targets and say “oops” if they aren’t. Noncombatant casualties are generally in the vicinity of very high value targets, or approach the target during the weapon’s time of fall. I guarantee anyone in the path of a special operations raid is going to get killed, so I’m not sure how that is any more acceptable to you than what I’ve stated above.
SGEW
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: I believe it is under the heading “the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason,” as well as a alleged failure (due to said imperfections) of “whenever possible, civilians are [to be] spared from violence” (therefore raising the question of what is “possible”). A question of means versus ends (see, e.g., the “collateral damage is not, in fact, terrorism” discussion, above).
Now, this is all within the context of “Just War” theory. Obviously, one can choose to repudiate the basic concept that war can ever be “just”; this is a tremendously respectable philosophical position to take (with some very illustrious adherents!), and I will never tell you that you are “wrong.”
But, in all seriousness, you cannot expect the Commander-in-Chief of the largest military in the world to be a doctrinal pacifist. I’m just counting my blessings that he’s a sophisticated student of political philosophy, and is (apparently) painfully aware of the inherent contradictions; a serious Niebuhrian thinker at the top of the command structure is probably the best option one could ask for. At this point. So far.
Leelee for Obama
Amen, SGEW.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@General Winfield Stuck: I agree, and that’s what makes it so tough. Do you take the time to chopper in the team and risk losing the target? Do you risk them kicking down the door and capping the inhabitants of the house only to find Dad in the back room and not Mehsud? Fog of war stuff, and it’s all things that are weighed and evaluated. We’re generally very careful about inhabitants of unknown dwellings, but war is a very messy business and the only way to make sure none of the wrong people get killed is to pack it up and go home. Which I fervently hope we can do as soon as possible.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
So your argument is that if a squad is being protected because the drone does the work, then the civilian deaths are just regrettable but acceptable?
Good for you. I don’t agree, and I haven’t called you any names Chuck, and I am not going to take that from you.
Further, I am not going to agree that a drone is the moral equivalent of a soldier with a powerful rifle. If I am civilian looking at the remains of my relatives that your drone just blasted away, the fact that some country sent a machine operated by a man ten thousand miles away, which I never saw, never imagined would do this, couldn’t hear or see, to kill my relatives is not the same as having casualties in a ground war with soldiers, and people fighting people they can see.
That’s why the thread is here, and why the distinctions are being made. Making those distinctions and making judgments about them does not make me a dumbass because I happen to disagree with you.
General Winfield Stuck
And in the context of a just war against the Taliban and AQ, I do not have a problem with using drones to target, say a column of men carrying heavy weaponery out in the open, where they can easily be identified as “the enemy”, or in a military style camp.
It is the targeting of structures where civilians have a high likelyhood of being present, and based on various types of third party intelligence, that may or may not be accurate. And either way, for all the reasons I stated previously in this thread, it is not worth it, or right, to pull the trigger of a drone circling above.
And the moral part, is not only the high likelyhood of killing civilians where a combatant is hiding amongst them, it goes deeper into the accepted philosophy of warfare, that though sometimes it is necessary, do we continue to do it with technology and no risk to us, that on it’s face leads in the direction of making war where we might not have, and unsound rationalizations, given all the elements and calculations of cost in blood and treasure. Especially blood.
That calculation has, and does, make less wars than more, IMHO.. Technology though, has fucked the historical formula all to hell, and promises more of the same.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
It is, although I am not sure that is (or isn’t) tenable. It’s a far tougher question than the one I am addressing.
The context shifting of “drone warfare” into “warfare in general” is, I think, totally dishonest. It’s a way to paper over the fissures in the moral conundrums here, when I think the right thing to do is to peel off the paper and look into the fissures as deeply as possible.
I am generally not in favor of war unless it is justifiable beyond doubt. I don’t happen to think that either of our current wars meets that test, but that doesn’t mean that no war would meet that test.
