There's a high cost in both money and human lives - nationality should not be a consideration.
I know it's not the same issue, but throughout the whole NSA snooping revelations, Americans have only been concerned by the legality of spying on their own citizens. All of us foreigners are fair game.
This is similar. The value of an American life is much more than that of a foreigner's life.
When the US government decides a US citizen's communication patterns makes him a terrorist, the US government is free to knock down their door in the middle of the night and whisk them off to Guantanamo, and NO ONE except the US government can do anything to stop them.
When the US government decides a foreigner is a terrorist, they have to ASK your government to cooperate, and if they don't, the US has to be ready to go to war to kill/capture him.
The difference between the NSA spying on an American and a foreigner is that only the foreigner has a government that can protect them from the US government.
Pakistan is a nuclear power and even they don't have a government that can protect its people from the US government.
While I dislike how the U. S. government has decided that who they classify as terrorists superceding the rights of a US citizen, this is just wrong. Communicating with terrorists on a typical basis isn't enough for the U. S. government to do so - the only cases where I have heard of this happening is when the US citizen in question has carried out actual violent terrorist actions such as armed combat.
You have far less protection against the U. S. government if you are not a citizen, since there is nothing protecting you against broad actions. You can be assassinated in the middle of the night & your government wouldn't be able to do a damn thing to pre-empt that. There are also far less protections as to spying as well, but that has nothing to do with this article.
For the time being. Do you think how the surveillance apparatus currently works is how it will always work in perpetuity?
Some B.A. in the NSA digs through your traffic and decides you are some terrorist mastermind, next thing you know a Hellfire blows up your home and family.
So maybe we can someday go to globalism. Putting the whole of humanity inside your circle of concern, not just your friends and members of your tribe.
Still, judging from the actions of the democratically elected UK government, you lot don't seem to do much better...
Our government isn't democratically elected - had they enacted the electoral reforms that they said they would, the next might have been - but they won't, and it won't be.
Americans feel this way, sure. But Americans are only 4% of humans, and soon 100% of humans will be on the Internet.
This worldview is not an economic survival trait.
I suggest relaxing, brewing some tea, and waiting for this to play out in the global market. Either they'll change, or they'll go out of business.
I know this may seem like semantic silliness, but here of all places i expect accuracy within region. to the larger point, at this time, american minds are more valuable in terms of conviction, as it is our country that is so reckless in regards to others, be it in the realms of security, supply lines, manufacturing, etc. This is no an inherent value; the most important dude at the party is always the person with the weed. It is not because she is better than her peers, it is because of her relationship to here peers in the context of what they want and what she has. Before you charge up your righteous indignation cannons, this "importance" along with all the times i must sit through a harangue about why i need to be more respectful/appreciative of the greatest nation on earth drives me, and many other americans, completely nuts. i fucking hate it, but when i travel, my brothers and sisters from overseas will only let me be a shitty american. some of us over here are paying attention, you know.
pass the tea, mate. this whole coffee thing needs to end as well.
4.28%
I'm American. I don't feel that way at all.
Here's a sobering thought: The way super-villains are portrayed in movies is basically how leaders were expected to act up through the 1600's. Screw over and kill your neighbors to benefit your side? Just business as usual. Torture and gruesome and spectacular executions? Just business as usual. Kill prisoners and animals in large part because of the entertainment value? Just expected behavior.
I wonder if the way leaders and the national security apparatus behaves now will be viewed as super-villainy in the future? Probably.
BTW, when was the last time B52s were used to bomb weddings to kill one suspected, not convicted, terrorist? Drones are used for that, in place of human assassins, or, heaven forbid, a judicial process. Remember that? The law?
This is the difference. With drones, governments think they can get away with it. They claim it clean and use the same false equivalents you use.
Tell me, if you are to be stopped in the streets, do you want that to be by a person, or robot? In the end, that is where these cowards will end up.
