The Washington Post has just reported within the last hour that a US airstrike has killed a family of 12 as they were sleeping in their beds just a few hours ago. They were asleep when the strikes occured. Most of the victims were women and children. The Iraqi government and local residents are saying that there were no terrorists present.
This is the very reason why we should not commit our troops to a foreign conflict like this except as a last resort. An Iraqi life is just as valuable as an American life, and the death of one innocent civilian is too many for a war that has no just cause. The blood of this family is on George Bush’s hands.
The air strikes were called in after an unmanned drone saw what was supposedly terrorists planting bombs in the road. But the fact that our technology was so dreadfully wrong in this instance shows that our military is overly reliant on technology and not reliant enough on human reasoning.
We could have died if we had relied too much on technology back in the 1980’s, during the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. I wrote a recommended diary about one such instance in which Stanislav Petrov correctly reasoned that the US would not launch only five nukes against the Soviet Union and told his superiors that the launch was a hoax.
This goes to show that the technology, which Donald Rumsfeld placed so much faith in, is not omnipotent and does not even come close to human reasoning and decision-making. Rumsfeld is not a man versed in military strategy. Instead, he came with an agenda — to win a war solely with hi-tech gadgetry and gimmicks instead of the massive manpower that the first Bush administration used in winning the First Gulf War.
Not only was the family innocent and not only were there no terrorists even near the site of the bombing, this has opened a whole can of worms for the Bush administration:
Maj. Abdul Jabbar Kaissi, a security officer with Salahuddin governorate, said the air strike killed the 12-member family of Ghadban Nahi Kaissi, a farmer and relative of the governor of Salahuddin province, Ahmad Mahmud Kaissi. U.S. forces surrounded the area Tuesday morning as bulldozers removed rubble and emergency crews pulled out bodies. The Post special correspondent watched as crews removed the bloody body of an older woman, her head covered in a black scarf, and two younger women in nightclothes with their heads uncovered for sleep.
In other words, the family in question was related to the governor of the province. The Bush administration will now have to explain why all their technology and all their gadgetry failed to tell the difference between a terrorist and an innocent civilian.
The article notes that the number of US air strikes has gone up five times since last January. This means that they know that the current ground war is futile, so they are resorting to the tried and true crutch that many politicians have relied on in lieu of an actual solution — air strikes.
The root cause of the problem is that Bush has no confidence in the men and women in uniform who actually have to do the work. So, he hired Donald Rumsfeld, seduced by the idea that we could improve on so-called smart bombs and smart drones and win a war that way.
We have a fundamental choice that we have to make as a country — should technology become our servant or our master? It is clear where the Republicans stand on this issue — they believe that technology should be our master, judging from Rumsfeld’s reliance on unmanned drones to track what may or may not be a terrorist. It is just as clear that they were wrong in this instance and wrong thousands of other times — that is why around 150,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed in this war.
On the other hand, I would hope that we as a party would decide that technology should become our servant. Computers and technology are useful tools. But technology can never become a substitute for human reason. If it ever does, it could get us all killed, like we almost did back in 1983.
They usually try to justify this as an innocent but necessary collateral loss in the vital war against some poosly defined ideal or profitmaker.
It could also be done on secret intelligence and unknown to all but a few, these were terrorist potential…predestined to destroy us….absurd, isn’t it?
The only thing I disagree with in your statements is the impression that a difference exists between Dems and Reps in regard to technology-profits-priority-terrorism.
and we’re going back to the “shock and awe” of aerial bombardment. Makes sense. It worked so well last time.
Here’s hoping the fellas who called in those airstrikes think about this as they ring in every New Year for the rest of their lives.
A little over an hour ago, from AP/Yahoo:
The “official explaination” is that these men entered a building. Yet the place we bombed turned out to be a residential section where no IED men were even operating.
Either this does not pass the smell test, or our technology is even poorer than I thought when I first wrote this.
First of all, the US takes every precaution to keep the details of its “operations” out of the western media, with the exception of operations where representatives of US cororate media are “embedded” for the specific purpose of communicating US policies to the viewing audience.
However, even the most careful planning is not fool-proof, and from time to time, reports not previously and specifically authorized of some “operations” fall through the cracks, and may be reported by wire services, etc.
When this happens, the explanation is very simple: Whoever was killed was a terrorist, harboring a terrorist, a terrorist sympathizer, or someone who had been openly critical of US policies and/or their implementation, or, in other words, a terrorist.
Rumsfeld made this very clear in the early days of the Afghanistan crusade when asked if the bombing of a family home had been a mistake, he explained, “If they’re dead, the US military wanted them dead.”