But this raises a valid concern. Is drone striking weddings really winning the hearts and minds of people, or is it just setting up the next generation of (IMO, justified) hate toward the US? [0] [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haska_Meyna_wedding_party_airs...
Adults are expected to understand the potential consequences of their actions. If you knowingly fire missiles into a populated area, you don't get to say "oops, I didn't mean to" when you accidentally kill a few dozen innocent civilians.
It absolutely matters. Intending to kill civilians and killing them accidentally are very, very different things.
> Adults are expected to understand the potential consequences of their actions. If you knowingly fire missiles into a populated area, you don't get to say "oops, I didn't mean to" when you accidentally kill a few dozen innocent civilians.
Are you alleging that they didn't understand the risks involved? Or are you alleging that they did understand the risks involved, and made a conscious decision that those risks were worth it? If the latter, do you have reason to believe that their calculation was wrong?
I take issue with your stance that the burden of evidence lies with the 'let's not shoot missiles crowd', though. While we don't have specific evidence on the specific efficacy of individual drone strikes, I'd argue that the intelligence community's track record (or what's been declassified or widely known) does not inspire the greatest confidence in their ability to make nuanced, apolitical judgment.
Well, we've elected people (who've then appointed people) to make those judgments on our behalf. Someone has to make them. If you have evidence that they're being made poorly, then that's something worth hearing. But what is that evidence? If you don't have such evidence...then are you arguing that nobody should be making decisions like that at all, ever?
If you bomb an outdoor wedding party with dozens of visible women and children, and then return to fire again when ambulances are on the scene, that's not an "unfortunate accident". That's deadly negligence at the very best. You're trying to twist the second example into the framework of the first.
Is it? Do you have a sense of what went into that particular decision? Was the wedding party the target, or were they hit accidentally? Did they know it was a wedding party? Did they actually do a double tap strike in this instance?
If he didn't bother looking closely enough to identify his target, that's negligence or incompetence. (Middle Eastern women are noted for dressing distinctively.) If he didn't care, that's intentional murder, or whatever euphemism we're supposed to use in those circumstances. If he was told it was all right to fire without being able to see the target clearly, that's bad policy. If he was told it's all right to knowingly kill women and children, that's also bad policy. If the drone was authorized to fire without any human in the loop somewhere, that's really bad policy, and also bad tactics--there's no point in wasting a missile on an empty field that you expected a terrorist to be standing in.
There is no circumstance where someone wasn't lethally and unnecessarily careless with innocent lives. Whether it was due to malice or incompetence is not really relevant.
> Did they actually do a double tap strike in this instance?
Yes. You've already been linked to relevant articles in this thread. Do your own homework.
You are not going to Socratic-method anyone into admitting that, yes, it actually is okay to blow up a wedding if we think there might be a terrorist in there somewhere.
No they didn't. Cite a source for that. Don't just editorialize nonsense.
> If he didn't bother looking closely enough to identify his target, that's negligence or incompetence. (Middle Eastern women are noted for dressing distinctively.) If he didn't care, that's intentional murder, or whatever euphemism we're supposed to use in those circumstances. If he was told it was all right to fire without being able to see the target clearly, that's bad policy. If he was told it's all right to knowingly kill women and children, that's also bad policy. If the drone was authorized to fire without any human in the loop somewhere, that's really bad policy, and also bad tactics--there's no point in wasting a missile on an empty field that you expected a terrorist to be standing in.
> There is no circumstance where someone wasn't lethally and unnecessarily careless with innocent lives. Whether it was due to malice or incompetence is not really relevant.
People like to make silly statements like this, maybe for rhetorical effect. Whether or not something is attributable to malice or incompetence is always relevant. Mistakes happen in war. This may well be an instance of that. But it is not evidence that the policy is net bad. There are hundreds of these strikes. Some of them will kill civilians, but sometimes it's worth killing a few civilians to kill some unusually bad actors. We have people who's job it is to make that tradeoff. Do you have evidence that they're doing so poorly?
> Yes. You've already been linked to relevant articles in this thread. Do your own homework.
Firstly, the wedding that got bombed twice was not by drones, it was by jets. So, if the point of this thread is to discuss drones, it is irrelevant. There have been many wedding strikes, which one are you referring to?
