Why is the article focusing on the goon pulling the trigger, as opposed to these actual killed-dead casualties?
In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best. This is a completely valid journalistic subject, separate from the people who were killed.
In other words, the painted picture is much broader and deeper than the man itself seemingly put into the focus. In reality, he's just used as an anchor point to tie the big picture, and might be also used as a so-called decoy (or bait) in a narrowly starting, but deeply expanding story. This doesn't make his tragedy lighter, however.
To be honest, I feel sad and disturbed for everyone involved in this.
Who isn't manipulated in situations like this?
Remember Iraqi soldiers killing babies? And Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? The first to get manipulated are always the general public.
After that it just matters who does the killing... if it's "our guys", then every bombed wedding and reuters reporter is foreing militant or a terrorist, and if it's "them", then it's a poor civilian. If you bomb a hospital, a civilian train, bus, building, bridge or whatever... again, if it's "our guys" it was "bad intel" or "a mistake", but if it's "them", it's "war crimes for intentionall killing civilians".
Indiscriminately bombarding cities feels somehow worse than this targeted killing, and somehow better, because it’s nothing personal.
Even Obama had several instances of drone killings inadvertently killing large groups of civilians -- for example: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...
I'm pretty sure that's basically standard operating procedure in the military though?
Harder to get soldiers to kill people if they think of them as people and not as the enemy.
Hannah Arendt
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Himmler was horrified and mentally affected after mass shooting he seen. So, he started to figure out how to kill Jews differently, out of worry for mental health of German soldiers.
So, the above is at best him figuring out how to kill more effectively. Definitely not some kind of guilt or regret.
Himmler speaks of the challenge of remaining a decent person despite witnessing and committing atrocities (the section around “Dies durchgehalten zu haben, und dabei – abgesehen von menschlichen Ausnahmeschwächen – anständig geblieben zu sein”), showing the kind of reversal at work that Arendt describes.
I can’t imagine the thought process that says “humans have had a visceral reaction to the killing of women and children specifically in war, across millennia and across cultures, but surely such thinking is obsolete in our generation.”
Some nations just won’t tolerate their men fleeing a crisis leaving women and kids behind, state or no state. Western Anglo/EU culture skews towards this, but not as hard.
Hence the broad support for them.
Doing things for a long time is never justification for thinking about them uncritically.
In the same vein, something being old does not mean you can dismiss it out of hand. There is wisdom in thousands of years of human existence, and plenty of people have the hubris to dismiss it all.
This sounds pretty much right at least as far as men vs women, though. If you truly want equal rights then that should come with equal privileges. Historically or evolutionarily, women were valued more in such a situation because they make babies - now, so what, we're clearly not running out of babies if you look at population trends. Either everyone fit to serve should have to stay or nobody should have to stay, not based on the circumstances of their birth.
All that's being pointed out here is that it can't both be the case that there are no relevant differences between men and women and also that a phrase like "women and children" is useful. You have to pick one.
I think most people even in America embrace a pragmatic egalitarianism where they think it's okay for women or men to be lawyers or politicians, but men continue to have a unique role when it comes to fighting wars or fixing power lines in the middle of a storm, while women continue to have a unique role when it comes to reproducing the species.
I think it's a small minority who think the difference between 1930 and today is solely due to us being more enlightened about gender roles, and nothing to do with the fact that the primary achievements of that age had to do with things like building thousands of miles of highways, while the primary achievements of this age are quite different.
If a drone strike kills five men, who knows whether they were enemy combatants? Your example is murky and vague, through no fault of the dead men. If it kills three kids under the age of 10 and two mothers, it's more obvious the casualties weren't combatants. If you're a journalist and you're looking for examples of clearly horrific drone strikes, you point to the one that killed people who were most obviously non-combatants.
I think you know this and you're asking a rhetorical question about the value of human life, but it's a question with a real answer. "Innocent adults" is a phrase less self-evident than "innocent women and children" because of the way militaries and insurgent groups recruit.
> … All that's being pointed out here is that it can't both be the case that there are no relevant differences between men and women and also that a phrase like "women and children" is useful. You have to pick one.
I would not be more outraged if the Taliban killed an armed American servicewoman than a serviceman. If you would, then that's your opinion, but you should stand by it instead of attributing it to me.
Why is the article focusing on [an uncomfortable but lesser-known side aspect of war], as opposed to [the more obvious bad aspects of war we already know about]?
Because war is what you call "complicated". It is this complexity that the article was attempting to address.
A similar spin was with the Abu Ghraib: torturers were humanized and their victims dehumanized.
Conversely, what is described in this article is the worst of both worlds. After spending days looking at their lives you are most definitely killing a human/father/grandfather.
It's "hilarious" when anyone in the US says about anyone else they are war criminals, since they don't recognise ICC. (Also, hello India and China)
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...