Israel is bombarding Gaza, slaughtering civilians en masse and vowing to turn it into a “city of tents” following this weekend’s horrific violence. An immediate cease-fire to end the cycle of bloodshed couldn’t be more urgent.
For the last two decades, the United States has been conducting an undeclared war across much of the globe. It has taken pains to normalize the use of drone warfare outside established war zones.
What should not get lost in all the bold-type words like “failure” and “flawed intelligence” is that virtually none of it was unforeseeable. The killings have resulted from policies that gave very low priority to prevention of civilian deaths.
“Even when the events depicted are far away, journalists and forensic analysts, deeply immersed in a flood of explicit, violent, and disturbing photos and video, may feel that it is seeping into their own personal headspace...”
These themes resonate today: need to limit casualties among “our” troops, who are not necessarily white, though the people who control them usually are; the pretense that “precision bombing” differentiates between “lawbreakers” and “innocents."
“If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”
Everything we thought we knew about drone warfare -- and America’s wars more broadly -- is about to be thrown out the window. Under the circumstances, one thing is predictable: ever more civilians are going to die in America’s wars.
New reports show an escalation in civilian casualties from U.S. operations in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia — and a pattern of U.S. denial about the scale of the problem.
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