I am actually reaching whatever the next stage is after impatience and exasperation with these Beltway pundits’ efforts to psychoanalyze the president’s ‘maimed soul.’ This morning it is Richard Cohen’s turn.
What these people were seeking was not an eruption of anger, not a tantrum and not a full-scale denunciation of an oil company. What they wanted instead was a sign that this catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk — and this time just wouldn’t budge. He showed not the slightest sign in the idiom that really counts in a media age — body language — that he gave a damn. He could see your pain, he could talk about your pain, but he gave no indication that he felt it.
One can understand. Obama’s father deserted the family and afterward visited his son only once. He twice was separated from his mother, who lived in Indonesia without him. He was partially raised by his grandparents — an elderly white couple. If the president is what the shrinks call “well-defended,” who can blame him? It’s ironic that Oprah Winfrey was maybe Obama’s most significant early backer when the man himself is so un-Oprah. He cannot emote.
This need for men of a certain age to be led by Captain Kirk and not Mr. Spock is getting tiresome. I’d like to know what it was in Mr. Cohen’s upbringing that turned him into such a needy dick.
It’s astonishing to see Cohen call for dumb leadership.
Fortune has not smiled on Obama’s presidency. His one uncontested attribute — a shimmering intellect — has become suspect. A world of smart guys has turned against us. Everyone at Goldman Sachs is smart, but they seem to have the amorality mocked by the songwriter Tom Lehrer in his sendup of the celebrated American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi (” ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun”).
The oil industry is full of smart people, and so is the mortgage industry. Smart people seem to have brought us nothing but trouble. Smarts without values is dangerous — threatening, scary, virtually un-American. This is why a succession of archconservative eccentrics have succeeded. Their values are obvious, often shockingly so. We know what they want, just not how they are ever going to get it. Experience has become a handicap and inexperience a virtue. Smart is out. Dumb is in.
Who are the members on the list of archconservatives who have succeeded? Why is Cohen comparing the president to the crooks at Goldman Sachs, the mortage-lending industry, and BP? Did Cohen just compare Obama to a Nazi and suggest that he doesn’t care who he bombs? Is being stupid and inexperienced really a virtue? Does this man sniff glue for breakfast?
And why do all these columns end as incoherently as they begin.
It’s okay to trade with China. It’s okay to hate it, too.
Pragmatism is fine — as long as it is complicated by regret. But that indispensable wince is precisely what Obama doesn’t show. It is not essential that he get angry or cry. It is essential, though, that he show us who he is. As of now, we haven’t a clue.
We are supposed to hate China? Obama is supposed to wince everytime he mentions China? He sends Geithner and Clinton over to China to convince them to float their currency and he succeeds, but his reward is to be told that he doesn’t show enough regret?
Richard Cohen is indisputably the worst columnist in America to have permanent space at a major newspaper. And he has a lot of competition. Just at the Washington Post he has to compete with Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and David Broder. The man has rocks in his head.
He’s the Wanker of the Year, actually:
http://wonkette.com/410151/worlds-worst-writer-richard-cohen-back-in-form-pens-worst-article-anywher
e-on-the-internet-right-now/
He’s looking to keep that title in 2010, seeing as he can’t win the Pulitzer Prize.
Finally, I have access to the site.
Cohen isn’t a wanker, he’s impotent at this point because frankly who pays attention to him anymore. I’d call him a WATB instead.
The only people who pay attention to Village pundits are other Village pundits. WaPo is a dying shell. So far no one wants Newsweek. As for setting agendas, Politico seems to have eaten their lunch. (I see a danger in that, but they seem to have replaced WaPo as the source that Congressional staffs and other political class folks pay attention to.) It is only a matter of time until WaPo goes under.
Meanwhile, McChrystal floats a balloon to see whether it is safe for Petraeus to become the American Caesar. Or if the President will find his inner Harry Truman.
“Dumb is in”?!? Doesn’t Cohen remember that we already tried the Forrest Gump as President thing? That didn’t work out too well.
Don’t insult my man Forrest Gump. He kept his commitments unlike our dear departed former president.
Also to a great extent unlike our current president, who in some respects is trying out-Bush Bush.
I don’t think so.
Have you looked at his record on civil rights lately? Looked at his military policy lately? Looked at how he has escalated things with Afghanistan and Iran?
Should I go on?
So is it resignation or impeachment?
Don’t get carried away.
Um, maybe because his administration is filled with Goldman Sachs hangers on, Goldman Sachs was a huge campaign backer, and BP’s Sylvia Baca is still at MMS? And didn’t the Obama adminsitration drop cramdown because it would hurt the banks?
Cohen’s still an idiot, but hello, does the phrase “unmanned drones kill women and children indiscriminately in Pakistan” ring a bell? As for Nazis, while the Obama adminsitration isn’t marching people into ovens, would “concentration camp” be an inaccurate description of Bagram and Guantanamo? Is der Spiegel lying when they write that torture continues at Bagram? Do we not hold people in Guantanamo that we know are innocent?
I’m not going to argue with you that Cohen has rocks in his head: i have an entire category at my blog called “richard cohen is an idiot” that’s gone unused for years because I won’t read his drivel anymore. and i’m certainly not defending his nonsense pseudo-psychology column.
But your attacks on Cohen seem to hit the wrong marks: Obama DOES have close ties to Goldman Sachs; HAMP, designed to help banks stave off mortgage losses, has not worked; Obama’s interior is headed by ken Salazar, who has been very friendly to BP (I didn’t even mention that the president was “top recipient of BP-related donations during the 2008 cycle”); our robotic drones don’t care who they bomb; and if throwing people who look like people we don’t like into cages without access to a lawyer and then torturing them isn’t exactly nazism, it sure comes fucking close.
Thank you for saying this, Brendan. Just because Cohen is an idiot doesn’t mean he didn’t hit some serious points in his article. Obama is weak. We don’t know who he is. We don’t know what he cares about (except his new golf elitism). We don’t know his priorities. His staff is chock full of Goldman Sachs leeches and inexperienced-yet-learned nerds (a complete reflection of himself). His egghead style is the polar opposite of his predecessor but that doesn’t make it better in any way. It’s just different BS. Obama doesn’t care who he bombs. I guess we simply excuse those indiscriminate predator drones because they spread freedom.
Look, I don’t need a daddy telling me how to feel. That’s another strawman issued by Obama’s many apologists (He’s only the president; what do you expect him to do–lead?) And if I wanted to choose a daddy, I’d at least choose one who wasn’t so spineless, ineffectual and dishonest.
Half truths are always more zombie-like than flat-out lies (although the flat-out lies are trying to hold their own).
Holy chrickey…
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/06/20/sunday-talk-shows-all-start-bp-haywards-yachti
ng-ignore-obamas-golfing
To actually take a right wing talking point/framing and run with it is just as bad as Hamsher going on Fox News. Go to hell.
Just because the right wing has finally seized on the obvious doesn’t mean that I can’t mention it, too. You apologists kill me. When Bush was cutting brush at his fake ranch during the Katrina catastrophe, I bet you were fuming. But when Obama golfs on pristine fairways while the ocean dies, that’s just fine because Obama works soooo damn hard.
No, sir; you go to hell!
actually, bush was fundraising and eating birthday cake in SanDiego with John Mccain when katrina hit.
Obama, it’s totally different. he was fundraising for Barbara Boxer, and there was no birthday cake that i know of.
Before someone says “low blow, all presidents fundraise”, i’ll add that it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. on the other hand, one would hope that a national disaster trumps fundraising.
Same script, different cast.
It’s interesting that you say that drones don’t care who they bomb. The entire reason they were developed was to be a precision instrument. It gives the operator the ability to have an eyeball on the target in a way that is not possible with a tomahawk missile or a regular bomb.
It’s true that sometimes a decision is made to bomb a target that turns out not be what they thought it was, and sometimes they make the decision to bomb a target even when civilians are in the same building or vicinity. But drone attacks are intended to avoid civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible.
