Drones!

There has been a great deal of recent and not so recent controversy around the use of unmanned aircraft known as drones and their employment in the war on terror in the Middle East and other places. A recent news report has stated that as many as fifty countries or more now have some sort of drone technology, although it is not known how many have the ability to kill people with that technology. Some statistics have shown that the Bush administration killed around fifty four people with their drone attacks while the Obama administration has greatly expanded their use to up upwards of over three hundred and fifty kills in just four years. The Bushies seemed to prefer the more traditional hand to hand operations while the Obama people prefer the more hands off approach that risks fewer lives.

The war on terror really began to escalate under the Bush administration after September eleventh, 2001 and so the gold standard of that fight can be traced back to the Bush years and everything is measured against what the Bushies did. However, valid points have been brought up that surround what the Obama administration is doing and how that relates to the precedents that may be set for future presidents to follow. There are those who are making a somewhat feeble attempt to try to rehabilitate George W. Bush’s reputation in the areas of war and terror but we would remind them all that this was a president so ill prepared for office that he did not even have the sense to realize that an attack on the American homeland was imminent even with adequate evidence placed before of that fact! Then there are those lumped among the conspiracy theorists who believe that this war on terror was what the Bushies had wanted all along! Either way, they changed American history in a way that they probably did not have a right to do! As we approach the tenth anniversary of the Bush led invasion of Iraq it might be good to remember that all sorts of rights and precedents were altered or destroyed by these people in their rush to war! To question Barack Obama when he tries to save American lives when cast into comparison to the thousands who died because of the Bush transgressions, we feel makes a questionable argument at best! When we remember the tensions shown in the photographs taken in the White House situation room when the bin Laden raid took place and contrast the eagerness that was in evidence with the attack on Iraq in 2003, it tells a story all of its own! And, we cannot predict what future presidents can or will do after Obama is gone, but, as with Mitt Romney, we can take a close look at the people that he surrounded himself with who were the old holdovers from the Bush years! We will simply have to trust that the American people will make the right decisions about who they entrust the levers of power with and that George W. Bush was an aberration that will not happen again!

It can be argued that September eleventh began the true war on terrorism and highlighted Osama bin Laden as the main objective in that war. But, over the seven succeeding years after September eleventh, the Bush administration was never able to capture or kill bin Laden and we feel that it was significant that when bin Laden was finally taken down that it was not a drone attack that did the deed. President Obama felt that we needed the body if we could get it to prove to the world that bin Laden was indeed out of the picture. However, since that time, drones have been used almost exclusively to kill terrorists, at least as far as we know from what has been released to the public. We must remember that this is a war clouded in secrecy. We do know from information released to the press that there are anti terror events that go on every day somewhere across the world involving navy Seals or other apparatus and that many others have been captured or killed that we have no information about at all.

One of the other great issues surrounding drone attacks appears to be the sterility of the nature of these attacks and the remote nature of the operators who carry out the orders that emanate from the highest levels of the United States elected government. A bomb fired from a drone kills whatever it hits and we do not have the discrimination that was available in the bin Laden attack where those surrounding the terrorist leader were generally spared from death where they might have been wiped out if drone fired bombs had been used to level the compound in Pakistan that bin Laden was hiding in. But, it is interesting to note that, after it was all said and done, Pakistan ended up leveling the bin Laden compound after all to help wipe out the memories of the intrusion onto their soil by American forces and their helplessness to do anything about it. The fact that the United States felt as if it could not involve the Pakistani’s in this operation because of the fear of notification being passed to bin Laden is also a matter for consideration. Trust is a nebulous and precious thing in the Arab world and is not always contingent on what you did yesterday for those that you must deal with or work around today! When we look at some of the results of the ongoing Arab Spring, we must acknowledge that we have lost a few trusted leaders who had been helping us in the process of it all. Hosni Mubarak chiefly comes to mind in all of this as we watched his regime in Egypt fall after only eighteen days. We wonder if trust and the quick collapse of that regime might go hand in hand as those that we cannot trust did and have hung on far longer in places like Syria!