So, I'm going to say "2010", but it might actually have been 2011 or 2012 or even 2013 (I haven't kept up).
All weapons are the weapons of cowards. It isn't fair that almost all the weapons we use in Afghanistan are superior to our enemies, and it isn't fair that they resort with IEDs and suicide bombs.
If you have equal weapons then you look for superiority in numbers or tactics. Long gone are the days when "honourable" war meant agreeing to fight pitched battles on terrain that suited neither side and both sides knew was coming. Those "honourable" wars were also the most brutal to both prisoners and civilians.
I'm not particularly sure about the concept of "cowardice" here, I just had to point out this logical flaw.
Non-temporal colloquial "never". "Never in their wildest dreams" never.
Oversimplification. Domestically, the US is still paying the cost of using, eg, Agent Orange in Asia, today (children of service members born deformed).
Civil lawsuit: http://www.benefits.va.gov/compensation/claims-postservice-a...
I'm sure I might pay for it one day. I'm fairly sure my kids and grandchildren will pay for it.
"The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005 (definitions are obviously fluid; these are the ones used by scholars at the universities of Uppsala and British Columbia for a project called the “Human Security Report”). On their definitions, the number of international wars peaked during the 1970s and has been falling slowly since. The number of civil wars continued to rise until about 1990 and then fell precipitately. In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s."
The Economist, 28 June 2008: http://www.economist.com/node/10564141
What war are we in currently?!
Anyway, let's try not to run into the weeds playing games. It adds no value to the conversation.
Maybe. The 'declared war game' has several nice properties:
1) It provides a definite start and end to hostilities. 2) Clearly identifies a target. 3) Has relatively clear rules of war, especially with regards to treatment of POWs and civilians.
You don't want to play that game. Ok. So what are we left with?! We have not-really-POWs at Guantanamo. We drone-strike targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and apparently Yemen. There is no clarity around who the targets are, why they are targeted, who sentences them to death and what the procedure is, how long this will last, and any other information that would introduce some sort of accountability. Just a few weeks ago, a wedding convoy was mistakenly targeted and 17 innocent people died. Clearly there was some MASSIVE lapse in intelligence. Worse, why is a convoy EVER targeted given that more than likely most convoy-travelers are either innocent or not-deserving of a death sentence even if a known terrorist is among them. So...why did this happen? who was responsible for the 'mishap'? what was done to make sure this doesn't happen again? Who was fired/disciplined/court-marshaled?
I have no power to change any aspect of the US military, but that doesn't mean I can't decry it as evil.
The one initiated by the 9/11 attacks and declared by Congress via Pub.L. 107-40 (September 14, 2011)
Using this Act almost 15 years later to justify drone attacks against targets that had nothing to do with 9/11 stretches the interpretation a little. No? I mean, surely, you're not suggesting that this act means the office of the president has perpetual authorization and apparently such a huge leeway in its interpretation.
It most emphatically was a conditional declaration of war.
> It was an authorization of military force against targets that that committed or aided in the 9/11 attacks.
"An authorization of military force" is an exercise of Congress' power to declare war. And it was against those "nations, organizations, or persons" that the President of the United States determines to have committed or aided, or harbored those who have committed or aided, in the 9/11 attacks.
> Using this Act almost 15 years later to justify drone attacks against targets that had nothing to do with 9/11 stretches the interpretation a little. No?
The attacks are against al-Qaeda, an organization which did not have "nothing to do with 9/11".
> I mean, surely, you're not suggesting that this act means the office of the president has perpetual authorization and apparently such a huge leeway in its interpretation.
Until and unless it is repealed, yes, by its plain language the AUMF gives the President perpetual authorization with very broad discretion -- which is why a number of people (including Barack Obama) have called for it's authority to be conclusively sunsetted by Congress -- though the continuing attacks against al-Qaeda aren't really any kind of a stretch.
Dirty Wars [1] is a fine piece of investigative journalism by Jeremy Schaill about exactly this.
