[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Time was freight technology, geopolitics and pure bad luck of being too physically close to a British warship could deliver an extremely unfortunate American experience: you’d get pressed, forced into seaman’s service on that ship with some of the most brutal labor around until it was convenient for them to drop you off, usually years later. Such was the manifest outrage of Americans being put through pressing we declared war on the United Kingdom for it in 1812, starting a long, long line of stupid American military egotism that only results in tragic, wrenching death and brutal male squishing of our most cherished American ideals.
Our latest grave American folly is the far, faraway land of Pakistan, a place of nuclear dangers in fractured murky tribal politics ensconced in an impossible landscape. Many Americans are uneasily aware that Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the bastion of Middle East peril we should have spilled blood for (if it was ever necessary, which it was not), yet very few citizens recognize we are at war with Pakistan--as much bloodily, butcherly fashion as any war we have waged—a war that has terribly pernicious new dangers that need to be openly discussed immediately.
The US government belatedly and underhandedly sees the Pakistani dangers, launching Predator drones from locations unknown to strike at "terrorists" with Hellfire missiles. Apparently many scary bad guys have been killed, for every single time infants, children, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and parents have their limbs blown off or eviscerated or both in the crashing plastic smashes but the United States keeps right on doing it, month after month.
The American media doesn’t like to talk about it much—even when Hillary Clinton recently took the perfectly deserved seething, searing outrage from Pakistani citizens for this new 21st century psychosis most citizens never heard of it. Hopefully that will change soon, we have immense problems presented with the war in Pakistan.
War it very well is, we used to declare it when our people (only 10 generations ago) got pressed, how could these intrusive missile strikes be anything else? Related to this issue is the shocking, crashing lack of American empathy, just how in the hell would Southerners react if some nation launched a drone that made a mistake, wiping out 20 perfectly innocent people in Atlanta one day because a missile missed a target? That happens with almost every drone strike in Pakistan.
It has now become the holiest of holy writs in Afghanistan that no civilian ever be killed, it destroys all elements of our mission there. Why then do we tolerate such appalling folly in Pakistan?
Something is wrong with our geopolitical coupling with Pakistan, those drones are launched from somewhere, and it’s not a carrier or Afghanistan. America has strong-armed weaponry and policy of death into tacit approval of another government that sure as hell won’t be found in a United Nations charter.
We are completely oblivious to the grave implications of mechanical killing by robots in this de-evolution. Drones are some kinda badass killers, it’s very true they fear nothing, have excellent bravery and take wounds perfectly, but we’re completely missing the long-term implications of a world with small nations that have no robot killing machines—are those countries forever to be abused by the merciless, relentlessly efficient killer nations that possess them?
To recap, we now have a killing un-declared at-war policy with Pakistan that very few Americans truly comprehend in a nose-wrinkling geopolitical coupling that produces horrifying gory deaths of innocents which Americans would not tolerate once, not for one second, on their own soil and people. Throw on a scary robotic era of death by machines on top of this nuclear enchilada and the result is not good. Not good at all.
We inherited this ungodly mess, yes, but does that mean we have to continue it? Is stupid deadly neocon policy that creates horrible new human issues of death something we should automatically carry on with? Is that progress in America?
No great human wisdom of warring with drones is to be found in these pixels, no great insights on what to do for the future in a world full of alleged scary threats. The point is that clear, ready coherent answers aren’t coming from the Obama/Clinton people either, and with so many unknowns we should simply stop. Stop war with drones until it can be coherently explained to the American people.