To add, I find the parts which mention the people who were killed or otherwise affected by these strikes deeply moving despite being short and concise.

In other words, the painted picture is much broader and deeper than the man itself seemingly put into the focus. In reality, he's just used as an anchor point to tie the big picture, and might be also used as a so-called decoy (or bait) in a narrowly starting, but deeply expanding story. This doesn't make his tragedy lighter, however.

To be honest, I feel sad and disturbed for everyone involved in this.

> there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people

Who isn't manipulated in situations like this?

Remember Iraqi soldiers killing babies? And Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? The first to get manipulated are always the general public.

After that it just matters who does the killing... if it's "our guys", then every bombed wedding and reuters reporter is foreing militant or a terrorist, and if it's "them", then it's a poor civilian. If you bomb a hospital, a civilian train, bus, building, bridge or whatever... again, if it's "our guys" it was "bad intel" or "a mistake", but if it's "them", it's "war crimes for intentionall killing civilians".

To be fair, in light of recent events, I think it’s mostly a matter of scale.

Indiscriminately bombarding cities feels somehow worse than this targeted killing, and somehow better, because it’s nothing personal.

I mean... it is highly likely such events happened at much larger scale than the US public was made aware of in Iraq. How "precise" was shock and awe? I doubt the incentives are aligned for anyone to know.

Even Obama had several instances of drone killings inadvertently killing large groups of civilians -- for example: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...

Fallujah and Raqqa were pretty large scale destruction. The official civilian casualties were only in the thousands, but it's not like we dug up the cities afterwards to find all the bodies.

> In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best

I'm pretty sure that's basically standard operating procedure in the military though?

Harder to get soldiers to kill people if they think of them as people and not as the enemy.

You are asserting a critical thinking skill that really, most folks don't have. You are John LeCarre, most are Tom Clancy.

hey whats wrong with tom clancy now? (except all that jack ryan trash)

Le Carre wrote about the fact that espionage or s an allegory for all human interaction) is "all gray" with lots of moral ambiguity and nuance. Clancy's stuff makes for a decent plot for an action movie adaptation, but his ideas and characters are almost all one-note, one-dimensional "popcorn" nutrition conceptually.