SGEW
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Nothing is justifiable beyond doubt. Nothing. Ever.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@General Winfield Stuck: Unquestionably. That’s why counterinsurgency/counterterrorism is such a difficult mission. What do you do if your target is always surrounded by his family? The problem with insurgents is they look like everyone else in the population and are generally familiar enough with their own terrain not to get caught carting a recoilless rifle up an unconcealed path to their compound. All of it sucks, and as soon as someone comes up with the killer app for it, he’ll get to hang out with Petraeus and Odierno to his heart’s content.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Of course not, and in all seriousness, disapproval of a military tactic is not a gateway drug to doctrinal pacifism. Unless …. the advocates insist that one either approves of anything that can be kept dry under the umbrella of Warfare, or must disapprove of all warfare.
In that case, I disapprove of all warfare, because I don’t want war waged by people who think like that.
In the hypothetical, of course. Surely nobody here would make that kind of argument?
Kevin Phillips Bong
Let me close by stating how much I enjoy this blog and the commentariat therein. I’m headed to the girlfriend’s house to do things that are still illegal in parts of the South and Utah. Enjoy your Friday evening all.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@SGEW:
Yes, I am rather aware of that. I don’t see how that bromide applies here.
Nobody is talking about removing all doubt. We are talking about actual, countable innocent casualties. If the question comes to me, as a citizen, how many of those casualties will you accept in return for a vague and rather undefined improvement to your safety, when the casualties are inflicted by an impersonal and mechanized force that kills people who never see the force coming and probably won’t know what him them, then my answer is, zero. Invent something else, I don’t approve of this, no matter how many chest-thumping soldiers protest.
Let me have another way to get safety, because this isn’t morally acceptable. In fact, this is so bad that when they tell me I am getting safety by doing this, I frankly don’t trust their judgment to know whether I am or not. I have the same perception of this that I had about the WMD arguments in the runup to the Iraq war. It all seemed so simple on paper. Except, it was all a lie. I don’t owe the people who took us down that road any respect now. I don’t believe this argument now any more than I believed Dick Cheney then.
Chuck Butcher
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
apologies for the name calling
SGEW
And as to drones, in general, I am against them. Of course.
But they are better than carpet bombing (see Vietnam). Or barrages of “smart” missiles (see Iraq, I and II). Which isn’t saying much, but it’s worth saying.
Are they better than “boots on the ground,” or manned air strikes? I think not, probably (for many of the reasons listed in this thread, and elsewhere), and that they very well may be a violation of the “rules” of war and a standing executive order prohibiting assassination. For what that’s worth (which is very little, sigh).
But we’re not talking about the firebombing campaigns of WWII, napalming jungles, or “shock and awe” (which could have been technically characterized as terrorism, by the way). There are colorable arguments on both sides of drone strikes, and there is a legitimate debate. Yes, ethics and morality are part of the discussion (as they should always be): but I hope that one can see that it is a much more nuanced debate than whether or not we should be, say, indiscriminately slaughtering entire villages, or systematically torturing detainees to death, as we were doing not-so-very long ago. In other words, I do not believe that supporting drone strikes against Al-Qaeda or Taliban personnel means that one has made an egregiously unethical decision.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Chuck Butcher:
You are one of the best posters here, Chuck. I appreciate your views and have great respect for you even when we disagree.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@SGEW: Actually, our results vs. those of manned airstrikes would surprise you. OK, I’m out.
Chuck Butcher
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Then you have exactly none of such casualties that I know of. You have claims of such and as you’ve had pointed out to you, the innocent part is open to question due to the limited nature of the ordinance. Dead is dead, or mutilated is mutilated whether the operative factor is a bullet at close range or a remotely flown drone. Large numbers of soldiers multiplies the error factor versus one pilot and one round.
You want to explain to a soldier’s family that he was killed in search of your morality of being up close and personal? If someone manages to start firing from the cover of a building, the response is to put an HE round through it, not have a stand off while other forces are mustered to kill you from behind. You are searching for nice clean solutions to something chaotic and extremely messy and deadly and seem to be willing to spend other people’s lives in that endeavor. I am not.
I don’t make a measure of whose life is worth more, I do make a measure of what I’d be willing to ask someone to spend their life for. I cannot tell you what your measure ought to be, I’d vastly prefer that pacifism worked but it doesn’t.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Sorry, but I can’t accept the idea that somebody supporting drone warfare can say that my opposition to it is “searching for a nice, clean solution.” What the hell is drone warfare if not a mechanized “nice, clean solution?” And if it’s so nice and clean, why is this thread here and why are the questions being raised?
I’m not looking for a solution. I’m saying that if drone warfare is the solution, then we are attacking the wrong problem. See the article I link to below for more on that.
As for the statement you make about casualties, this is typical of the stories out there, and there is grist for everyone’s position on this, I guess it just depends on whose figures you think are the most accurate.
OriGuy
@Yutsano:
Not so. The CIA has been the outfit sending Predators into Pakistan. They were contracting with Xe (formerly Blackwater) to load the missiles onto the drones.
scudbucket
@SGEW:
This is sort of an amazing comment, tossing about – like a boat in choppy water! – from pragmatics and efficacy to moral ambiguities, all rudderlessly gooped up into a string of paragraphs.
But let me try to state what I take your claim here to be (please, tell me if I’m wrong): Since drones are less destructive than previous methods of warfare, they are ethically justifiable. That’s the nuance?
Chuck Butcher
@scudbucket:
I won’t answer for someone else, but here’s this – I do not blithely accept collateral damages, human or otherwise. I do accept that they are inevitible in warfare. Best practices is to minimize them and in a drone versus ground troops or manned air assault the drone wins out. Manned aircraft are fast movers, even fairly slow units move fast to stay in flight, drones are capable of much slower airspeeds and as such easier to target reliably, not to mention there is no pilot worrying about missles or other. Ground troops means more triggers, more bullets, more errors not to mention unit casualties.
There seems to be opinion that drones are somehow lacking in judgement versus other methodologies. Intelligence is what it is and as soon as doors start getting kicked in it becomes about combat, not judgement. There are no uniforms, there is no male/female/adult qualification for combatant. A trooper is going to (rightly) assume that mere presence means probable danger and four pounds of trigger pull isn’t much. Things move very quickly and mistakes are fatal to somebody. A remote operator has the luxury of time and distance – a luxury to ask questions and make judgements.
Again, Pakistan does not allow ground troops and is pretty particular about manned aircraft. Options are somewhat limited unless you propose a Bushian invasion. The Pakistanis are, so far, tolerating the drones.
Inadvertant casualties are down considerably over the past decades. That certainly doesn’t change the rightness or wrongness of it, but it is a measure of our concern that it is so.
Chuck Butcher
Morality would be an odd word to toss around in a discussion of warfare considering that it is an exercise in destruction and slaughter. Ethical is damn near as problematic, considering the exercise. If you allow for what warfare is and apply ethics they suddenly become very situational in nature and an exercise in pragmatism. A death is just that, now you are going to apply ethics to it, that puts it in the situational mode and because you have accepted the fact of death it becomes qute pragmatic. Complaining that this is so in the matter of warfare would seem to ignore the very nature of what you’re trying to apply the term to.
We have decided that certain ethics apply, we don’t accept the wounds caused by hollow points, we don’t accept gas, bio-agents or other “non-discriminate” weapons within “ethics.” The difference between a jacketed hardball round and a hollow point is the severity of the wound, so I suppose that is ethics, but look at what you’re discussing. It is in this context that an argument is being raised about an on board or distant pilot? As ethics?
Mnemosyne
@Chuck Butcher:
I think it is, and I think people are saying that having an on-board or distant pilot is the same thing, because neither pilot can see who’s being bombed. At least in theory, a human being on the ground with a gun would be able to recognize that a 3-year-old running around is not a danger to them, but a pilot can’t even see that the toddler is there.
Considering that the US has bombed at least five wedding parties that we know of, people have good reason to be wary of declarations that pilots just have to trust the intelligence. Clearly, the intelligence is wrong often enough that remote bombing is unethical.