> You are not going to Socratic-method anyone into admitting that, yes, it actually is okay to blow up a wedding if we think there might be a terrorist in there somewhere.
What, exactly, is the terrorist density of a wedding that makes it bombable? 50%? 80%? 99%? Do you know what the terrorist density of these particular weddings were?
I'm...not sure how you think attack drones work? There is always a human in the loop, at least for now. Humans pick the targets and authorize weapon release.
> Whether or not something is attributable to malice or incompetence is always relevant.
It's relevant to the discussion of how and why these things happen. It's not relevant to the question of whether or not a wrong has been committed. If you drive drunk and kill four people, you certainly didn't mean to, but you still go to prison.
> We have people who's job it is to make that tradeoff. Do you have evidence that they're doing so poorly?
Do you have evidence that they're not? They've certainly had limited success in stopping international terrorism.
We discussed earlier how extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you believe that a goal was achieved here that outweighed 50 or so innocent lives, it's on you to demonstrate that, not on me to falsify it. Do your own homework.
Many of these wedding bombings didn't involve drones, they involved jets. The drones are also using fairly low res cameras, so if we are talking about one of the instances where a drone bombed a wedding, it may or may not have been clear to the operator that that's what it was. It may also have been a targeting issue. That is all to say that we do not know that a person consciously, knowingly chose to bomb a wedding full of civilians.
> It's relevant to the discussion of how and why these things happen. It's not relevant to the question of whether or not a wrong has been committed. If you drive drunk and kill four people, you certainly didn't mean to, but you still go to prison.
It's relevant to the level of the wrong, just as it is in the car case. If you kill four people in a car on purpose that is a much more serious crime than doing so by accident. Further, if the CIA intended to do this, then we are having a very different moral discussion than if they did this accidentally.
> Do you have evidence that they're not? They've certainly had limited success in stopping international terrorism.
Are they? By what metric? There have been very few Islamic terrorist attacks on US soil. Sure, they haven't wiped out radical Islam in the entire region...but we don't really have a basis for comparison here. We cannot conclude much of anything about its efficacy.
What we do know is that there are networks of people who have organized themselves for the purpose of enacting terrorist attacks on western soil. What do you propose that we do about it, if not this?
> We discussed earlier how extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you believe that a goal was achieved here that outweighed 50 or so innocent lives, it's on you to demonstrate that, not on me to falsify it. Do your own homework.
Ok. Drone strikes have killed hundreds of high ranking members of Islamic terror networks. And it is highly likely that to the extent that civilians were harmed, most of them were probably, at the very least, sympathetic to these people to begin with.
How about if your camera is so low res or your drones are too shitty to avoid killing innocent people, you stop fucking using drones?
I have 0 doubt you would find it ridiculous to use the same drones on US soil because of the risk but hey as long as its not your family/friends, its just a "risk" right?
I would not find it ridiculous at all. So, I guess your argument kind of falls apart then.
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us...
First of all, you cropped the start at 2001. Presumably after September 11th, 2001, because a whole lot more than 26 people died there. Second, Islamic terrorism is not just about attacks that happen inside the US. The difference between Islamic terrorism and most other forms of domestic terrorism, is that Islamic terrorism represents a global, organized threat to liberal democracies, in general. Islamic terror attacks have happened through western and eastern Europe, China, Canada, they are positively endemic in Africa, and they continue to plague many other places.
No doubt about it, there are real and serious domestic terror threats inside the United States, and it is important that our law enforcement agencies work to stop them. But in the regions of the world where we're employing drone strikes, substantial fractions of the population are involved in these organizations. In some cases, such as Afghanistan, the recognized government of the country (the Taliban) consisted of these people. There are no similarly large sections of the US population to target for drone strikes. That doesn't mean there aren't domestic terrorists here, there are, and many of them are not Islamic. The reason drones don't work here though is that they don't have the critical mass to organize - they're lone wolves. Drones simply aren't an effective tool in that context.
Don't pretend the US is doing this bullshit out of altruism for the world. You got hit once, 17 goddamn years ago, and you haven't stopped hitting back since then. Its just killing a 1000, 10000 people for every one of yours killed, responding so monstrously out of proportion that anyone who attacks the US will think twice.
