The way America is conducting the war on terror is both self-defeating and morally repugnant.
If terrorists disappeared tomorrow. Let's say we use our surgical strike weapons to target every cell every member, and in one hour they are gone. What would happen? Billions of dollars disappear from the pockets of everyone in the chain. Military contractors, drone maintenance, promotions, bonuses, career advancements, no more completed missions, medals, no job to go to.
So the direct financial and career incentive for everyone in the chain is to always make sure there is a stream of new terrorists, new cells, new intelligence chatter about "the Great Satan". And that is indirectly accomplished by indiscriminately bombing civilians. Everyone who is involved in picking the target and knows it is a funeral, will know civilians will die. I can't help but think they also know it is job insurance as well. They would be stupid not to.
American public via media has been tested enough during releases of so many atrocities, torture tapes, lies, monitoring that by now, I think they've built an accurate model of how much outrage will be generated and how much will actually threaten future operations, funding, reelection and so on (so far not much).
The bottom line, I don't even know and 100% believe them when they say these are all "mistakes". The incentives and the motivation, especially in the long term, is for them not to really care if civilians get bombed.
Any industry that is built on addressing problems that people naturally have is going to generate lots of revenue. It has been proven that people naturally fight with each other. People fight over race, religion, sports, politics, and territory. Nations do the same thing.
If you think it would end terrorism by killing all current terrorists and if you think it would even be possible, I think you're misguided.
The truth of one conspiracy cannot be used as evidence for the truth of others. It simply doesn't make sense.
[0] They didn't really laugh at Einstein, but you get the idea.
Once Einstein[0] had published his theory of relativity people stopped laughing, and they never laughed at him again.
[0] They still didn't laugh at Einstein, but you get the idea.
Is that the true division between conspiracy-minded people and others?
Therefore I would not like to draw that line. I would however say it's a division between our views. I do believe that a government can be considered a single entity. Care to explain why you disagree?
Furthermore, what's being discussed involves non-government actors too. Exxon, doctors, and defense contractors are entities outside the government.
And I'm fucking ashamed of myself for doing it, unlike the other 132000 employees who still work there.
I was naive to the point of being stupid.
I admire your intellectual honesty, you don't see it very often when it comes to criticizing one's own actions.
It won't change until people in the chain have incentives to avoid war.
Now let's think how to accomplish it: maybe there should be huge tax on profits for military contractors in the time when operations are going ? Maybe private for-profit military contractors have to go in the first place ? Maybe we shouldn't pay them for every piece of equipment but only for time spent working ?
As to people in the field, there are some ideas as well like freezing all bonuses during the military operations and such. The thing is it has to be profitable for individuals involved to seek peace not war. The war machine is never going to stop otherwise. The balance should be such that once high command in charge feel it's necessary to start military operations they should meet at least some resistance from rest of the chain not "fuck yeah sir!" as it is now.
Using the same logic, nothing should ever get better because those who benefit from "bad things" will never allow them to be stopped.
Thats not true because it ignores existing structures of power.
A common thief benefits from the bad things they do, but has no power to influence those that might seek to stop him, and so is convicted.
A banker who committed fraud (read: stole) during the recent financial crisis has the power of capital and lobby behind them, and walks.
The existing structures of power in place are actually designed to stop many of the bad things you describe, however there is nothing intrinsically moral about them so they can be corrupted by capital and lobbyists.
(Note: I'm not convinced war profiteering is the driving motivator for the NSA, just pointing out the fallacy in your argument.)
securities fraud - all those jobs at the SEC would disappear if they ended securities fraud, therefore they must not really want to stop it
child abuse - the cops, social workers and judges would lose their jobs if child abuse stopped, therefore they must not really want to stop it
cancer - oncologists would have no job if cancer was cured, therefore they must not really want to stop it
money laundering - DOJ would lose their jobs if there was no money laundering, therefore they must not really want to stop it
murder - cops would lose their jobs if there was no murder, therefore they must not really want to stop it
And you can't say those people I noted above are not a part of the power structure...
