I have just spent seven days touring the French Western Front battle fields of the Great War, a war that claimed 9,500,000 lives, including 60,000 Australians.
An average 6,046 people were killed every day of this war, a toll delivered by appalling political and military leaders who cared little for their own people, let alone their enemy’s.
It made me think about the rapidly escalating use of drones by America to kill the leaders of its terrorist enemies and whether I can condone the strategy of arbitrary assassination, with its additional murder of innocent bystanders.
While I was mildly in favour of it before this trip, I am now more firmly in favour of it, but with a caveat. It makes sense to ‘take out’ the leaders who are wasting human life. In an article in the International New York Times by Scott Shane, Mr. Obama is quoted as often telling aides, “Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us”.
So by all accounts the drone assassination strategy is working. America is demolishing the leadership of terrorist groups simply by using an airman in Nevada steering a drone and firing a rocket. No ‘boots on the ground’. The same newspaper report states, “The Pakistanis estimate that Al Qaeda has lost 40 loyalists, of all ranks, to American drone strikes in the past six months”. “Core Al Qaeda is a rump of its former self,” said an American counterterrorism official.
But do we trust the US government to be responsible, or more importantly honourable, in its actions and what it reports to us?
When George W Bush left the White House he had in place complex rules for his issuing an assassination strike by drone and they were rarely applied. Under the Obama presidency the number of drone assassinations has jumped to an average of one every three to four days and they no longer need the President to approve these strikes. The authority to kill has moved down the command chain.
Civilian casualties
The latest reports from three organisations – the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Long War Journal – identify that 522 strikes have been made, killing 3,852 people with 476 of those being civilians. In fact they all have been civilians in that they have not been soldiers in a national army.
With volume of strikes comes errors, which means civilian casualties. Volume also brings an inevitable detachment to the process and outcomes. On the other side, the increased volume of casualties and growing apparent detachment on the part of the Americans, breeds increased alienation and hatred among those innocent people affected by the drones themselves or the perceived attack on their sovereignty and religion. It’s a dangerous mix.
That said, I have to still err on the side of the drones when I consider the destruction to humanity and challenge to our way of life that a few fanatical leaders can create.
If only we had drones in 1914.
What do you think?
[To read a Frank & Earnest story about other non-military uses of drones, go to It’s a Jetson’s World]