There aren't "large sections" of Afghanistan population to target via drones either - believe it or not, most of the people there just want to live their lives like the rest of us. You think "substantial fractions of the population" are involved in terrorism in ANY country? Do you think more than 0.01% of the population is involved in terrorism? Its just a ridiculous claim.
But again, the US doesn't care about innocent bystanders killed or collateral damage or how little their efforts have reduced terrorism (they haven't). They only want to send a message - "you kill 10 of ours, we kill 10000 of yours". While pretending thats all A-OK morally and totally not terrorism. So 90% of the population of 2-3 entire countries suffer because of the 0.1% or 1% of bad apples who are terrorists. For 17 years. Entire generations of people who've known nothing but war for shit they had nothing to do with.
Even the phrasing grates at me. Killing a bunch of innocent people in another country is just a "risk" to some moron with a drone. If all of a sudden that moron was piloting a drone IN THE US and blew up a church/school on accident, I guarantee you wouldn't be so comfortable abstracting away lives as "risk".
By the way, if we count all the innocent people killed by the US as "mistakes", it is certain that number would be >10x the people who died to Islamic terrorists on 9/11... so isn't the US military as much of a terrorist?
Its a sick strain of sociopathic paternalism by which you can abstract away peoples lives as long as they aren't your own countrymen.
I wouldn't be happy about it. But these things are inevitable consequences of war. People get shot accidentally by the police, here, in the United States. We try our best to minimize it, but it happens. It is an inevitable consequence of law enforcement. If one of my family members were accidentally killed by a cop, I would be upset. I'd want to understand the specifics of the incident, and see if perhaps the cop was being negligent in some way. But, if they were not being negligent and the situation had warranted it, and it was just an unfortunate accident, then I would not be angry with the officer, or the department.
For some proper context, I really suggest reading this CS Monitor piece from back in 2001 [0].
Keen observers will quickly realize that pretty much everything written there has become reality over these past 17 years. It should also be noted that there's a certain irony to it when the "Christian Science Monitor" is peeved about your religious rhetoric being a bit too much on the extreme end.
This is something that seemingly passed by many US Americans like it never happened. But you can't declare yourself a "Christian nation" going on "crusades", hinging large parts of your popularity drive on this imagined "clash of the cultures", and then act all surprised and outraged when the opposite side also reacts with more radicalization.
Just looking at the trends for global terrorism for these past 2 decades [1], there's a very clear picture to be found there. Before 2002 countries like India, Colombia and Algeria topped the "terrorism charts".
But by 2003, as a response to the "War on Terror" started by the US, you already see Iraq and Afghanistan making their way up the list, steadily increasing in the number of attacks and fatalities until in 2005 they take the top.
Since then there's been little change, only Pakistan making their way up there some years, one might wonder why? [2]
But all three of these countries represent massive outliers and make up the vast majority of "Islamic terrorism", what do they all have in common?
9/11 was bad, no debate there. But the US's reaction to 9/11 was worse, it perfectly played into Osamas original intentions of starting a "culture clash", stigmatizing even moderate Islam in the Western world, making frustrated and discriminated moderates more likely to join his cause.
In that context, the US pretty much kicked a hornet's nest down the street and still keeps kicking it to this day. Yet many US Americans keep wondering where the angry hornets are coming from and "why they hate us so much".
[0] https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html
Hm? Which crusades are those?
> Just looking at the trends for global terrorism for these past 2 decades [1], there's a very clear picture to be found there. Before 2002 countries like India, Colombia and Algeria topped the "terrorism charts".
You mean countries that had civil wars going on in them? That seems practically tautological.
> But by 2003, as a response to the "War on Terror" started by the US, you already see Iraq and Afghanistan making their way up the list, steadily increasing in the number of attacks and fatalities until in 2005 they take the top.
You mean that terrorist attacks increased in places when they had foreign military bases in their country to target? What is that evidence of, exactly?
> But all three of these countries represent massive outliers and make up the vast majority of "Islamic terrorism", what do they all have in common?
Fundamentalist Islam and low economic development.