Back in the 80's and 90's, people who insisted the NSA did all this or that really couldn't explain how the technology would work to do all that. People insisted spy satellites could read my newspaper, yada yada.
About 5 years ago, the chips, scale-out HW, storage and Linux (thanks submitters!) reached the point where the known daily capacity of information stream or their meta could be stored by someone like the NSA or Google.
One just needs to assume technical capabilities is what defines reality.
I don't think that was too off-the-wall, even in 1988 or '89.
I can recall, although not google up, at least one back-of-the-envelope effort to figure out if some organization could store all internet traffic. I think the answer was "yes", and this was done maybe 5 years ago.
And in the meantime, if they can make people think they have those problems, that would be even more revenue.
Like the pharmaceutical industry that sell you drugs for diseases you didn't even know existed. Or cigarettes manufacturers that want to solve your problem of not being addicted to nicotine...
Consider reactions to the idea that we cancel the Joint Strike Fighter program. Long story short, every politician who had a contractor working on the project in his constituency started making noise about all the jobs that would be lost if we were to shut down the program. No secret conspiracy; that was an open debate that happened in the public sector, and which many Americans were talking about over dinner.
Even the actual influencing of decisions to engage in hostilities is so everyday as to be unremarkable. For example, the big defense contractors spent a whole lot of money lobbying members of Congress to convince them that the 2009 Afghanisatan surge was a good idea. I think some wonks wrote columns about it in Foreign Policy magazine, but otherwise the news was barely even noticed.
As for how that leads to a sort of "continuous warfare" policy where we're always on the lookout for new enemies. . . I think that just emerges. If you've spending billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer money on some new toy, then at some point someone's going to start asking why. And of course if your job is tied to a project, the very last thing you're going to say is, "No reason, actually this is a pretty silly lark if you ask me." So folks start coming up with hypothetical adversaries, and starts inventing war games and conducting exercises built around these hypotheses. And things just sort of roll along from there.
When it comes to where the law belongs in relation to pragmatism and ethics, I'm inclined to say that the cart belongs firmly behind both horses.
People acting unethically for profit is pretty much the American way, isn't it? It seems to me that if there's a buck in it and it's not illegal (or you can get away with it) it's pretty much justified in the US.
“They actually like deploying. So when you go visit them in Afghanistan, in the western Pacific, you don't get questions like, ‘Oh, shoot, what's sequester going to do to me?’ They know how to spell it, but that's about it. They want to know, ‘Hey, Commandant, you know, is this going to be the last deployment I'm going to get on, or am I going to actually be able to go to combat again or be able to go to WESTPAC (western pacific) again,” Amos said. “So our morale's pretty high right now, and I think it's going to stay high as long as we give them something to look forward to. The reorientation to the Pacific has just reenergized a lot of Marines as they think about Afghanistan: ‘My gosh, we're coming out of there in 2014. What's left?’ Well, we talk about Darwin, Australia. We talk about Japan. We talk about Guam. And their eyes light up.”
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2013/11/after-war-budget-cut...
We have seen mountains of evidence that people follow their incentives even when those incentives lead to perverse, counter-productive behaviors. It's basically what the entire "Freakonomics" franchise is built on, for example.
We also know that the incentives faced by the military establishment are pushing toward more war, more violence. This is obvious, just look at the early '90s when we thought the world was going to be more peaceful. We cut back on military spending, military contractors howled and screamed.
So, while we have no direct evidence that anyone in the military establishment is willfully disregarding civilian casualties, we do have extremely strong inferential evidence that some people in the military establishment are likely to do so, now, in the past, and in the future.
And for the example you offer, judges' very job description require them to narrow down on a case by case basis, and to make a decision based on the evidence available, beyond reasonable doubt. The ethical principle that requires this to be so is that the asymmetry of power between the individual and the State is so big that it is most fair for the whole process to start with a bias in favor of the individual.
