Drones and collateral damage

Children could, and should, be off limits.

by Mel Watkins

Some of us are old enough to remember how, during the protests in the 1960s against the Vietnam War, in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, we would shout: "LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

We turned a tragedy into a taunt but it had the merit of being the kind of truth that doesn't otherwise get widely acknowledged.

The murder of children is what we now call "collateral damage," but the very term reminds us that the Johnson administration knew what would happen and did it anyway.  And what we also now know is that the whole war in Vietnam was a big mistake, so any way you look at it, those children died for no purpose whatsoever.

History has a habit, if we don't heed it, of repeating itself, one horror after another. Of the hopes that the current American president Barack Obama has dashed, his sins of commission and omission, none is more upsetting than his hands-on targeted killings by drones, and nothing is more horrifying than the children who have been killed, literally blown to smithereens, so that there is not even a body to bury.

Since George W Bush began these assassinations, they have been sharply accelerated by Obama.  It is estimated that 200 children have been killed — by accident, of course; it would be otherwise inexcusable. Only real terrorists are targeted, and the fact they have families and live in communities that have children is simply unfortunate. It's a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the kind of mistake a child might make.

It was hard to listen to John Brennan, Obama's top targeteer, in his confirmation hearings before the Senate to head the CIA, talking about the "care" his people take and the "agony" they experience. Tell that to those who grieve.

It's hard, too, not to contrast what Obama is doing to children in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia with the depth of his decency, his compassion, his ability to heal, when twenty children were massacred in Newtown Connecticut in December.

We know the difference: they were American, and that's what matters. Indeed, as the Senate hearings showed, the biggest issue about the drone killings was whether the President had the right to kill an American citizen. This is to tell us more than we might wish about the moral thinness of that thing called globalization.

I must say it occurs to me, what's to stop the National Rifle Association and all those who oppose gun control from using the "collateral damage" argument for their purposes? Insist that what one crazed person does is the collateral damage, the risk that must be taken, so that Americans can exercise their constitutional right to bear arms?

A moral of all this is that war, while we await its abolition, is conducted within limits and children could, and should, be off limits.  Say what you will about the war on terror, those 200 children were not perpetrators.

That Obama can be both the healer and the executioner is a stunning example of how power brings out both the best and the worst in people. How can that message be made to get through to the White House?

At the same time, it cannot be ruled out that our side's designated "war" on terror that strikes terror and anger and calls forth vengeance in those it stalks is as stupid and self-defeating and evil as was the war in Vietnam. Today we have a monopoly on drones. It will not last long. Washington needs to clean up its act, to set an example.

We need a rule of law, a moral code. There need to be lines that cannot be crossed, things that must not be done.

© Copyright 2013 Mel Watkins, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca