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Wait have you guys seriously written 3 pages of responses to Obama's foreign policy without mentioning drones? I'd have thought waging a campaign of robotic assassinations in allied, enemy and neutral states would raise some eyebrows since its going to be his major contribution to US foreign policy. Especially since they're incredibly bad at anything other than destabilising allied governments, increasing jihadi recruitment and killing shitloads of civlians.
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Mar 11, 2016 17:48
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Juffo-Wup posted:Are drone strikes morally different from conventional airstrikes, in your view? Firstly, drone strikes violate international law, and probably US law too so my own moral opinion is meaningless. But so I'm not just dodging the question there is little moral difference between a drone strike and air strike used to do the same thing but drone strikes are not used to do the same thing. Drone strikes are fulfilling the out of fashion airstrike role of just saturation bombing "soft" targets which is morally repulsive, though drone strikes are used for intermittently but consistently bombing soft targets. Also I think most moral codes see some difference between killing a fighter on a battlefield and killing a fighter and everyone around him when hes at the 7-11. The main reason to be very concerned about drone warfare is they legitimise those old soft target tactics, if the USA can successfully define some guy in Utah shooting a hellfire into a flat in Kabul, killing nearly everyone inside as a "pinpoint targetted killing" or whatever and refuse to release accurate information on it then that will be how the USA and everyone acts going forward. Whats more they can now just go on indefinitely as a blatant terror strategy as we can see in Pakistan. The weirdest thing about Obama is that a constitutional lawyer went HAM on domestic spying and an international assassination campaign.
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Mar 11, 2016 19:05
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JFairfax posted:Yeah I get that, but what I am saying is that practically speaking, with the way the US uses drones - they may as well be inherently illegal because they're being used illegally all the time pretty much. Pretty much what I was saying, of course a legal bombing doesn't become illegal because its a drone. I should have specified that I am specifically talking about drone-only targetted killing operations like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia etc, which are at best assassinations and at worst state terror. The intercept's peices on the drone campaign looking at a bunch of leaked stuff (almost all info about the drone campaigns are officially secret or from misleading military sources) and is a very pro-read, they tend to be a bit strident but are all legit journalists with unique access to actual sources. https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/ This one is especially good for a look at how it doesn't work by the military's own analysis. https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/manhunting-in-the-hindu-kush/ quote:THE FREQUENCY WITH which “targeted killing” operations hit unnamed bystanders is among the more striking takeaways from the Haymaker slides. The documents show that during a five-month stretch of the campaign, nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets. By February 2013, Haymaker airstrikes had resulted in no more than 35 “jackpots,” a term used to signal the neutralization of a specific targeted individual, while more than 200 people were declared EKIA — “enemy killed in action.” quote:In the complex world of remote killing in remote locations, labeling the dead as “enemies” until proven otherwise is commonplace, said an intelligence community source with experience working on high-value targeting missions in Afghanistan, who provided the documents on the Haymaker campaign. The process often depends on assumptions or best guesses in provinces like Kunar or Nuristan, the source said, particularly if the dead include “military-age males,” or MAMs, in military parlance. “If there is no evidence that proves a person killed in a strike was either not a MAM, or was a MAM but not an unlawful enemy combatant, then there is no question,” he said. “They label them EKIA.” In the case of airstrikes in a campaign like Haymaker, the source added, missiles could be fired from a variety of aircraft. “But nine times out of 10 it’s a drone strike.” quote:Despite the rise in civilian casualties and the well-documented failure of drone strikes to achieve the military’s broader objectives, there is every indication that unmanned airstrikes will play an increasing role in U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan, as they have in war zones across the world. Less than two weeks after the U.N. issued its report, Foreign Policy revealed that JSOC has drastically reduced the number of night raids it conducts in Afghanistan, while dramatically increasing its reliance on airstrikes, and is currently “on pace to double the rate at which it kills ‘high-value individuals’ using kinetic strikes, compared to how many it was killing that way five years ago.” e: and as to why drone strike killings are a seperate concern from regular bombardment: quote:While many of the documents provided to The Intercept contain explicit internal recommendations for improving unconventional U.S. warfare, the source said that what’s implicit is even more significant. The mentality reflected in the documents on the assassination programs is: “This process can work. We can work out the kinks. We can excuse the mistakes. And eventually we will get it down to the point where we don’t have to continuously come back … and explain why a bunch of innocent people got killed.” Communist Thoughts fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 20:03
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Obama's "doctrine" seems to be doing the same bad stuff as Bush et al but more thoughtfully and competently. Unfortunately for him he is both not actually evil and buys into the benevolence of America's plan for the world, which means he ends up twisting in the wind when faced with a situation previous Presidents would have dealt with by just bombing or invading. So Obama settles for a little bombing here and there with assassination droids because that seems more sensible than using planes, or airstrike only campaigns that seem more sensible than land invasions, neither of them work but neither would the thing they're replacing. Fullscale domestic and allied spying? Sounds sensible and modern so that'll do too. I think a lot of people were excited for Obama before he was elected because he seemed like a guy who really beleived in the dream of America but thats a double edged sword. The world ended up with a guy who doesn't beleive in meaningless violence but who still beleives in "american interests" re: distrusting its own population and having total jurisdiction over foreign citizens.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:45
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