(Alternet will pop an ad up on you with that first link. Sorry about that.)
Yutsano
@OriGuy: Hence my caveat, and thank you for the clarification. I thought the CIA operated their program in the context of military control. The fact that they don’t disturbs me even more.
@Kevin Phillips Bong: Pictures or it never happened. :)
scudbucket
@Chuck Butcher:
Thanks for the response. ANd just to clear one thing up, the incredulity I expressed above had nothing to do with drones, but rather the words ‘ethical’ and ‘nuanced’. From a tactical POV, I have no objection to drones, or any other particular military tactic or strategy. I believe what you are saying: that ground troops could result in higher loss of life. I trust that military commanders are making the best decisions given their objectives.
It’s the objectives that I have a problem with. Upthread, an argument was made that if a military strike predictably kills civilians as collateral damage but is ordered under the cover of a Directive or Declaration, that action doesn’t constitute terrorism. Implied in this is the more subtle point: there is nothing morally or legally wrong with the action. Well, according to the US Code the described action doesconstitute terrorism (or it did as of 2007).
More importantly, the action is quite clearly immoral. Any action in which the stated purpose includes taking innocent life is immoral. Now, you (and others) may deny this outright, or you may argue that there is a greater moral good achieved (which I’ll get to below) by killing 2,3,7 AQ commanders (or whatever), but the action is still immoral.
Some might argue that an enemy of the state is a legitimate target for assassination. The legality of this is disputable, but even if we grant that it is legal, the morality of it is clear: it is murder. There is perhaps a utilitarian argument for justifying this (ala the Hitler thought experiment), but that is a dangerous road, because a) more Iraqis and Afghans have already died at our hands than US citizens, even including 9/11 victims, died at theirs, and b) quite clearly it would be immoral to kill the entire population of Afghanistan just to prevent a potential threat from a few hundred terrorists where the amount of damage/injury/death cannot be remotely predicted.
Finally, there is the argument from self-defense, which could justify killing those who have expressed an intention to do us harm, and in fact have in the past. This is just the Bush Doctrine of preventative war, which is on it’s face immoral (and I think illegal in the eyes of the World Court). More specifically, attacks across borders of sovereign nations for the purpose of killing individuals requires a high burden of proof, reaching the level of imminent threat, which none of the cells on the AfPak border have attained.
On top of all these considerations is a pragmatic one: killing civilians radicalizes people to join the terrorists. This is especially true of Muslims in Muslim countries, as was evidenced by the influx of AQ into Iraq after the war started. Our military efforts to combat terrorism through a policy of even selective targeting of highly prized AQ leaders is self-defeating.
What would I propose? Investigate and prosecute terrorism like the crime that it is, stay vigilant regarding cells that pop up in locations where they can be apprehended, and leave Iraq and Afghanistan (and all those dreams of pipelines and free oil). They don’t hate us because of our freedoms, they hate us because we keep fucking around in their countries and politics.
scudbucket
@ Chuck Butcher: You know, I just realized that I’m writing this like I’m arguing with you, which I’m not. I don’t even know your views of all this. It’s more of a response to many comments upthread.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
How about this: we bomb a house in Pakistan to kill a legit ‘target’ that it turns out was not there but we do kill off a bunch of innocents and leave a few people alive but injured. Move forward fifteen years or so and suddenly we are facing the results of another 9-11 type of attack but this one was led by the survivors of this attack and their reasoning behind the attack is revenge for the
murder ofcollateral damage to their family and friends fifteen years earlier. Let’s say this attack they made killed some of your friends or family.Any thoughts? I am asking this because IMO this is the logical extension of the ‘war’ we are fighting, it will never end with the way we are ‘fighting’ it.
Wash, Rinse & Repeat, that’s all we got. Oh, and our freedom fighters are their terrorists and vice versa. Also.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
As if more reason were needed, or evidence required, especially in a place like Balloon Juice where we have just spent 5 years hammering on the core dishonesties of the “War on Terror,” and the bellicose policies that it has spawned, and the futilities of that “war”, and the grotesque manipulations and demagogueries that are associated with it …..
