Serial killing children — is this the American Way now?

01 February 2017 (numbers updated, 12 February 2017)

Theme

Serial killing children as national policy, are you fricking kidding me?

President Obama's boomeranging anti-terrorist strategy continues under President Trump

Over the weekend, we lost a Seal Team 6 member. What was not reported by America's media was strategically more important — and just as sad:

The daughter of al-Qaeda ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki [an American citizen], who was killed in a US drone strike in 2011, was among children killed in a US raid on al-Qaeda militants in Yemen on Sunday.

[And five years ago, her almost certainly non-terrorist 16-year old brother was killed by an American drone two weeks after his father was executed the same way.]

"She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours," said the eight-year-old's grandfather.

The raid that killed Awlaki's daughter was part of a dawn attack in southern Yemen on Sunday that killed a US commando and around 30 people including al-Qaeda suspects and civilians, the US military and local Yemeni officials said.

Medics at the scene said 30 people were killed, including 10 women and three children.

The US military said in a statement that 14 al-Qaeda militants died in the raid, which netted "information that will likely provide insight into the planning of future terror plots".

Updated numbers— from 08 February 2017

25 civilians including:

9 children (under age 13)

and

8 women, including a pregnant one

7 more women and children were wounded

Do the presumed math

The raid killed 14 alleged bad guys along with about 25 innocents. Nine were children. Eight were women. Seven more were wounded.

This is a starkly lopsided cost-benefit ratio from a nation that pretends that it precisely and consistently strikes only proven enemies.

We can be especially impressed with . . .

. . . the killing of two children from one family, five years apart.

Serial killing kids. Now there's some splendid public relations.

Christ.

This kind of moral vacuity parallels the humanity-degrading Abu Graib doings that we so idiotically gifted our opponents with in 2003-2004.

This is not Seal Team 6's fault

They were just courageously doing what they had been told. Once inserted into battle conditions, sparing innocents is not (and cannot be) a primary focus.

Civilian leaders who ignore this consistent attribute of war are idiots.

The place to interrupt the cycle of disproportionate violence (which kills children and their mothers) is before strategically questionable or probabilistically risky operations begin.

My quarrel is with American strategy.

Our obtusely conceptualized "war" on terror (or whatever pseudonym one wants to use for it) is a losing proposition. Unless, of course, our true goal is to continue stirring the (admittedly profit-producing) Pot of Perpetual War.

What's a few dead kids (or hospital staff) when money's to be made?

A pertinent quotation — from an anti-American adversary

Here is how one terrorist group reacted to the 8-year old's death:

“The daughter of Shaykh Anwar Al-Awlaqi is martyred in the US raid in Yemen today. Obama killed his son and now Trump kills his daughter,” Jihadist group Al Maqalaat tweeted.

Blood feud

You don't think this "blood feud" sentiment will resonate through the generations?

Especially when the two kids' ages are mentioned?

It would resonate with me.

An equally questionable twist

From the New York Times:

The main target was computer materials inside the house that could contain clues about future terrorist plots.

The military’s Central Command said in an earlier statement on Sunday that “similar operations have produced intelligence on Al Qaeda logistics, recruiting and financing efforts.”

So, you're going after materials very likely to be associated with someone's home or shared-home office space?

And at the same time, you pretend to be attempting to minimize innocent civilian casualties?

And even if those kinds of captured materials have proven useful, why is terrorism expanding rather than contracting in the geographic regions we say we care about?

Evidently

It has not occurred to the Crusades-mentality folk who concoct these operations that:

(a) captured plans get changed,

(b) identifiable perpetrators go into hiding or change their identities,

and

(d) while American strategists continue to target similarly (vaguely) alleged bad guys

(e) with essentially the same results —

(f) which are repeated over increasingly larger regions of the world.

This is a positive feedback system.

Positive feedback, in situations that one actually wants to limit and control, is the bane of competent engineers.

So why encourage the same kind of backwards mechanism in American foreign policy?

The take-away message seems to be this

Assuming that our enemies are as strategically and tactically dumb as we have been, from Vietnam on, is (by now) an obvious mistake.

Does no one influential in the United States ever evaluate the long-term effectiveness of the things we do?

Or is this just a continuing example of happily institutionalized U.S. dumbshit-ness?

Meaning that those who make and implement American policy are more interested in position, prestige and loot — than they are in doing anything demonstrably intelligent, occasionally humane, and provably effective.

The moral? — Child and mom-murderers is who have become

Killing 8-year olds and butchering almost certainly uninvolved women is a surefire way to fuel undying hostility from any population on this planet.

This is not an admirable recipe for American Patriot Soup.

What are our leaders thinking? Do they think at all?

PeteFree.com

Serial killing children — is this the American Way now?