That’s not to say that there isn’t legitimate controversy about the use of drones, but your specific criticism is quite odd.
That’s probably the coldest, most brutal thing I’ve seen you post.
Brutal?
The way we bombed Dresden and Tokyo was brutal.
Dropping 5000lb bombs is brutal.
Expending tremendous resources to create munitions and platforms for the specific purpose of avoiding indiscriminate killing is the opposite of brutal.
As Tarheel Dem correctly points out, the problem with drones isn’t that they aren’t precise.
Here’s something to consider about our current strategy in Afghanistan:
Seems like a good reason to give up, but it doesn’t sound like brutality is the strategy we’re pursuing at the moment.
If you’d read what I said, I put it into the context of what you have written. Your cold, detached method of calling rockets “instruments” of precision and the implication that if civilians are killed, they shouldn’t have been stupid enough to be used as human shields in the first place. Bombs away!
i made no such implication.
“mistakes were made”.
“no one could have known”
“you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
They’re just brown people on the other side of the earth, and anyway they dress funny.
“The entire reason they were developed was to be a precision instrument.”
if that’s the way they’re supposed to work, maybe they need to go back to the drawing board.
23 dead civilians caused by unprofessional drone operators.
pakistan: “US drones killed only civilians in 39 of 44 attacks on their country in 2009”
Brookings: Critics correctly find many problems with this program, most of all the number of civilian casualties the strikes have incurred. Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but more than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the attacks. That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died.
doesn’t sound too precise to me.
you are quoting the Pakistani government in the most important of those links.
so what?
are you saying they’re less than credible? I hope not, because you quote the US media all the time, which doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation for truth-telling or objectivity either. Judy Miller, WMD, “newly-discovered mineral deposits in Afghanistan that we’ve known about for three years”. You want me to go? Cus i can, at length.
Of course they’re not credible.
They are fully cooperative with the drones-program, even providing more than one airstrip for their storage and maintenance. Yet, they routinely deny any involvement whatsoever.
well, you don’t have to read that one then if it offends your sensibilities.
that said, brookings says essentially the same, and the UN wants the things banned.
Actually, the Brookings piece is a tortured piece of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand writing which says that allowing militants a safe haven is extremely dangerous and that the drones make it harder from them to relax and plot major 9/11-style attacks. It doesn’t endorse drones, but neither does it call for them to be curtailed. Rather:
but that’s not what i said.
I didn’t say that brookings “endorsed” drones or not. i said that brookings says the drones have killed more 600 pakistani civilians, which is very close to the 700 the un-credible Pakistanis claim to have been killed.
why are you suggesting i wrote something i never wrote? i never addressed whether brookings thinks this is too high a price to pay or not, only that they have similar stats to the pakistanis, who say 700 civilians have been killed by drones in their country. i never said whether brookings thinks their use should be curtailed, only that Brookings says there are 600 dead civilians, and the ratio is 10 dead civilians to every one dead militant.
Funny that you call the pakistani lionk “the most important” and “not credible” while carefully ignoring the domestic link to a credible organization that finds almost the same number.
i’m sorry if the pile of dead civilians is inconvenient when defending Obama’s policies against Richard Cohen (who is an idiot).
i should say “while carefully stepping over the money quote” from the domestic link to a credible orgnaization (which I suppose is unimportant).
what you said was the drones are killing people indiscriminately. Brookings would presumably call for an end of drone-use if they believed that.
Their overall assessment is that poor intelligence leads to unacceptably high civilian casualties and “each strike needs to be carefully weighed, with the value of the target and the potential for innocent deaths factored into the equation.”
That’s a far cry from saying that almost no drone attacks have hit even a single bad guy or that civilians are being hit indiscriminately.
The only point I was trying to make is that drones make it possible to target a moving target and to be precise in the targeting.
My feeling is that there have been a few mistargeted strikes and more cases where the intended target was in a house or compound with other people. I do not think we’re just targeting civilians without discrimination. And Brookings didn’t say that.
But, Boo, that’s semantics. Civilians are being killed for the crime of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. When it happened on 9/11 this country was outraged. But since it’s “over there” and Obama cosigned it, it’s for the greater good. That’s the definition of naked American exceptionalism and hypocrisy. SMH
It’s a little more complicated than that.
Let’s go back to 1998, when Clinton tried to kill Usama by sending 75 tomahawks into Afghanistan. In targeting militant training camps, Clinton was also targeting the families of militants, which are counted as civilians. Obviously, there is a difference between mistaking a wedding party for a band of terrorists and bombing a militant camp where civilians are present. The advantage with drones over tomahawks is that you can theoretically make a strike that does no harm to the families.
If we are truly killing 10 civilians for every one bad guy, then that’s a problem with decision making and intelligence, not the technology.
I think this debate is misplaced, in any case. The better question is what are the pros and cons of carrying out these strikes in the first place. Obviously, killing innocents is counterproductive, but is killing the guilty really doing anything either? I think Brookings was questioning whether it’s worth it if we can’t improve the ratio.
so you don’t think 10 innocent civilians to 1 militant is “indiscriminate”. OK. i guess it’s relative: we could be killing hundreds at a time so those ten innocents are… what do we call them? “the cost of doing business”? “in the way”?
Still, that’s an amazing point of view and utterly callous to the loss of innocent life.
I never said “almost no drone attacks have even hit a single bad guy”. that’s YOU: again, why are you putting words in my mouth? do you think that pretending i said things i never said somehow strengthens your case?
you can think what you want, but when people from Pakistan want to set off bombs in Times Square in revenge for drone strikes i submit that your personal “feeling” doesn’t matter for shit. Especially when 10 innocent people have this unfortunate habit of being shot full of holes for every one militant summarily executed by our sky robots.
Is it not fair to count something you link to approvingly as coming from your mouth? The Pakistan link says that almost no drone attacks have killed anyone but civilians. You linked to it and you suggested that the Brookings article supported it. Who’s parsing now?
And, no, I don’t think the ratio of 10:1 indicates something indiscriminate. That word has a precise meaning. It means haphazard or random, and without careful decision making. The bombing of Dresden was indiscriminate. A drone attack that has to be signed off on by a dozen people is not indiscriminate in any sense of the word.
And a look at the list of drone attacks since Obama became president doesn’t look like the attacks are indiscriminate. I don’t know where Brookings got their numbers, but I don’t just blindly accept them.
I just cannot comprehend how war and the destruction of innocent life (an “insurgent’s” wife and children are probably innocent, btw) are abstract academic affairs that cannot be avoided. But to each his own.
it’s an abstract because it’s someone else’s family. It’s only an outrage when it happens to you.
you’re really determined to be pedantic aren’t you?
well, since we’re going down that route, I’m paying more attention to the “700 innocent civilians killed” part as opposed to the “39 out of 44 strikes”.
if you don’t see a 10-1 ratio as “indiscriminate” you have a different definition than I do. But i don’t think you believe what you’re saying. you certainly wouldn’t be excusing it if someone from YOUR family was blown to bits while the military or the police were aiming for someone else.
As for where Brookings arrived at that number, I have emailed the author and will report back.
Just looking at one report of a 2009 drone attack, from Reuters, I get this:
That’s 16% compared to 88% in your report. Also, according to Wiki about exactly 1,100 people have been killed in drone attacks in 2009-2010. I think that 700 number would go all the way back to 2004.
The bottom line is that I don’t believe anything that Pakistan has to say about anything. I do not believe that civilians are being targeted indiscriminately nor that they are the majority of who is losing their lives.
Having said that, we’re definitely facing blowback in the homeland, and I don’t see the drones as helping us prevail in Afghanistan.
But I’m not quoting pakistan this time: since their credibility is suspect with you, i’m quoting brookings, which has similar numbers.
the brookings article was written in January 2009, and the number is probably low at this point. and i’m waiting, as i said, for a response from the writer to see where he got his numbers.
when you refer to the US as “the homeland” you sound like an extra from a bad WW2 film. i think it was that awful Bush person who came up with that phrase anyway. What’s wrong with “our country” or “here in the States”? Does anyone in real life EVER refer to the US as “the homeland”? [i don’t count political types in the category of “real life”]
I’ve never understood the widespread liberal aversion to word ‘homeland.’ I hear people complain about it all the time but I haven’t figured out what the problem is. It’s not that it sounds vaguely like Fatherland, is it?