This. This is just another on my list of 673 reasons why I simply don’t believe these people when they tell me how wonderful their new extra-constitutional assassination programs are, how cleanly they are killing bad guys and how necessary it is that I accept the “accidental” unwanted casualties, and how much of a “dumbass” I might be for challenging their logic, or how challenges are just examples of “pop psychology,” or any of the other myriad lies and manipulations they’ve worked on us for lo these many years.
I’d have to be crazy to believe their shit any more. Hell, even the crazy people who invented the whole warmachine approach represented here are now going on television and telling us that we are less safe today because they aren’t still in charge.
I didn’t believe them in 2002. I didn’t believe them in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and I don’t believe them in 2009. They appear to be a bunch of amoral, treacherous liars who will say and do anything to prop up their war machine and run their protection racket.
Asking me to just swallow their evil suggestion that if they accidentally kill the wrong people, it’s just the price we have to pay for freedom? That’s so insulting that there aren’t even words for it. That’s the same crap they said about torture, about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, about the screening of phone and internet traffic, about the whole gamut of abuses and monstrosities that we’ve been asked to put up with for the last 7 years.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Really? Well then why do we have a Uniform Code, why do we prosecute our soldiers for unwarranted killing of people in the theater of war?
Your argument sounds a lot like George Bush’s “being president is hard” defense.
If the people who do war are now telling me that morality and ethics are just really difficult in war, that’s a signal to me that we need new people in charge. If this country isn’t about morality and ethics, then what exactly are we defending over there?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Let me revise that to “This argument ….”
I have no opinion on whether or not this argument is embraced by anyone here. The fact that someone recites the question doesn’t mean that he embraces its implications. This is a rhetorical mistake we all make every day around here, and usually it just slips by, but in the context of this thread, I want to be precise.
Cassidy
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): How about this? You’ve got a terrorist in your custody and he knows the location of an imminent attack on civlians…..
We make fun of people for coming up with stupid shit like that.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@Mnemosyne: I’ll jump back in briefly to clear up some things that I think are being misunderstood. I don’t employ weapons against a set of coordinates, just fly over and let the thing go. We watch these targets for minutes, hours, sometimes days before we action against them. Through our sensors we can tell the difference between young men, older men, women and children. We can tell if they’re armed or not. We can see what they’re doing, how they’re behaving. All of this goes into the decision to employ, and I’ve seen plenty of strikes aborted due to the presence of noncombatants or even the lack of knowledge of who else is in the building. That’s really the only time you’re going to get civilian casualties, when there’s a strike against a high value target inside a building where there are other people. And I’m not really sure that a guns-drawn special operations raid is going to be much easier on the inhabitants of that building. Just my two cents from the pilot’s seat.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): This one of the core problems of counterinsurgency, the fact that for every “bad guy” you kill, you probably generate at least one current or future enemy. You can’t kill your way out of an insurgency, it’s much, much more complicated than that.
Chuck Butcher
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
As I noted, we have set some limits and we seem to please some people by using words like ethics and morality. If it pleases you to use such in this context, then it does. As I noted, even “ethics” becomes situational and largly pragmatic in the endeavor of warfare. Once you get to that point claiming an ethical high ground seems pretty limited in effect. I won’t deny you the ability to claim it, I’m just somewhat underwhelmed by doing it.
But then I wasted a large number of bytes arguing that law isn’t moral right here awhile back. I can think of all kinds of pragmatic arguments to support or oppose drones, as soon as you bring some amorphous ethics argument you’ve lost me.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Yes, I bundled a bunch of them in the article I cited upstairs.
This is probably just a personality thing, but ethics arguments are not amorphous to me. They are essential to the formation of right policy. In the field, there is little time for them, but we are not in the field. We are in the planning rooms in Washington. At least, I am. Otherwise, why not just turn the wars, and the country, over to the military people and let them do whatever they want?
Oh wait, we did that under Dick Cheney’s administration. And ended up with drone wars. So, there you go.
