Failure of Public Imagination regarding US Drone Murders Abroad — See the Washington Post Opinion Piece by Yemen’s Minister for Human Rights, Hooria Mashhour

© 2014 Peter Free

 

15 January 2014

 

 

Citation

 

Hooria Mashhour, The United States’ bloody messes in Yemen, Washington Post (14 January 2014)

 

 

Minister Mashhour’s short essay should make the human toll of drone murder clear to even the most hypocritically blind of American readers

 

If events like these were happening in the United States, we would be in a frenzy of revenge:

 

 

December 12 was supposed to be a day of celebration for the al-Ameri family. A young bride traveled to her wedding with her relatives in Bayda province, Yemen. But in a few dark seconds their celebrations were eviscerated.

 

A U.S. drone fired at the wedding procession, destroying five vehicles and most of their occupants. Not even the bride’s car, ornately decorated in flowers for the occasion, was spared from the carnage. Senior Yemeni officials later admitted that the strike was a “mistake”.

 

Though the bride survived, the strike is said to have killed at least 14 civilians and injured 22 others, over a third of them seriously. This marks the largest death toll by a drone strike in Yemen since the drone war’s inception. It is also the largest death toll by U.S. strike since December 2009, when a U.S. cruise missile killed 41 civilians in al-Majala, including 14 women and 21 children.

 

This is not the first time a U.S. drone has killed civilians in Bayda. On Sept. 2, 2012, a U.S. plane hit a village shuttle near Radda. The vehicle was full of villagers carrying their day’s shopping. As usual, the initial press coverage labelled the dead as “al-Qaeda militants,” but when the relatives threatened to deliver the bodies to the president’s gates, the Yemeni government was forced to concede that all 12 of those people killed were civilians. Among the victims, a pregnant woman and three children were laid to rest.

 

[R]ather than forthrightly address its role in these grim events, the U.S. government has issued no admission of responsibility, nor any apology.

 

Given Yemen’s tribal structure, the U.S. generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] operative killed by drones.”

 

How can the people of Yemen build trust in their fledgling democracy when our collective will is ignored by democracy’s greatest exponent?

 

© 2014 Hooria Mashhour, The United States’ bloody messes in Yemen, Washington Post (14 January 2014) (extracts, partially re-ordered)

 

 

Unfortunately, America’s volunteer military will be the only segment of U.S. society to pay the price for drone carnage in the near future

 

The United States’ twisted system of governance is perfectly designed to allow the Military Industrial Complex’s depredations to continue.

 

Our volunteer military is the perfect instrument with which to press immoral money-making adventures abroad, without arousing the wrath of Citizen America, which would otherwise have to serve in its place.

 

And Commander in Chief Obama, attuned to domestic politics rather than law and morality, will continue his narcissistic pursuit of political impregnability to the assaults of America’s (brainlessly) warmongering political right.

 

 

A sample of the American public’s typically self-righteous moronic responses to criticisms of drone murder

 

Appended to Minister Mashhour’s essay, this one:

 

 

You notice that U.S. unmanned aircraft are not killing anyone in New Zealand or Germany or Singapore or Paraguay.

 

But you must understand: al Qaeda chooses to be indistinguishable from the rest of Yemen's populace, and Yemenis need to blame the cowardly tactics of al Qaeda, not U.S. drone operators, for that deliberate confusion.

 

I wish you the very best of luck in extinguishing the plague that is al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and I hope that your success in that endeavor is followed by generations of joyous and blessed weddings, where the only tears are happy tears.

 

© 2014 giffordj, [14 January 2014 (9:18 PM EST) comment appended to] The United States’ bloody messes in Yemen, Washington Post (14 January 2014)

 

In other words, “It’s all your fault — and, once you stop being blameworthy, we will stop killing innocent people.”

 

Apparently the supercilious Mr. Gifford thinks that it is:

 

(a) okay to kill innocent people

 

as

 

(b) repetitively undertaken collateral damage

 

in

 

(c) an undeclared war against

 

(d) innocent citizens of a sovereign nation,

 

(e) just because the United States has the means to and feels like it.

 

Based on his statements, I can fairly label Mr. Gifford an American coward.  How his perspective differs from terrorists’ escapes me.  And probably the rest of the world.

 

 

The moral? — Sometimes the immorality of specific circumstances is so clear that one can assess a nation thereby

 

If Americans will not respond to moral arguments about engaging in war criminality, perhaps they should think what it means to breed 40 to 60 new enemies for each whom we kill or injure.

 

Given the religious, philosophical, and situational ties that extend far beyond simple tribal connections in Yemen and the rest of the Islamic world — which comprises roughly 21 to 23 percent of the globe’s population — the United States is en route to making enemies of a sizeable segment of humanity.

 

Any competent geopolitical strategist will tell you that that’s just dumb.