I understand that you are using a number from Brookings, who I agree is not an organization with an ax to grind. But as far as I can tell, they pulled the number out of their ass. We have no idea where they got it, and we’ll have to see if they get back to you on it.
Wiki says that less than 300 people total were killed by drone prior to 2009, and 800 in 2009 and 2010. So seven hundred in a 2009 article is basically saying that no bad guys were ever killed in a drone attack.
Yeah, and Wiki IS, after all, THE definitive source for everything – NOT.
I’m not saying that Wiki is authoritative in the sense of having the final word on the matter, but that article is very comprehensive and includes records of strikes every two weeks or so,
Let’s take a look:
Now, maybe the Wiki article missed a few drone attacks, but they seem to have been very thorough. Brookings, on the other hand, provides no source or factual foundation for their estimate. The Wiki article makes no attempt to differentiate civilians from militants, but the Brookings article does without explaining their methodology.
The bottom line is that if I am to believe that 700 civilians were killed in drone attacks by July 14, 2009, then I have to believe that more civilians were killed than total people were reported to be killed at that time. I think that’s so highly unlikely that I conclude Brookings just pulled that number out of their ass.
Whatever the actual number killed, for each “suspected insurgent” they manage to “take out” they also manage to murder a number of human beings who are not “suspected” of anything. It is completely safe to say that the majority of the human beings who are being permanently wiped off the face of the earth by the United States military is several to many times greater than the number of “suspected” badguys. No one with an ounce of humanity can find that anything but completely wrong and utterly unacceptable.
It is also worth pointing out that in the vast majority of cases the only thing that makes the “suspected badguys” bad is the fact that they are fighting against a foreign invasion and occupation of their country. If there were no invasion and no occupation, they would not be badguys, real or suspected.
It’s depressing to me how you view the Taliban as well as the influence of Arab fighters in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Them bad. We good. We get it!
I’m a regular critic of our own religious assholes. I don’t know why it is so hard to critical of religious assholes in the Islamic world. And the Taliban top the list.
Now who’s looking for Big Daddy to protect him? :/
Boo, this country cannot solve it’s own terrorism problems (gangs, Fred Phelps, etc.). How are we going to go “over there” and solve their cult/gang problems? The scary Taliban is a cult/gang, just like the Bloods, Crips, KKK, the Catholic Church and the Mafia. Wake me when the USA solves it’s own gang/cult problems, then maybe I’ll get on your bandwagon. But until then, it’s all just BS so that this country can continue it’s rank corporatism without second thought.
It’s depressing to me that you can’t see how the United States creates its own enemies by its actions.
We’d stop killing the savages if they’d only become civilized like us.
“We’d stop killing the savages if they’d only become civilized like us.“
It’s all their fault we are not winning this war. They are just too primitive and backward and corrupt to give us the support we need, and we’ll just have to keep on killin’ ’em until they get westernized.
By what possible rationale, by what possible logic, does anyone with an ounce of humanity conclude that it is acceptable to permanently end the lives of ten innocent people in order to “take out” one “suspected insurgent” (that IS how they usually describe them – not as known criminals, but “suspected insurgents”)?
The problem isn’t the use of drones. The problem is the field intelligence that identifies targets. A US soldier couldn’t recognize an insurgent member of the Taliban if they were talking with one, especially one who was a translator or informant. That’s the nature of insurgencies. Which means that US soldiers also can’t accurately identify known leaders of the insurgency, even from photographs (if they exist). One has only to remember the many mistaken identity arrests in the US to see the problem.
The civilian deaths are not really “collateral damage” in the sense of inadvertent deaths from uncontrollable factors in munitions technology. The drone is a precision weapon that finds the target that the operator guides it to. If there is an insurgent using his family or civilian villagers as human shields, they will be killed too. More likely, the intelligence is flawed or bogus so that the attack is on civilians with no insurgent around.
For other civilian deaths, it’s just a matter of US troops firing first and investigating second. Or a glory boy who thinks he’ll just kill everything in sight and let Allah sort them out.
Drones don’t care who they bomb, but trained operators do. And probably moreso now that Karzai has made a stink about it. But operators work with the intelligence information that they are given.
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Nothing to see here. Substitute Obama with Bush and you have Red State.
The issue isn’t Obama, it is a military that trusts field intelligence that is flawed because they have no better strategies for doing what they promised to do.
Obama has a lot of work to do to gain commander-in-chief control over a military used to getting its own way regardless of the results. It is a seriously difficult problem that if not handled well can put Obama’s life on the line.
Should we used drones? As compared to what? A platoon with a glory boy mentality?
Even if we got out of Afghanistan tomorrow, we would still face a difficult issue. How do you deal with terrorism that has sanctuary in states that lack the resources to deliver them to trial or to suppress them? Drones haven’t become the answer; no one knows what is yet.
The difficult task is to remove the irritants that make the US a target of terrorism in the first place. So what are you willing to trade off to solve that one?
One way to deal with “terrorism” (nice Bushism there, buddy!) is to not kill and maim more of the aggrieved and their families. But that’s just not an option for G.I.Joe.
Terrorism is a tactic of asymmetrical warfare. It isn’t a philosophy or ideology; that’s where my use of the term differs from Bush’s.
Warfare is politics by other means (Clausewitz). You stop wars by dealing with the politics (and the military dominance of US foreign policy makes this difficult).
Once a country is engaged in a war, its military kills and maims people. That’s what G.I. Joe is trained to do. But G.I. Joe is also trained to stop shooting on command. NPR interviewed some US soldiers before the first Fallujah massacre who were occupying Fallujah. They were having problems with security details because they were “trained to fight the enemy”. If there is no enemy they can quickly create one. The Iraqi people gave the US a year to make good on the promise of liberation from Saddam Hussein. Fallujah and Abu Graib reversed that unexpected tolerance.
If you want not to kill and maim people, you make sure that the politics of a situation never degenerates into war unless there is real aggression at issue.
In Afghanistan the political issue was ensuring that the US would not be attacked as it was on 9/11. That political issue could have been solved without sending troops to Afghanistan. It wasn’t. The political issues underlying the attack on 9/11 was (1) the continued occupation of Palestine by Israel, (2) the continued presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia years after the first Gulf War, (3) US support for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, (4) a Wahabist vision of restoring the unity of Islamic nations. Bush obeyed his Saudi clients and dealt with removing troops from Saudi Arabia. The other three political issues remain. But those political issues are the result of the US inserting itself into the Middle East arguing that its presence was related to US national security interests. There is only one real national security interest that the US has in the Middle East–ensuring that the US military has a reliable supply of fossil fuels and petrochemicals. All the rest is driven by domestic US politics; the US (seemingly unconditionally) supports Israel’s security; having other states supporting Israel’s security is beneficial; the states most interested in supporting Israel’s security are those that can be bought off with foreign military aid; those also turn out to be the most authoritarian states because authoritarians tend to be reliable clients.
“If there is an insurgent using his family or civilian villagers as human shields…“
Oh, please, not the “human shields” canard again! The nature of resistance or guerilla fighting necessitates that the fighters blend in with the population. That does not mean they are using them as human shields. What do you expect them to do, set up “resistance” bases miles outside the cities? Should they also paint a big target on the ground with arrows and a sign?
“Drones don’t care who they bomb, but trained operators do.“
Oh, come on! They sit in some trailor in Nevada looking at a screen and pushing buttons, and we are supposed to believe that the human beings they kill are more real and more human to them than they are to the troops who are right there seeing them up close and personal? I don’t buy it.
The nature of asymmetric warfare means using willing or unwilling populations as human shields. “Human shields” is in my opinion a tactic and not a moral issue. (All war is immoral, and repressive governments automatically place themselves at war with their own citizens.) But war is politics by other means (Clausewitz). And willing populations shield insurgents as a matter of popular struggle (consider for example the “partisan wars” of the American Revolution). The canard is that all “human shields” are unwilling, and thus ought to be opposed to being used as shields. Having gone to war, an insurgent who stays nearby his family willingly puts them at risk. And if they don’t understand that, they are naive.
If they are looking at the screen, they are usually seeing people. And they are trusting in the assurances of field intelligence that these people are hostile and targets. Whether they see the people as real and more human is immaterial; they have no way of actually knowing whether these people are threats or not.
The troops who are right there know that they are among people who are hostile, but their response in battle is limited to their ability to discern who it is that is firing at them.
Once the politics of a situation degenerates into war, evaluating the morality of tactics gets pretty meaningless. And the only question the Geneva Conventions apply is whether the warring nation is taking due diligence to avoid civilian casualties.
Arguments from tactics do not carry much weight in stopping wars. Using drones is harmful to fewer civilians than the carpet bombing and spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But so what.
The real issue is the politics. What is the political settlement among the various local factions in Afghanistan? What will it take to move US domestic politics, which drives foreign policy, toward understanding the political issues that are driving this war?
Funny, but in my lifetime I have been personally acquainted with several people who engaged in asymmetrical warfare. They included members of the Pesh Merga (and in some cases their families), Palestinian resistance fighters, Kurdish and Shi`a fighters in the Iraqi insurgency of 1991 (the REAL insurgency, not the Iraqi resistance falsely branded as an insurgency), Iraqi dissidents against various regimes (the real kind, not the fake sort like Ahmad Chalabi, and Iyad `Allawi), Iraqis who had resisted the British, and the U.S. occupation, oh – and someone who claimed to have been an Algerian freedom fighter. Not ONE of them EVER considered that they used anyone, particularly their families, as “human shields”. The point of their living in cities, towns, or villages usually with their families, and often continuing to go to regular jobs was primarily to blend in with the population so as to avoid being identified as a resistance fighter, and to be easily available for operations. No one EVER suggested that they lived where they did in order to protect their own lives by using their families, neighbors, or colleagues as human shields.
In my admittedly limited and anecdotal experience I cannot come up with a single example of populations shielding resistance fighters (not insurgents – fighting against foreign invasion and occupation is not insurgency) in the sense of putting themselves in the line of fire with the idea of preventing the opposing forces from attacking the resistance fighter(s). They DID shield the resistance fighters by helping them blend into the population, providing alibis, and things like that, but that is not what is generally meant by the term “human shields”, particularly in the sense you used it here.
PS We are in agreement on the question of the morality of war. Military violence should be reserved strictly for self defence, not to promote or protect one’s “national interests”, and not even to retaliate for some offence real or imagined.
It would probably surprise most Americans to know that the Qur’an is pretty clear regarding the limits of the use of violence. There is one passage that states you can take up and use weapons in self defence, but as soon as your opponent stops fighting you, you are obligated to put down your weapon as well. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the kinds of people who run countries have very different standards for the use of violence.
“Drone attacks are intended to avoid civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible.“
Yeah, right. Every single type of military attack is intended to avoid civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible. The military is so damned intent upon avoiding civilian casualties it’s a bloody wonder they ever manage to kill anyone.
At least the US military makes the pretense of intending to avoid civilian casualties.
Just imagine the results if killing civilians was the US military’s intention.
And it would help if the insurgents would just wear a tee-shirt that said “Insurgent”. At least the US military wears cammies so that they can be distinguished from civilians.
It’s funny how unimpressed one is with a pretense of an intention when the people at the wrong end of the pretended intentions are more than just anonymous brown people on the other side of the earth – you know, when you actually have a connection to them, like, they are your relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues? In other words, when you see them as real human beings.
Yeah, the so-called “insurgents” should all walk around wearing t-shirts with targets painted on them. Better yet, maybe the U.S. shouldn’t treat the world as if it were its own private shooting range. I know this is a strange idea, but the invaders/occupiers might just be the bad guys here.