Tsulagi
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Angus, let me be the first to say I have zero doubt all your 673 reasons have as much validity and weight as this one you linked to. Who knew there was a clandestine conspiracy afoot reaching the highest levels to always peg the number 30 to Taliban killed in U.S. airstrikes reported by the Pentagon this year?
Good to see that DKos sleuth linked to a really smart operative who provided the meat backing up his work in a post titled Winning the War, 30 Taliban at a Time. Linked news reports providing his datapoint. The top three…
A Greek online paper, Adnkronos, reported 12/07/09 “Up to 30 suspected militants were killed in a NATO airstrike on a Taliban hideout in eastern Afghanistan close to the Pakistani border on Monday.” Umm, they said “up to 30.” That could be anywhere from 1-30. But 30 it must be because we know the secret truth. Greek guys didn’t quote a source for their figure, so let’s catch ISAF Joint Command in their press release. (I’d provide a link, but I’m guessing we’re still on the two-link BJ limit) Shit, they didn’t give a number. Must know we’re on to them.
Second datapoint. A 12/04/09 SF Chronicle story. Now we got ‘em. But, umm, the Chronicle lists their story date as 12/04/2008. Okay, a year is close enough for tinfoil work. Maybe them Pentagon bastards got to them changing the date. Oh, also the article itself says it was Pakistani, not U.S. or NATO airstrikes. Fuck, the Pakis are in on it too!
Third datapoint from the sleuths. A Chinese news story. Good, we know those commies won’t have our back and will set the truth free. Ummm, they’re saying Pakistani ground forces killed 30 (there’s the number!) militants during a 24 hour period bringing the total to 400 during their offensive in Waziristan. Wait, Pakis again? No airstrikes either. Okay, maybe there were some midgets among the Paki troops and they tossed them at the evildoers.
I’m guessing the other datapoints went that way too, but I didn’t bother going on. Thanks for the comedy, Angus. I guess facts really can have a liberal bias.
Cassidy
@Kevin Phillips Bong: Stop debunking the myth of Skynet! If you keep bringing facts into this, people will have to stop thinking that we aren’t just uploading a picture into a hard drive and using some super-secwet facial recognition software to engage targets with.
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Don’t let facts ruin your moralistic naivette. That isn’t what happenned.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
That’s right, Cassidy. We should all subscribe to your version of “what happened.”
Sorry, that ship sailed a long time ago. I don’t care what you think happened. I don’t trust your views or your judgment. I consider you part of the problem, not part of any solution.
Cassidy
Shorter Angus: Blah, blah, blah, I’m better than you on my soapbox…blah, blah, blah, more self righteous bullshit…blah, blah, blah…
Considering I’ve been over here twice now, I think I might have a better perspective. Considering this is the 2nd warzone I’ve deployed to, I might have a better perspective. But hey, I don’t get all my news from blogs and the Daily Show, so myabe you do know something.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Tsulagi:
So, your argument is that we should trust the Pentagon and its disinformation machinery to keep us poor ignorant slobs happy that they are looking out for our safety and stop asking questions.
We should take the advice of the people who lied us into war, got the details all wrong, screwed the pooch in the occupations, tried to keep us off stride when we bitched about Abu Ghraib, locked people up in offshore prisons and threw away the legal keys, ran the hideous intel campaigns, laughed about the missing WMDs when they weren’t found, built a better mousetrap of a psyops operation to keep all the rubes confused here and/or abroad, invented terrorist interventions at home for political reasons, outed a CIA agent to discredit her husband’s criticism of their antics, and on and on and on …. but they are right about this nice clean drone war and that we just have to accept its collateral damage as the price for freedom?
Sorry, no sale. At all. I don’t trust anything they say, and I have no reason to do so, because they have given me no reason to do so. Not even with my most favoritest president in place now, do I have a reason to believe them. So far. I don’t even subscribe to the ludicrous idea that a “war on terror” is anything but a marketing slogan, and can actually create a safe world. At least, not if these potatoheads are running it.
