This may well be true, but it seems to miss the bigger point, which is why the fuck are we killing people in the first place, especially as it seems demonstrably ineffective in accomplishing anything useful? I mean, we’ve been doing drone murders for twenty years now, and about the only argument you can make for their utility is a highly suspect one based on what didn’t happen. “We prevented a lot of terrorist attacks” is impossible to prove, and morally dubious at that.
I do think there are quite a few scenarios where drone strikes can be very effective tools, but IMO our use of them has been more a function of “when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail” and our general love of blowing stuff up in lieu of actual policy than of any actual strategy or need.
I think if you’ve talked yourself into the notion that killing the citizens of nation X for political reasons isn’t intervention because we’re killing a representative ethnic sample of those citizens and because we also kill the citizens of other countries besides country X, you’re working very hard on a special definition of intervention.
CraigM
1638
The alternative to intervention would simply be calling it ‘random murder to justify the massive contracts the army has with weapons manufacturers’.
You’re right, that’s my bad. Civilization is a historically loaded term. What I meant was really the bare minimum of government, the level of order necessary to keep a society from being a free-for-all for any violent psychopath who wants a slice.
As much as I don’t enjoy saying it, the fact that the Russians, Iranians and Assad won in Syria ultimately means we have a government to deal with, instead of a Battle Royale of psychopaths. It likely won’t be as easy for gangsters and terrorists to run the country.
Yeah, that seems to be the case.
I just hope we study those lessons closely, because very little of what we did made sense. That’s probably hoping for too much.
I mean, there’s reasonable and debatable arguments people can make for them, it just becomes more morally harder to defend playing God as if we’re infallible at predicting the future. And indefensible when we don’t even know the damn present.
Strollen
1641
Hold on when did I say drone strikes are good thing? I’m very much on the same page as Wombat, the benefits are dubious, and the morality is bad. I found it particularly outrageous when Obama decide that he could declare US citizen enemy combatants and then execute them with no due process. BTW, on Frontline this week it was pointed out that Obama authorized 10x the drone strikes of Bush. Nor am I happy that Biden has touted our over the horizon capability as reason to withdraw from Afghanistan. It seems clear to me that if used to take a few hours from getting intelligence that some terrorist in Khandar to killing him and now takes 12 hours that odds or something going wrong and we end up killing a civilian.
As to yours and Scotts, point that I’m making too fine a distinction on what is or isn’t intervention, you guys have a point. I do think there is a difference between simply providing weapons, which in many cases is just business, and intervening with troops and/or airpower. In the case of Yemen and the US, it is not a clear cut line.
I am assured this is fine, because there was no possibility they had three or four channels of bad intel. And, in fact, there is no way the military could possibly be mistaken. Or, god forbid, lying!
Also, it’s probably a perfect Putin-Xi fabrication.
Scared people + tense situation + a climate of “fuck it, kill 'em all and let God sort it out” = massive fuck ups as usual.
I mean, I used to believe that by and large the US military was run by professionals and that, barring the occasional and regrettable error, we were careful and conscientious (relatively at least). I don’t think I can believe that any more. Not just this incident, but the entire last decade has seen in my view a terrible deterioration in leadership and professionalism across the board. So many incidents, from navigation errors at sea to errant drone strikes to intelligence failures of all sorts, combined with the evident toleration of far-right sentiments and outright religious zealotry in some units has made me feel that our experiment with the so-called professional military may well have been an abject failure in many respects.
I’ve been leaving my anti-us policy feelings aside, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals: armies rely on dehumanizing enemies and desensitizing violence to make people don’t hesitate to kill; and big organizations, especially in messy situations, screw up inevitably, and in big ways.
If people recognize that, it would be a big progress already. And I think it’s happening, slowly, as it’s painful to see how much is pointless and avoidable, but happening. If only for the cost to us without much to show for it.
TurinTur
1647
20 years later, and still the same old USA…
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, it’s worth considering that in the end, Al Qaeda got what it wanted. It got a perpetual so-called war on terror that it could, and did, portray as a war on Islam. It created an environment where violent extremists with no useful contributions to any society, and no real prospects of being more than bottom feeders in their own communities, could present themselves as warriors of the faith and martyrs and all that. It also gave cover for folks to pretty much set up their own bandit kingdoms, under the guise of fighting against the Americans and their allies.
The bitter irony is that much of this stems not from the specifics of the initial mass murder, but mostly from the disproportionate and ill-considered long-term actions of the USA itself, and the way we framed it. We had ample opportunities to undercut the propaganda of Al Qaeda and its ilk, isolate them, and encourage what might have been a fairly organic rejection of their ideology among the vast majority of the Islamic world. Instead, we followed a course of action that inevitably turned friends into enemies, bystanders into accomplices, and a lot of people who were not threat to us into corpses.
When people say “never forget,” on a personal level I get that entirely. On a national, policy level, I often wonder what we are supposed to remember, though. Seems to me we need to forget the policies that brought us to that point, and start creating new ways of thinking that can actually prevent future atrocities. Otherwise it’s just one long forever war that won’t fix anything.
schurem
1649
Which it is. Look at the bullshit spewed out by right-wingers over the years, the immigration bans from muslim countries and the way other flavors of terrorists were ignored or swept under the rug.
Quoted for motherlovin’ truth.
Expert hired by WaPo says there is no indication of a secondary explosion / no evidence of explosives in the target car and that the physical visual evidence is consistent with that of a Hellfire missile.
Great video piece from the fuck-the-NYT that uses security camera footage, interviews with colleagues, and post strike video to show that, most probably, there were no bombs in the car, no secondary explosion, and that the US probably targeted the car by mistake.
I read those tweets last night. It’s heartbreaking.
If true it’s pretty emblematic of how stuff got “fixed” in Afghanistan.
The implication is that the military had intelligence about ISIS using a white Toyota Corolla in a particular neighborhood to mount an impending attack, and (via drone surveillance) they found a white Toyota Corolla in that neighborhood, and they followed it while it drove around picking up several people and things, and they watched it at a particular place while people loaded some things into it, and they followed it when it returned to the place where it had started that day, and they decided it was the car they were after and blew it up. The detail that ISIS launched an attack from the same neighborhood the next day, using a white Toyota Corolla, makes it seem quite plausible a scenario: They got the wrong guy.
Heat and fog of battle and all that, but there are questions. Why didn’t they know that the place where the car was parked all day was the office of a US-funded humanitarian food organization? You would think they’d want to know about that place, and you’d think such places would be noted in some catalog somewhere. Did they use a conventional warhead or an inert one, and if the former, why did they say the latter? Why did they think there were secondary explosions, when the video and photo evidence shows no evidence of that, in fact shows that it is unlikely based on the lack of structural damage to the surrounding walls, homes, etc?
Obama bro weighs in.
One thing I really admire about Biden is that he suggested this under Obama, which is easier to do when it’s Obamas responsibilty. However, once he was in charge, he did carry it out himself.
Yep, that’s the same ShivaX posted. I was wondering if I was commenting on the wrong (more likely incomplete) thing, because I had just seen it at the same time.