Other situations require a different kind of analysis. And the consequence to apply this level of precision to political analysis is that no analysis (and no criticism to the de-facto policies that are guarantied to emerge anyways in this vacum of knowledge) is ever possible.
For how many years were people dismissed as nutjobs and "conspiracy theorists" when they talked about NSA spying? Now we know it was all true. Would you like to make a bet as to whether or not the US military-industrial complex acts in its own self-interest when comes to the "War on Terror"? When it comes down to it, there is nothing particularly "extraordinary" about these claims.
> You have made these accusations without any evidence.
The evidence is circumstantial and based on past behavior patterns of the US government. Read "Decent Interval" and its follow-up "Irreparable Harm" by Frank Snepp, or "State of War" by James Risen (for something more recent) to get started on this history. Again, there is nothing "extraordinary" about the previous poster's claims.
Just because it is true, doesn't mean those people aren't nutjobs or conspiracy theorists.
[Unlikely thing X] came true! Therefore, [unlikely thing Y] will, too!
Even if X and Y were incredibly similar -- in this case they aren't, at all -- that's still not a logical assumption. It's not even evidence toward Y.
I don't really have one but if you must, it's probably someone with a dissociative disorder. I'm just noting that you don't have to be sane to be right.
>given that you would apparently apply it even to people who are correct about all of their theories.
When exactly did I say that?
But they can take place in them, and, more to the point, the problem that needs to be addressed in the legalities of modern war is that modern wars, increasingly, don't have "zones" at all.
Erm, why? You're saying terrorists can't kill 14 people?
Mumbai.
'Some people' do not make an army.[1]
Presumably the one that was either (a) initiated by the 9/11 attacks and formally recognized as already existing by Congress in Public Law 107-40, or (b) was provoked by the 9/11 attacks and declared by Congress in Public Law 107-40, depending on how you choose to look at it.
> What is the objective?
"to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by" "those nations, organizations, or persons [the President determines] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001".
> What would have to happen for this 'war' to end?
Given the rather fluid definition in PL 107-40, it is not clear that it could formally and completely end absent a subsequent resolution of Congress terminating it.
It most certainly is an exercise of Congress' Constitutional power to declare war. It may not be a formal declaration of war under international law, but those are two very different things.
> it expressly avoids being called a "war" in much the same way as ye olde Vietnam.
Vietnam was also a war for which Congress exercised its Constitutional power to declare war. See, e.g., Orlando v. Laird, 443 F.2d 1039 (2nd Cir., 1971).
> What it is is probably illegal under international law
Please cite the provision of international law (either a treaty to which the US is a party, or a generally accepted provision of customary international law -- and, if the latter, please also provide evidence that the cited principle is a generally accepted provision of customary international law) under which the AUMF itself is illegal.
Yes, but this isn't a war. It's a bunch of crude assassinations. There are no meaningful military objectives regrettably costing some civilian lives; these drone strikes are the primary act of war, and they accomplish nothing of value. They just breed more enemies.
It seems to me that the incentives structure rewards a continued War On Terror. Everyone directly involved in it, tends to profit from maintaining it.
Also I refuse to blindly believe in the inherent goodness or extraordinary purity of heart of those involved. You ask for extraordinary evidence that they are incentivized to kill. Ok, I can also turn it around and take the point that those involved are by default bad, don't have pure motives, are evil and are motivated by money or desire to inflict pain and require extraordinary evidence to prove the opposite.
We have seen them lie time and time again. To the people, to Congress. At this point they have the burden of proof that their have good and pure motives at the core of their decision making. Sorry, they lost the confidence that once might have been placed in them.
You're talking about moral humans, here. Our soldiers/airmen/marines/sailors are not soulless automatons, nor are officers that develop strategy and provide direction. Nor would I consider their pay to be either incentive or motivation.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are immoral individuals in the US army, especially in the high ranks (where sociopath usually meet), like everywhere else.
