I don’t think it has to do with their skin. I think it has to do with their remoteness and the only way to get to them is to find them from the air and launch a strike. If they were hiding out in the middle of Baghdad they would send in soldier to fight them.
In general, the ROE in the Middle East has been very mindful of civilians. To the point that soldier have died because they were fighting too close to civilians for air or artillery support.
I think that’s slightly naive. Would the U.S. even consider using an air strike or artillery to take out a suspected terror cell in a remote area of Canada or the Australian outback? Especially without conclusive evidence that it was actually a terror cell and not just a bunch of families out for a camping trip?
I disagree. What has changed most since the cold war is that most of the US’s supposed adversaries are non-state actors. So with regards to diplomacy. intelligence, combat etc there is no neat separation between civilians and combatants. So, with the exception of more well-known members, there really does not seem to be any way to know which people are adversaries - and discussion of this is avoided pretty much everywhere. When the US was combing through mountains and caves in Afghanistan, did they check to see who had Taliban membership cards? Of course not - they guessed, and the specific criteria of who was killed and what the criteria were is hidden in national security records, if anywhere.
Even less impressive is the US’s mindfulness of national sovereignty. It’s suddenly our faux humanitarian crisis when there’s a bit of social unrest in the US’s favorite strategic areas, but there’s never any talk of intervention when it’s worse in debt-stricken sub-Saharan Africa.
Come on, neither of those places are like the Mountain regions near Pakistan or the other areas they have had strikes. They were on hostile land we were actively at war with (or what ever they call it).
I am not saying there isn’t a certain callousness to it. I think the general apathy of “no one I know or care about lives there” is more of a reason than racism.
About ROE? Read what it was and compare it to Vietnam or WWII.
From a geographic standpoint there are definitely areas in those countries as remote as the border regions of Pakistan (a country which is ostensibly our ally even though we’ve been engaged in a largely counterproductive campaign of bombing the bejeezus out of its civilian population).
“Those guys are too remote for us to confirm the intel, so we hit them from the air just to be sure” would never fly if the civilian casualties looked like people most Americans could relate to.
Like Glenn Greenwald, I disagree. As with other U.S. wars, the “war” on “terror” is a thoroughly racist war. As GG wrote about the killing of a certain American:
Many Americans can (a) say that they oppose the targeted killings of Americans on foreign soil while simultaneously (b) supporting the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen because, for them, the term “Americans” doesn’t include people like [the American] Anwar al-Awlaki. “Americans” means their aunts and uncles, their nice neighbors down the street, and anyone else who looks like them, who looks and seems “American”. They don’t think those people - Americans - should be killed without charges by the US government if they travel on vacation to Paris or go to study for a semester in London. But the concept of “Americans” most definitely does not include people with foreign and Muslim-ish names like “Anwar al-Awlaki” who wear the white robes of a Muslim imam and spend time in a place like Yemen…
Does anyone doubt that if Obama’s bombs were killing nice white British teeangers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp?
If by Ft. Hood, you mean the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and by jihadist you mean racist psychopaths bent on fomenting a race war, then yeah, Roof is a lone wolf in the white supremacist army of lone wolves who think The Turner Diaries is a how-to manual.
If you took the number of people killed and graphed that against the year each killing happened, sorted by ideological basis, the 9-11 attack would be a massively outlying data point. If you handed that data to a data analyst, and didn’t tell them what the data was, they’d probably throw out that data point as an aberration. It does seem like they should have gone back to the first Islamic jihad motivated attack. If they had done that, and then excluded 9-11 and the Oklahoma City bombing as outliers, I think it would be a justifiable presentation of the data. As it is, it’s a little odd.
Doesn’t look like the picture @Mister44 paints of “mindful” and sophisticated experts at work.
Why wouldn’t you exclude 9/11? It was after that event that the US went crazy going after “terr’ists” on the other side of the planet while simultaneously dismantling the Bill of Rights domestically. In addition, it paints a rather stark picture of how the security apparatus isn’t acceptably dealing with the terrorists in our midst who happen to believe in approximately the same flavor or Abrahamic deity as the people running the security apparatus.
As my poor analogy shows, it doesn’t make sense to exclude it.
“Americans are the worst terrorists! (Except for the 3,000+ people killed by other terrorists on 9/11, but let’s not count them.)”
That makes little sense at all.
“99% of the murders in Detroit last year were done by black men! (Except the ones by white men, which I am leaving out of my statistic.)”
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