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05 January 2006
Another tragic mistake in Iraq

A report out of Iraq this week paints what is, to me, a disturbing picture of our routine military practices there. This particular story has to do with our military killing a family of 12 in their home while ostensibly targeting "insurgents". It went like this:

In a statement, the U.S. military said an unmanned drone in the area had tracked three men digging in a road about 9 p.m. Monday. Insurgents commonly plant bombs in such craters to catch passing convoys of U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The military called in air support, tracked the three men as they entered a building nearby and attacked the building with precision-guided munitions, the military said.

Call me incredibly naïve, but this sounds pretty shocking to me. Is this how we win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people? Is this the kind of care we take with innocent life? If this is any indication, it's little wonder that we've killed 20,000 to 100,000 Iraqi civilians to date.

So a remote-controlled camera sees some men digging a hole, we track them from a distance, and then send in jets to bomb the building they go to. I have to think that this is an approach designed to minimize U.S. casualties--a good goal in principle--but it makes clear that we're willing to take much greater chances with Iraqi lives than our own, which means we value them less than we do ourselves, which means their welfare is not our top concern, which means that our president's most recent reason for invading Iraq, this vaunted notion of delivering freedom and democracy--coming after the initial several reasons have fallen apart as lies, exaggerations, and deceit--is also a lie.

We're not delivering freedom to Iraq, but our own form of crudely administered dictatorial power. We trumpet elections being held even as we occupy and control most every facet of the country, preventing the Iraqis from controlling their own natural resources, preventing their workers from organizing, preventing them from nationalizing their utilities, as we sell off their country's business opportunities to the highest foreign bidder.

That's not freedom.

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In either the December or January issue of "Popular Science" there's a cover story on the military's push for more and more autonomous, unmanned tanks and supply vehicles. They'd go for miles with no driver and use lots of fuzzy logic, something the military is expert at. The idea is to minimize human loss and, I suppose, make the idea of invading another country a clean, mechanized, easily supported option for future American tyrants and oil companies. The whole thing smacked of "Terminator." How long before SkyNet to coordinate all our robot armies, I wonder?
 

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