So there may be irony in the name, but not in their practices.
I've never researched their actual background, but over the years I've noticed their content to be usually of very good quality.
I suppose it's a good example of why one should never judge a book by its cover, or in this case, the content of a website by its domain name ;)
If you look at the history of terrorism in Europe for instance, before the 70s it was mostly independentist mvts / de-colonisation related. 70s to early 80s was mostly far left terror attacks. Mid 80s state sponsored terrorism (Libya, Iran). 90s to now, islamist terrorism.
Islamists were blowing bombs in the metro in Paris in the 90s, and tried a 9/11 style plane attack on Paris in 1994 [1].
Islamism is a worldwide phenomenon, like communism in its time. If you go through every single muslim country from Marocco to Indonesia, the largest or second largest political party is an islamist party, or the islamists are in power, or they have been outlawed after taking too much power, or they are one of the major party to a civil war. Terrorism is a side effect of this rise in islamism, like the red brigades, RAF, etc were to communism.
So no, it’s not just a reaction to the war in Iraq.
And what allowed Islamism to rise and prosper like that over these past decades?
The power vacuum created by the removal of Saddam in an illegal invasion? The resulting unleashed sectarian violence?
You can't just switch around cause and effect like that and call it a day. To quote from the 2001 article:
> Moderate Muslim opinion could also easily be swayed against America, predicted Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, head of the Muslim Parliament in Britain, an umbrella group for Muslim organizations. "If they end up killing innocent civilians it will be very unfair," Dr. Siddiqui said. "The problems will arise if people see that justice has not been done."
Now, nearly 2 decades later, we have relentless and ML driven drone warfare [0], torture scandals [1], a US president who is not only condoning it but actively advocating for it. The blatant injustice is done out in the open to see for everybody [2], justified in haphazard "They do not have rights" ways to a point where a US president just declares a "Muslim ban", followed up with pointless legal shenanigans how "it totally isn't a Muslim ban, but a Muslim country ban!", like that's in any way better.
How can you look at all that and deny it contributed to the rise of Islamist sentiments? Don't you think it's kind of telling that you have to summon the good ol "they caught the communism" bug to still justify these US actions?
Is it really that difficult to take a step back and admit: "We've fucked up, we've been going about this the wrong way from the very beginning"? Is doubling down on this oppressive and destructive path really the only way forward from here?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
It seems to me that your question is coming at this from the wrong angle.
a) be aware of all the information relevant to each operation
b) make a judgment as to whether each individual operation is worthwhile
Now, i'm not saying that makes them infallible. It certainly doesn't. There's a long history of people in such positions making poor choices. But if you're implying that they are, i'd like to see some evidence. Because what I see is a lot of "civilians died, therefore it was bad", but very little consideration of the objective of the mission, and whether or not the possibility of collateral damage was justified. What we do know is that smart people in positions of power believed that it was, and i'm happy to second-guess those beliefs if given good reason, but thus far i've never seen anyone give good reason in the case of these drone strikes.
Because the very action they are using to eliminate enemy combatants may in fact be creating more of them?
That's an interesting statement. Do you have evidence for it?
“over the past 15 years. Increased US efforts are correlated with a worsening of the overall terror situation. Statistical modeling indicates for every additional billion dollars spent and 1,000 American troops sent to fight the war on terror, the number of terror attacks worldwide increased by 19 (data available from the author). Furthermore, the model finds up to 80 percent of the variation in the number of worldwide terror attacks since 9/11 can be explained by just those two variables—US money spent and military members sent to fight the war on terror. The data for both money spent and troops deployed come from the Congressional Research Service publication, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 by Amy Belasco. The number of terror attacks is from the Global Terrorism Database, hosted by the University of Maryland.”
“The data show countries the US invaded had 143 more terror attacks per year than countries the US did not invade. Similarly, countries in which the US conducted drone strikes were home to 395 more terror attacks per year than those where the US did not.”
https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/issues/Spring...
The fundamental problem is that where the US targets its drone strikes is (or at least, should be) correlated to where terrorism is in the process of springing up. So, if our government was actually doing a really great job analyzing these things, you would see the same data pattern - drone strikes lead terrorist attacks.