Umbrellas and Drones

To observe the Republicans, one would think that the U.S. military was involved in nothing more controversial than a Marine holding an umbrella for President Barack Obama while he gave a speech in the rain.  Sarah Palin, one of the many darlings of the rightwing, has stated that most Americans hold their own umbrellas, despite pictures showing her disembarking a plane on a rainy day with a lackey holding an umbrella for her. Lou Dobbs, formerly of Fox News, said it was ‘disrespectful, inconsiderate, classless,’ although one looks in vain for his similar comments when Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush had soldiers holding umbrellas for them. And the conservative blogosphere has been awash with condemnation, criticism and great umbrage about an action the president took, that has been taken by many presidents before him, including many of their heroes.

Someone awakening after a multi-year sleep and observing this would certainly believe that society overall was in very good shape, if the most important things political activists had to complain about was a Marine holding an umbrella for the president. However, such a person might be deceived.  Let us take a quick look at another current issue that is somewhat less benign than an umbrella, and that no one on the right or the left seems concerned with.

U.S. drones, unmanned aircraft, have for some time been bombing targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries , all in the sacred name of the U.S. war on terror (whatever that is).  In the last couple of years, over 5,000 people have been killed in U.S.– initiated drone strikes, and the frequency of these bombing is escalating rapidly.  Their purpose, ostensibly, is to rid areas of Al-Qaeda operatives, a strategically important goal (we’ll not consider the morality of it quite yet), as the U.S. prepares to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, after twelve years of U.S.-sponsored terrorism against the Afghani people.

But what of the human debris left in the wake of these bombings? Ibrahim Mothana, a young Yemeni writer, said this in a New York Times op-ed last year: “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology, but rather by a sense of revenge and despair.” Much as U.S. citizens are told that people throughout the Middle East hate them because of their freedoms, it might be worth considering that the U.S. is hated by many in the Middle East and other areas because the U.S. government keeps killing their loved ones.  In moving testimony on April 24 of this year, another young Yemeni man, Farea al-Muslimi, who had lived in the U.S. as a...