Droning On
"In order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives, the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones."
John Brennan, U.S. CIA chief nominee
The Nobel laureate, President Barack Obama, has authorized 350 drone strikes since taking his executive office. The war-mongering, bloodthirsty, Republican President of the United States whom everyone loved to hate, had authorized 50 such strikes in his time. The killer-drone program began under George H.W. Bush in 2002.
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| B.K. Bangash, A.P - A group of American anti-war activists joins an anti-drone rally |
The use of the drones has a distinct purpose; to ensure fewer American lives are lost in the pursuit of Islamist terrorists and to eliminate as many al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists as possible through their targeted use.
It seems like a laudable solution to a seemingly intractable problem.
But those Islamists, fanatically crude anti-Western, American-hating, Zionist-deploring terrorists have wives and children. They don't seem to particularly care about whom they imperil with their presence, since they subscribe to the functionality of using human shields - installing themselves among civilian populations, and shooting rockets from those same centres, inviting responding hits with calculated coolness.
But the West, and in particular the United States, has a definite code of honour and responsibility, and do their utmost, we are encouraged to believe, to ensure that civilians are protected when militants are targeted. After all, it is those scurrilous dictators like Syria's President al-Assad, like the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, who do that kind of thing, who arial-bomb the innocent, not the West.
When blasts take place in Israel, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, a second takes place when people rush to aid after the first.
And guess what? The tactic, it seems, is more universal than we might have nightmared it to be. Wives and children of terrorists in their presence are blown to smithereens when their husbands are taken out. And those who rush to the aid of the blasted, in the logic that if they know the terrorist they must be collaborators, get hit with a second strike.
Not very civil, nor chivalrous, and we are that, aren't we?
There are numbers being bandied about separating the numbers of 'terrorists' as opposed to those of 'civilians' that have been killed through these methods. Of 32 al-Qaeda leaders on President Obama's purported kill list, 22 were killed, 21 through the use of drones, according to Micah Zenko, security policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
Numbers also reveal that over 3,000 have been killed with these targeted attacks performed by the drone method. The U.S. administration claims civilian deaths are minimal. Non-government sources say the figure is minimally over 2,000. The drones striking in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia represent a new method of fighting foreign wars.
War is never nice. It is simply becoming more distant, less personal, and people more expendable from either end of the equation.
Labels: Conflict, Defence, Munitions, Security, United States
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, February 02, 2013
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