If incentives are in place, nature will find the way even if you can't point to one single person who actually pulled the trigger.
Read this. Follow orders or get court marshalled. Its no surprise that after objections from pilots that they started singling out people who didn't give a shit about things like ethical objectives other than shooting their target accurately.
A choice is being made in either case. Innocent people are being killed in either case.
You forgot the one group of people who could actually stop this, literally overnight: Politicians.
It doesn't need to make more profits during wartime than in peacetime to exist.
It only needs to have multiple actors whose interests align to produce more military funding and hardware than is needed to defend the nation.
If you read the parent, he doesn't buy the debunking of the industrial military complex because, in a theoretical world where war is not a common occurrence, the conclusion doesn't hold water. Well, that's nice, but in the real world, war happens. A lot. It always has and it still does.
The reason for this is irrelevant. You talk about war being manufactured for personal gain (with no proof I would add, but whatever). True or not, it's irrelevant. We're talking about human nature here. Do you really think a time will come in which everyone is moral and good and wars cease to occur?
If you do then you believe that we will somehow alter whatever it is that brings people like this into existence. I hope you're right, but for now you're living in a fairy tale. I prefer to deal with reality as it is, not what I wish it were.
The point is that humans are always fighting with one another. Until that stops there will always be a war looming.
EDIT to add: The binary way you're looking at it is also way off from reality; It seems self-evident that the more often one has military engagements, the easier it is to convince those in charge that more money should flow to military expenditures (which includes peacetime research). It's not the simple case of "constant war = military spending" vs "utopia = no military spending" that you're describing.
You know what would help "debunk" such a thing; if there was a site where every single investment made by any member of congress was required to be listed.
Chomsky, for example, analyses this in respect to the media. Large media ends up acting in sync with government's propaganda because there are set of constraints and incentive s built in. From outside they often act _as if_ they are centrally controlled by a single government party.
A large finance source for the Al-Nushra front in Africa is Jordan/Saudi Arabia. But those countries are allies to the US, so there are no drone strikes there. There are also no strikes in Iran or Syria.
Yemen government is very complicit to those strikes and it should at be mentioned in such articles.
But self-defeating? Not sure I can even see a plausible argument for that one.
I guess drone strikes are just a cheaper solution for that problem, with less outrage than prison camps.
It might seem nationalistic to some but it reminds me of a quote from "A Few Good Men" -
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
It should be noted as well that the entire premise of the film wasn't "the ends justify the means" but rather the exact opposite. People can do great evil while believing that every action they take is fundamentally correct and for some kind of nebulous greater good.
Btw, not saying the comment is bad in anyway.
And maybe eventually people will actually start thinking about the opposite position before they post something.
Or maybe they actually won't.
Because the next question that should inevitably spring up is ok, ok, but why the fuck would someone in Yemen want to kill US citizens?
Once you start answering that question, the question of morality in drone strikes becomes a lot more difficult to answer.
It's a whole chicken and the egg thing.
Taken at face value, US should go and bomb with these drones a whole lot of other people too. And no, they wouldn't be "jihadists". I'm sure there is many many people in the states that very much want to kill other U.S. citizens.
I also don't see how blowing away teenagers in an Afghan village who have no idea what 9/11 is, is some kind of macho statement against oppression. Pretty soon, if not already, we'll be killing young people born after 9/11. Not sure if this is the big win the GOP 'defense first' voter thinks it is. Sounds like yet another failure in policy, much like the profitable war on drugs.
When we give the nation state carte blanche on both a moral and budgetary level, expect nothing but endless abuses of power. There are 150,000 Iraqi graves that wouldn't have existed if Bush was honest. Lets not forget that. If there's a global bad guy in Nicholson's speech people should defend against, its probably the US military, and I say this as a US citizen.
Wait, I do? Did they pass a law or something?
I am very confident that I do not have to do that. How are you going to make me?
Maybe you shouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt on those horrible things they are doing in your name.
Those numerous killing of civilians should require at least some questioning.