A Note On 'Drone Strikes', Ladies And Gentlemen

[jpgray]

332. We have raised a few thousand disconnected radicals to the dignity of a state

They do not even rise to the coherence and unity of insurrection - political motivation and mass murder are all we have to identify the enemy, and the motivations of those few thousand are disconnected and anything but united. What unites them, what identifies them and allows for us to talk about them as a whole, is solely their motivation and method; but surely that's a meager identity for the declaration of war, and a poor unifying principle for the actual group so identified. There is less unanimity of purpose, organization and culture between terror groups than even the most loosely connected and fractious revolutionary coalition. As the cliche goes, you would advocate for hammering when the target is nothing like a nail.

Acts of war or counterinsurgency against such a nebulous foe as politically motivated mass murder ends in the results everyone would expect, namely the deaths of many innocents and the spread of hatred against our own government and culture. The tools we've designed for war are destructive and blunt - the enemy is as minute and as surrounded with benign structures as a cancer cell. If you are happy to immolate every nobody who entertains large ideas about destroying America, it is a shame we don't have the means to burn just the nobody. Collateral damage to his mother's basement unfortunately is not the worst of it, as whole families, homes and communities are brought low under our Hellfire, and to eliminate what? Politically motivated mass murder? Our license remember is good not for the act only, but the advocation of it. What is our standard of evidence? A state secret. We're lucky no truly harmless nobodies are big talkers on the internet, I suppose. Because if there were, our weak standards of evidence would make for substantial waste of materiel to exfluncticate internet tough guys of a certain culture - to say nothing of the waste in innocent lives.

But the worst of it is that we could spend billions in munitions without ever changing the status of this "war" a jot. What does victory look like? What does progress look like? Let us look forward to a world where there are not a few thousand disconnected radicals who treasure up in their minds mass destruction and murder for political reasons? That world is just not going to exist. The lives and money are just being wasted to no purpose.

There has not been another major attack here? True, and we have nothing to thank but good fortune. Our security is woefully inadequate to stop another, given a sufficiently determined group. There is no evidence indiscriminate fire and death in Pakistan or Yemen does anything to soften that determination.