Except there's not really a war. There's just poorly-targeted killing, or let's just call it what it is, murder.
Weddings, funerals and restaurants are not war zones.
If you know are in a war zone, you can at least do your best to avoid it or flee as a war refugee. Should all citizens start fleeing all countries being targeted by drones?
Drones are used outside of declared war zones in "targeted killings". This is an important distinction.
> There's a high cost in both money and American lives.
Likewise, there's huge financial opportunities in a war for the military-industrial complex which just so happens to have strong ties with our political leadership.
I don't war a war at all. I want sovereign countries to be left to their own.
If there is a cross-country attack, then it can be handled either by the country's police (if it was by individuals acting on their own) or by a proper war operation.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/02/us-syria-crisis-to...
By some accounts, 1 in 10 killed was a child. Why don't we ever discuss this on HN?
Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.
I don't pretend to have the answer in the case of Syria, and I'm not advocating anything one way or another. I'm just pointing out that your model of the world doesn't appear to predict the past, let alone the future.
Kosovo is also disputed even in terms of actual casualties, let alone projected casualties, and is probably not a good case for intervention.
I fully agree there is not a good answer either way (syria included)... Just pointing out that your examples don't really predict the past or future either. Prediction in any case seems like a waste of time. (Unless you're The Doctor that is.)
A group of armed Tutsi's is ultimately what ended the Rwandan genocide. So yes, that likely would have worked well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide#Rwandan_Patrio...
Genocide tipping in exactly the opposite direction is another (obviously unintended) possibility. Oh yeah... The rest of the wiki you link talks about that... Oops!
You can't predict a future that didn't happen. (Again unless you're The Doctor).
Also it isn't so convincing to link to a wiki section that supposedly proves your point about reducing bloodshed, while the very next section on the page describes 5 million people killed in the same area in the following decade.
Also, I'd be a little embarrassed to suggest that the solution is to not have any media or political coverage. At the very least, there should be more coverage on the world stage.
It can only help if leaders know the world is watching, their acts are being recorded, and someday they may be held accountable.
Yes.
How many have died in the US Civil war? I read ~215K combat deaths and ~500K civillian deaths.
Should someone had intervene, e.g Britain or France, aiding one side over the other (and pushing their own agenda)?
>Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.
Actually, in historical terms, joining WWII was an already made decision, not something the US was "dragged on". The Pearl Harbor was just a pretext, and they worked quite hard on provoking that kind of aggression from the Japanese. They US (not the people, the policy makers and large interests) saw the decline of the old colonial powers, and reached for the opportunity to get a large slice of the post-colonial pie.
Plus, it had a long colonial/invasion history of its own, from Philipines to Mexico and beyond by that time.
Yes, WWII is well documented. The point was we didn't send in our full military until 1941. It's possible tens of millions more people would not have died if we had joined earlier.
That's not the civil war I asked about though -- the revolutionary war was already between 2 different nations (well, one under construction).
And there was other differences: France did it to weaken Britain (the part which was their rival to their colonial and trade empire). Not to "bring justice/democracy/what have you".
And if France could do much power-wise, it would have taken whatever much it could from the new nation.
This is war against terrorism. We are not in war with Pakistan. In fact we send them billion of dollars as aides. Then as reasonable Citizen it is my duty to ask - hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in war against terrorism, are we anywhere close to winning it? Are we even using a winning strategy? If not, why spend american lives and money pretending world police where we should leave it to the UN?
Aha, your theory of history is of a teleological bent. Not really my cup of tea, as it requires ignoring nearly the entirety of human history...
We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.
The real solution, of course, is to avoid wars, and violence, in general. Supposedly, the world is more peaceful now than ever, even with Syria, the train station suicide bomber is Russia today, etc.
Personally, I don't want to see the US be the world police. There's a high cost in both money and American lives. Still, for the foreseeable future, the world needs to address the problems and try to solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.