The fact is that there is a great resentment toward the United States in the Arab world is not in debate here. Nor is the fact that people like Osama bin Laden have capitalized on that resentment to build and sustain their organizations where ever they might exist. One of the questions surrounding the use of drones is that their indiscriminant, sterile killings are adding to that resentment and its expansion into outright hate. The only way that the United States can be associated with this hate is the fact that we have been in the region at all. We are reminded that the population of the Middle East also hated the infidels as they called the crusaders of many centuries ago, so hate in that area has a long history. Of all the regions in the world, the Middle East is both one of the richest because of its oil wealth and also one of the most backward because of several factors including its adherence to an eighth century idea of religion that included such things as a very repressive Shania law that includes very harsh punishments for a multitude of supposed sins, including death for many of them. This probably arises out of the fact that the Middle East is so often a desolate desert area where life has been hard, harsh and difficult for many, many years. Where much of the rest of the developed world has made advancements in civil rights, it has come hard for areas of the Middle East, particularly in the area of women’s rights!

No matter what the facts of the situation are, there is, as a bottom line, a great hate for westerners among some segments of Middle East society and that is combined with the questionable romanticism of being able to die for Allah and spend eternity in a paradise populated with the things that so many of the deprived young people, mainly men, seem to want out of a very limited horizon life. The fact that people like Osama bin Laden can take advantage of these simmering hatreds and desires is a fault and a failure of the societies from which they have sprung. But, also, the backing of repressive, venial old dictators through the decades has not helped the United States reputation in the region at all in its quest for affordable oil which is probably our only reason for even being there. Also, our passion for helping Israel only feeds that hate that so many Arabs feel for both the United States and the Jewish state!

As we see what has happened in the Arab Spring in Egypt, and other nations, there is both an opportunity and a peril in the advance of these people through increased education. Education is a good thing, however, education with no job opportunities is a very bad thing indeed! While the educated want one version of freedom, when it comes, it is so often defined by those such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and other places whose ambitions are clouded by their religion as they bend the new found freedoms that they have into ways that may benefit the terrorists as much as they benefit anyone else. As we look at places like the newly freed Iraq, we see the great western intentions of a defined democracy on their terms subverted as the Iraqi government begins to form a close alliance with the theocracy of Iran. There is a great clash of ideas and aims as we wonder if we would have been better off leaving Saddam Hussein in power as a check to Iran while we watch the Iranians meddle in the Syrian version of the Arab Spring. And, then, we see the reports coming out of Syria that very radical groups are fighting among the rebels there and it really makes us unsure of just who we might want to win there. Assad is a very repressive ruler but the United States does not want to see a crescent of Iran, Iraq and Syria extending across the heart of the Middle East with Iran being the heart of that being. The big winner in all of this turmoil may very well be Iran as they embody all of the religious fervor that so dominates a society that spends a great deal of every Friday kneeling in prayer before it leaves those services to go participle in demonstrations against the governments of the region.

However we might want to look at it, the genie is out of the bottle and there is very little that the United States can do to affect events there at this time. So much of what we do might be considered counter productive and drone strikes might be the very least of those interventions. This mess all began to boil with the attack on the World Trade Center in September of 2001 and the very best that this nation can do is to try to protect the homeland from any further attacks that might further disrupt a very fragile economic recovery. And, the most that we could do is to become energy independent so that we can quit relying on this very unstable region so that the merchants of death among the radical Arab populations can turn their attentions elsewhere as we recede from the scene.! Unless there is a great change in Arab societies, people like Osama bin Laden have set the pace for taking those left with little upon this earth and giving them a reason to hope, and a cause to die for. And, it doesn’t matter much whether the infidel is America, Europe, or some perceived evil from the past, the fight will go on and drones are, we feel, a very inconsequential part of it. It is also best remembered that the people of the Middle East who follow Allah are much more exercised when the prophet is offended than they are when some of their own die. Death is a way of life in this region but the God that they serve is the well spring of their lives! We live in an interconnected, global economy and oil is one of the basis for its existence. Many prescient observers have noted that there is at least the potential for a greater tension and instability in that world, and, that those tensions arise to a great extent from the events unfolding in the Middle East today. We feel that little can be done to affect those events and that we must simply strap ourselves on to the rocket and ride it to wherever it may take us. When we look at how the rest of the world is throwing money at the United States as a safe place for investment with little interest reward in return, however, our situation may not be as dire, at least in comparison to how others see the world, as we might think!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe