An answer to the soldier (and 364 others who read my confession):
Two weeks ago I posted a blog called: Bombs in Brussels, Drones in the Middle East, the Confessions of a Coward.
For three days afterwards my website was visited frequently. A great many readers “liked” the article. Some thanked me on facebook, others in private messages. Two or three declared that I am brave. A few said the essay had helped to clarify their own thoughts. And a soldier wrote me a long letter. He was polite, saying that he agreed with me conceptually that war is evil and that civilians pay the biggest price. But he did want to object to the idea that American drones are killing more civilians than combatants and that they are used without concern for “collateral damage.” In subsequent dialog I asked the man for permission to use some of the information he gave me, and he granted it, but without the permission to use his name.
The reason I want to share with you what he told me is that I am not willing to distort the truth by omitting some of it, and there are always facts that seem to line up on opposing sides of arguments. During the Lebanese civil war, for instance, some soldier fired an artillery shell into a residential neighborhood in the morning after a long night of fighting. I don’t have his story so I don’t know what he meant to accomplish. My friend Jeanette, whose husband was one of more than 100,000 civilians who died in that war, has her story. Fareed was diabetic and he left the shelter for five minutes to go upstairs for his medicine. The man behind the gun could not know.
I responded to the American soldier who wrote to me and asked what he could know about what was happening miles away and how he could know it.
He explained to me that high in the skies above enemy territory, beyond the sight and sound of anyone on the ground, there are drones carrying nothing but cameras. Soldiers on the ground have screens on which they see the pictures being made by these cameras. Usually personnel on the ground are following the screen only because they have their own reasons to believe that an enemy they want to target is in the area. If they think they see the people or the event they want to hit, they do not react immediately. They keep watching the activity to make sure. They have at their disposal armed drones, artillery and especially air power. There are usually American planes in the vicinity, ready to drop bombs if ordered. The common scenario is that the drones only observe; the jets deliver the bombs.
The forces on the ground (In Jordan, Syria, Iraq, for instance) do not have authority to implement or order a strike. They are in touch with commanders far away, probably in the U.S. and cannot do anything without their permission. The commanders in turn consult with lawyers. Permission can take hours; the target can escape or disappear. The soldier who told me this, confessed that he had on occasions become angry and left the scene, because the enemy, in one case an individual who was making bombs, was in sight but the army could not get permission to take him out, because someone at headquarters was concerned about who was in the house next door or on his way down the street. The soldier felt, “At some point, we have to just get the enemy!”
He also told a story to illustrate the care taken by our military. During a time when they were training Syrians, the house they needed to fire on was next door to the house occupied by the family of a Syrian soldier they knew. They enabled him to call his family on the phone, tell them about the coming explosion and instruct them to lie down on the floor. Consequently, the bombs hit the target and none of the family next door were hurt. He (the American soldier) also told me that they could pinpoint a target so accurately that they could kill a man in the back seat of a car without touching the driver. (This seemed nearly impossible to me, but I promised to tell his side of the story.)
Having told what I understand, I need to tell him and tell you what my response is to all of this. First, I am happy to know that there is some process that is employed to prevent collateral damage. I want to believe this.
The information did prompt me to demand an explanation for why, in light of all this, a hospital, full of wounded people and manned by foreign volunteers had been destroyed by American airplanes. The answer was: “Mistakes happen.” Making a small error is so easy to do, for instance, by just transposing two numbers in a long list of numbers. Soldiers have been known to call down fire on themselves in this way.
Second, the story about the Syrian soldier and his family is nice, but this was a rare coincidence. How often would the army be able to send a message to the people next door? How often would we have so much incentive to protect the neighbors of our enemy?
This reminds me, however, that my informant also told me that an Arab soldier had shown him pictures of the destruction following a Russian air raid in which a residential area had been blasted away. And he said, “We know the Americans don’t do that.” I hope, I wish. I do know that in the Arab world generally we are considered to be an aggressor, acting in our own interests, not the interests of the Arabs.
Of course, our men and women on the ground in war zones believe in what they are doing. The reasons, the justifications are part of their training, and I have no intention to destroy the morale of our soldiers.
My informant blames anti-war organizations for promoting falsehoods.
Some well-known statistics
However, The New York Times is not an anti-war organization. They reported on April 23, 2015, in an article by Scott Shane that the U.S, has carried out more than 400 drone strikes in tribal areas of Pakistan and is often unsure who will be killed. In January 2015, after hundreds of hours of surveillance, the CIA did not know that two Western hostages, including an American whom they wanted to rescue, was being held at a terrorist compound that they wanted to destroy. They killed them both with a Drone fired from Nevada.Obama was extremely upset about this and said that the families of these people had the right to an explanation. In the following June this emboldened two Yemeni families to file law suits against the U.S. for the deaths of innocent family members, an anti-Qaeda cleric and a police officer. They too were killed by a drone. The families are not asking for anything except an explanation.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is also not an anti-war organization. Figures they supplied appeared in The Guardian in October 2014 in an article by Spencer Ackerman. They say that 41 men were targeted in Pakistan, and the strikes against them killed 1,147 people. One of the targets was Ayman Zawahiri. Twice they tried to get him, killing 76 children and 29 adults in the effort, but not Zawahiri. Six strikes were required to take out Qari Hussein, deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban; these strikes killed 128 other people, 13 of them children. It goes on and on.
Why do I bother to say this? I know nothing about military necessities. Nor do I know what evil these enemies would have done if left alive. I don’t even know how to find out the whole truth. That may be the hardest part.
I know just three things.
- All 1,147 counted as “collateral damage” were people, not numbers. They were sons, daughters, brothers, fathers…. Every one of those children was the apple of someone’s eye.
- War is a messy business. It is about killing. The nicest thing I can say about killing is that it is messy.
- To lie to ourselves about this destroys the last shred of hope that we will make the world any better than it is.
Have you read In Borrowed Houses? If you buy it from this website, I will contribute 10% of proceeds to alleviate a bit of suffering of Syrian refugees.