It's a very human failing to demonize your opponents whether in mortal or merely rhetorical combat. I have scathing things to say about all sorts of people here (and elsewhere), but the marvels of editing and hindsight (involving hopefully more editing) allow us to see when we are hectoring. The Slate article I have picked on here could have benefited from some of that. Case in point:
Are the masters of "drone porn" committing war crimes by remote control? It's a bit shocking that more people aren't asking this question. I have a feeling that many of us, particularly liberal Obama supporters (like myself, for instance), haven't wanted to look too closely at what is being done in his name, in our name, when these remote-controlled and often tragically inaccurate weapons of small-group slaughter incinerate innocents from the sky, in what are essentially video-game massacres in which real people die.
Now I will get into how differently I see the world than do these "liberal Obama supporters".
Firstly, the repeated use of some catch(y) phrase throughout your essay lowers the tone of it significantly. "Drone porn" is not inherently inaccurate as a description; it's like crack for senior officers and I've seen it in action. Things that shock lose their effectiveness though overuse (sort of like conventional porn), and beating me with that phrase 16 times in one article is really overdoing it.
That however is mostly a style thing. My second main point is the bandying about of the term "war crime". This sounds clinical, but the few collateral casualties involved in drone strikes is not in scale or intent a war crime. Sure you can play with legal definitions to label it that, but reducing it to this level makes it a meaningless shibboleth instead of an affront to civilization. Firestorming Dresden in '45 is arguably a war crime, as it generated mass casualties for negligible tactical or strategic effect. Taking out the family of some guy who wants to destroy your precious liberal civilization is collateral damage from a legitimate (or at least necessary) military target.
Here's a part where the author loses any semblance of connection with reality:
Are the drone strikes defensible at 4 percent murdered innocents but indefensible at 33 percent? There's no algorithm that synchs up the degree of target importance, the certainty of intelligence that's based on, and potential civilian casualties from the attack. It's a question that's impossible to answer with precision. Which suggests that when murdering civilians is involved, you don't do it at all.
It's revealing that the comments on this article in Slate (Slate, of all places) were overwhelmingly dismissive. He goes on to refer to these drone targets as "criminals", demanding that we cease military operations against them. That legalistic attitude has already cost us any chance of success in Afghanistan, we don't need more if it.
The key thing is that regardless of certain peoples' sensitivities, there is a war going on. It's ugly (as are they all) and mistakes will be made. More importantly than this understanding of mistakes is the concept that this is an ideological war, and the only way to stamp out an ideology is to kill enough of its' adherents that they can't trouble you too much.
This comes to my third point about this hack job of an article. There is a whole lot of "we create more terrorists than we kill with _" floating around, and a fair bit of it settled here. First, I don't buy that, at least as far as it makes things any worse for us. The kids of a jihadist are brainwashed from birth to despise us "kufr", so killing them is merely proactive counter terrorism, and pissing them off doesn't change their attitude. At least after we blow dad into a red mist they know that we can and will kill them, and that sort of lesson will take with at least a few of them. Overall: net gain to our side.
Not nice and certainly not "liberal", but when we forget the basics "The Gods of the Copybook Headings, with terror and slaughter return!" The (historic, not rosy-hindsight-noble-savage) North American aboriginal peoples knew the score: kids are future warriors and women can breed more of them; you want to remove a threat, you remove ALL of it.
The NA Indians were by no means alone in this appreciation of ugly reality, but I use this as contrast to what is actually occurring on the North West Frontier these days. The locals (mostly Pakistanis) are happy to get rid of these guys and if it takes American Hellfires to do it, so be it, and there is no wholesale slaughter of non-combatants. On the other side of the Durand Line the Afghans (still Pashtuns) are complaining that the new COIN ("don't break anything") doctrine is strengthening the Taliban and other bad actors by removing the only stick we could use against them.
The only thing which will create more terrorists (besides all that Saudi money bankrolling them) is weakness and encouragement from us. And don't even get me going on Mr Rosenbaum's assertion that "There are those who argue that even the threat of a nuclear strike is a war crime". How about this: retreat to your liberal la-la land with your fellow travelers and leave dealing with the messy real world to those of us who live here.
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