Yes, let the dogs at the SF Chronicle bark at them, and let all the dogs bark at them, they deserve it. And let them figure out a way to convince us that they are to be trusted and know what they are doing, because I am not seeing it.
I really don’t know where you are coming from here, but I hope there is no doubt where I am coming from. I don’t believe in their bullshit or their whacked moral and ethical defenses for it. Period.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Like I said, I don’t want a country run by soldiers. I don’t trust them to have my best interests at heart. I trust them to do what soldiers are trained to do, and do it well, and that’s all. We have civilian control of the military in this country, and I am a civilian, and I assert that that control should be judiciously applied. I don’t want a foreign policy run by the military, and I don’t want a war policy run by the military.
That is my judgment to make as a civilian and as a citizen, and I am making it, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad. When your tour is up, write a book and get a job as a pundit on tv, Cassidy. Your light is being hidden under a bushel here.
Your snide remark above indicates to me that you think that the American people can’t figure out for themselves how to govern their own country. Soldiers deployed to wars right now, if I saw the figures right the other day, are in the 200k+ range. That is one fifteenth of one percent of the American population, isn’t it? I am interested in what they have to say, up to a point, but they are not running the country AFAIC, and won’t as long as I have anything to say about it. Public opinion in this country right now is in the toilet WRT the wars we are fighting, for a reason. And that reason is not that we haven’t all been to your war zone.
Tsulagi
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Simple, I thought in my comment above it was pretty clear. You bought that “30” conspiracy hook, line, and sinker. Willingly and happily. When even a cursory look at their “evidence” would show it to be complete, utter laughable bullshit of the type expected from RSSF Commander EE or the word salad queen. I suggest you work on that habit.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Tsulagi:
I have a habit of not trusting those Pentagon types, Tsu.
I think it’s well advised and if the Pentagon types want me to believe in them, they are going to have to try a lot harder. I don’t believe anything they say about these things. Whether the Kos article has all the facts right or not, frankly, I don’t care. Even if it’s only 25% numerically accurate, I don’t care. The only thing that moves me is evidence that the potatoheads are right, are honest with us, are not playing games with the information, are not fudging the details in the press releases, and deserve our respect. I have every reason in the world to think that they do not. And arguments like “I’m in the war zone and you’re not” don’t feed the bulldog. We laughed out loud at Bush when he did his “I am listening to the generals” mantra. For good reason.
And whatever goes for the Pentagon, goes for the CIA ten times over. They are ones running the drone war, if I understand it correctly. And I wouldn’t trust that bunch to give me the correct time even if we could both see the same clock.
Cassidy
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: I never said anything regardig civilian control of the military. All I said is that your stance is self-righteous and founded on bullshit. You don’t like the application of the military, then vote better or run for office instead of grandstanding on a blog.
I’ve said before that I think the bulk of the American populace is weak and wrought with cowardice, as well as blantantly stupid. I’ve enver hidden that position. But then, history isn’t proving to change my mind either.
scudbucket
@Cassidy:
You don’t like the application of the military, then vote better or run for office instead of grandstanding on a blog.
Of course, this statement (perhaps intentionally) misses the point. Earlier, many people made the distinction between what is moral and what is ‘legal’. (I know I certainly did.) Possessing political power in a democracy is not equivalent to a dictatorship, and even if it were, the moral arguments against a certain action, or set of actions, remain independently of the vagaries of power.
I’ve said before that I think the bulk of the American populace is weak and wrought with cowardice, as well as blantantly stupid. I’ve enver hidden that position. But then, history isn’t proving to change my mind either.
Weak with regards to what? The context of the discussion is a debate about the use of force to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan. One question is whether those objectives are sound, politically and morally. Another question is whether the strategy implemented to achieve those goals is sound, politically and morally.
The answers to both questions are open, and only close one way or the other depending upon evidence and argument. To say that Americans are weak seems to indicate a predisposition to use violence to solve complex problems which many people believe are only exacerbated by the use of violence.
Anoniminous
completely pointless post to test to see if new system is working correctly.
Ignore.
Or not.
(As you wish.)
Edit?