And the War Drones On 0
As my two or three regular readers know, I did not think that getting into Libya was a good thing from the git-go.
Never, when the United States has involved itself in the strictly internal affairs of another country, however vile those internal affairs may have been, has it ended well for anyone involved. Now . . .
Mr Gates said their use had been authorised by President Barack Obama and would give “precision capability” to the military operation.
There’s nothing precision about them.
I know a soldier whose job included calling in drone and air strikes in Afghanistan.
He didn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t even like to think about it.
He was close enough to his job to understand the consequences of a mistake; he agonized about it every day.
To the suits in Washington and other capitals, it’s a board game.
Soldiers and civilians are markers on the board. What’s a few markers more or less?
Meanwhile, in the Asia Times, Tom Engelhart, in an article written before this announcement was droned to the press, is not optimistic. A nugget:
We just don’t treat it as such, tending instead to deal with the foreign and domestic as essentially separate spheres, when the connections between them are so obvious. If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station and fill up the tank. Of course, who doesn’t know that this country, once such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it’s hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for planning how to get off that drug), or that it’s living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history? And who doesn’t know that a crew of financial fabulists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?