I don’t disagree on this point. American exceptionalism has not helped American national interests. But the issue is political, and if there is a solution it will be political.
And some of the troops over there are still a mite upset with the loss of two buildings and 3000 people in NYC. And they might feel like they are walking around with a target painted on them. To them war is war. Period. Soldiers, whether regular military or insurgents, are trained not to have feelings about the people who become their targets.
The bad guys are the politicians who sought or still seek to solve political problems by means of force. If the US pulls out of Afghanistan tomorrow, the people of Afghanistan will still have the political sorting out between the Taliban, whoever supports Karzai, regional power brokers, and the Northern Alliance. That sorting out might be peaceful, but is likely not to be.
I understand that you have some deep personal feelings about what is happening to friends, relatives, neighbors, or colleagues. But once the politicians decide on war, the consequences are pretty inevitable.
I don’t expect you to be impressed with these arguments. Just that you hear them.
It isn’t just a pretense. A major theme of the Rolling Stone article is that the army and marines are chafing under rules of engagement that put avoiding civilian casualties so high on the list of priorities that they don’t feel they can protect themselves or sympathetic Afghanis. I approve of COIN as a major improvement in strategy, even though I am sure it can’t work. But to ignore the rules of engagement and the risk it involves for our soldiers and suggest that we are going out of our way to kill civilians is simply dishonest.
It depends on who “we” is. Likely most of the military obey the rules of engagement as stated. But it doesn’t take many who don’t, who have a grudge, who never were that disciplined, who see their job as “killing the enemy” to completely undo even the limited good a counter-insurgency strategy offers over scorched earth conventional warfare. And those folks are going out of their way to kill the Afghanis they are sent to protect. It doesn’t take more than a couple dozen out of the number of troops we have there to completely undo months of patient patrol and negotiation.
The first massacre in Fallujah, Iraq, certainly was a failure of discipline.
And officers don’t always communicate the commander’s rules of engagement completely if they disagree with them.
It’s the reality of war. And human beings.
“The first massacre in Fallujah, Iraq, certainly was a failure of discipline.“
I followed and studied what happened in Falluja, and it sure didn’t look like a failure of discipline at all, it looked like what happened was pretty much the plan. And then, of course, they decided to go in a few months later and finish the job Guernica-style.
And the real irony of Falluja is that it was NEVER a “pro-Saddam stronghold” – quite the opposite, in fact. Falluja had a history of disliking Saddam’s cult of personality, defying the regime, and being punished for it too. In addition, Falluja stayed calm and safe until the Americans decided they needed to roll in there and take over, swaggering down the streets, ordering people around and manhandling them, forcing women to be patted down by males, rumbling down the streets in tanks and flying over houses in helicopters shining searchlights on the houses and into the windows at all hours of the night, and taking over the local school as their base, depriving kids of their education. It was the Americans that brought violence to Falluja, and then punished the people by destroying their city.
You are absolutely right. I am not in the least impressed by those excuses for murder. And yes, I have deep personal feelings about what the United States and its military are doing to people and places I know in countries with which I am intimately familiar. I also have deep personal feelings about what the United States and its military are doing to people I do not know in countries I have never set foot in because those people, too, are human beings who have a right not to be bombed and shot and manhandled and imprisoned and tortured by foreign invaders who have blasted their way into the country because politicians told them to. They have a right not to have to live with untreated and unrecognized PTSD for the rest of their lives, and the children have a right not to grow up with the emotional scars imposed on them by politicians and their volunteer executioners.
If the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan tomorrow, then it will be better for Afghanistan. One less party to f*** up the situation. The United States has only made things worse there overall, not better, and after all, that is all the U.S. knows how to do when it decides it needs to instituted regime change by military violence.
As for who the bad guys are, they are everyone who is involved in that cluster-eff, by no means excluding the troops themselves. They are the hired hit men, NOT the innocent parties here, and I will not let them off the hook, nor will I thank them for their “service”.
What if they gave a war and no one showed up?