The One Where I Put Drone Strikes Into Perspective

Last weekend more than 10 innocent men, women and children were lost in a deadly attack in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, victim to what is suspected to be a drone missile attack by Iran.  Details are sketchy, but it appears that Iran was concerned with a man who was suspected to be leaking sensitive government intel from Iran to the US Government.  The man's identity has not been released as the local officials are still trying to determine if he was even home at the time.  

Just reading that makes me angry, as it should make anyone angry at the idea of another nation lanuching an attack on our country, and killing our innocent men, women and children that have nothing to do with Iran's quarrel with this unnamed man.

However do you know what is most infuriating?  More people would be upset at the idea of THAT fake story that I just made up being true, then about this next REAL story:

MORE AFTER THE BREAK

On Sunday, at least 10 civilians were ... killed in a strike gone awry near the town of Rada’a in al-Baitha province. An aircraft — believed to be an American drone — fired a pair of missiles at a vehicle supposedly carrying a local AQAP leader. One of the missiles instead hit a nearby minibus.  A 10-year-old girl and her mother were among the dead. “Families attempted to carry the victims’ corpses to the capital, Sana’a, to lay them in front of the residence of newly elected President Abdurabu Hadi, but were sent back by local security forces,” according to CNN.

“You want us to stay quiet while our wives and brothers are being killed for no reason. This attack is the real terrorism,” one Rada’a resident tells the network. Members of parliament and Yemeni human rights groups were quick to condemn the killings, as well.


The U.S. has two separate drone campaigns underway in Yemen — one run by the CIA, the other by the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. Together, they’ve conducted 43 strikes since the start of 2011, according to a Long War Journal tally, killing 274 people in the process. Exactly how many of the 274 were militants is tough to tell; the U.S. “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants,” the New York Times recently reported. As long as someone acts like a terrorists — whatever that means — he could be taken out in a so-called “signature” strike.

Now why is it that nobody is concerned at that, an unknown amount of innocent people killed when WE do it, yet if someone else does it to us, that's cause for outrage?   If Iran or anyone else attacked the United States with a drone strike, killing innocent people -- no, scratch that, if they killed ANYONE, terrorist or otherwise, if they missed and killed nobody, but blew up a random field, that would be deemed an act of war, and the war hawks in congress (most of them being chicken hawks) would have no problem drumming up support for a war.

Now I understand the idea of being upset when something happens to us.  But imagine your reaction if you heard that Iran decided to blow up a house somewhere in Seattle or Nebraska or San Francisco or Ohio because they suspected a terrorist who was plotting against them was there.   Yet it's okay if we do that to other countries like Pakistan and Yemen?

 

I was upset when President Bush did his warmongering across the globe, and I'm upset now that President Obama is doing these signature drone strikes (or any of his various types of drone strikes).   When you are targeting areas and you can't even be sure who you're hitting, so you have to create some sketchy definition of what a militant is as being anyone who is a military age male in whatever zone they target, well that's bullshit and should never be acceptable or tolerated by anyone with any semblance of honor or a conscience.

This goes beyond simply "do unto others" this is state sanctioned murder.  Of course we've seen over the history of this country that the powers that be have no problems killing innocent or possibly innocent people.  ask the families of Troy Davis, Cameron Todd Willingham and others who have been executed despite serious questions as to whether or not they're guilty.

This country has a blood stained past and a strong history of fucking over the little guy, and those with the least power.   Is it any wonder that this nation built on destruction and bloodletting would find no moral quandaries with going into another country and just killing people? If someone's  a terrorist and they're seeking to do -- or have done real harm to this country, I can see going after them.  But when you're just blanket bombing a whole section figuring oh we'll get the guy somewhere in there, and all the innocent women and children are simply collateral damage, well...I can't get with that and neither should you.

Next time you read about the latest drone strike in some far away land where a bunch of brown people you don't know are massacred, people who had nothing to do with anything, just think about how you'd feel if the name of that town or city was replaced with your hometown or city.  If Yemen was replaced with San Antonio, Miami, Seattle, Yuma or Las Vegas.

Would your apathy still be the same? If not, then perhaps you should look deep within yourself and find out why.

Also there's another aspect to this that should be infuriating and worrying to people.  These drone strikes are basically fueling the anger towards us by people in other countries.  I wrote about this before in my post "Why do Terrorists Attack the US" where Osama Bin Laden flat out stated (as did other terrorists) that our meddling in other nations, our setting up bases in other countries, etc are why they fight us.  Why they hate us, and why they attacked us on 9/11.

It has nothing to do with our damn freedoms (which we have very little of anymore it seems) and it has nothing to do with our decadence (of which admittedly we have a lot of), it has EVERYTHING to do with us killing their friends and family in drone strikes, it has everything to do with bombing weddings in other nations by accident when we're trying to take out a terrorist.

The sooner we get that through our thick skulls, and the sooner we start putting that knowledge in effect and start changing the way we do business, the better off we will be, and the closer we'll get to a day when we don't have to constantly look over our shoulder at someone coming after us.