Imagine a situation in which Mexico finally gets serious about their war on drug trafficking. They arrest public officials and criminals who have been running rampant, they throw into jail people who are only marginally involved in the enterprise, and they set up a prison somewhere in the Caribbean to handle those who they don't feel can be tried in the courts for various reasons, chiefly that whatever information that would come to light during a trial would be embarrassing to those who are in charge.
But then the Mexican authorities decide to go further. In the interest of their own national security and the freedom and liberty of all its citizens, they decide to go after drug traffickers wherever they may be. And because many of the drugs passing through Mexico end up in the United States, they decide that they're within their rights to go after people within US borders. They send in troops who are forever snooping around San Diego and El Paso, they arrest American citizens and whisk them off to their Caribbean jail, and finally they launch drones that continually patrol the American sky looking for potential drug activity and occasionally reign Hellfire missiles onto unsuspecting bad guys. Unfortunately, they occasionally make 'mistakes' and innocent people get killed. Actually, it's not really occasionally...eventually the death toll would climb into the hundreds, with many more thousands of people getting hurt or having their property destroyed.
So, how do you think we'd feel about that in our country? Think we'd be a bit pissed off?
Change the cause for the war (drug trafficking to terrorism) and the location of the war (the United States to Pakistan or Yemen) and this is what is happening, according to reports from Human Rights Watch (Yemen) and Amnesty International (Pakistan). Here's an excerpt of the second: "According to NGO and Pakistan government sources the USA has launched some 330 to 374 drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and September 2013. Amnesty International is not in a position to endorse these figures, but according to these sources, between 400 and 900 civilians have been killed in these attacks and at least 600 people seriously injured." Hundreds of people being killed in Pakistan, and we act like we have a right to do what we want, all in the name of 9/11.
Now, let's say these figures are a bit overblown. Most objections to these reports are couched in the language of a)we can't verify that all these deaths come directly from drone strikes and b)they didn't ask the US for their side of the story, but only the baddies. Nobody is denying that the drone attacks on another country's sovereign soil takes place, but let's assume that we can cut down the number of kill strikes by 2/3.
Does this still make it OK? How many deaths and injuries of innocent foreigners are 'acceptable' losses? How long do these attacks continue?
For over 12 years now, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, the game plan has been the same: "Because of terrorism, we have a right to be doing these incursions, we have the right to ignore the sovereignty of another nation, one who supposedly has been our ally most of the time the past 50 years, because we still think there are a few al-Qaeda terrorists up in the hills."
After all the stories about the government spying on its own citizens, with all the failures we have encountered in trying to export western civilization to the middle east, with all the fear and money and lives expended to try to 'fix' the crazies of this world, we have to ask...who are the real terrorists?
