9/11: Over the Horizon

 

The final act of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 people. Our latest investigation shows how a man the military saw as an "imminent threat" and "ISIS facilitator" was actually an aid worker returning to his family: https://t.co/eUX5WSImrD

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

There just isn't anything more apt to round out our 20 year misadventure in the War on Terror, than by this--a misguided drone strike that showed how far we had come, that we could be wrong from farther away instead of having to be wrong face to face and street by street. 

The memorial of 9/11 has been fraught for some time with me because of the cant and formulaic expressions of remembrance and the truisms that just strike me as false. "We came together that day." Tell it to visibly brown Muslim or Central Asian people who experienced discrimination, and find a kernel of what people came together to be. We needed to be unified to move forward, but we didn't need to do all we moved forward to do. 

The 9/11 fallen, those who died that day, and also their survivors, and the ones who have died of assorted toxins breathed in from working near or on the pile since and their survivors--they deserve every respect and support. But they were also used to sell an open-ended global war that was misguided in many ways. These ill-conceived decisions, occurring in part because short-sighted people didn't want to know any better and acted on what felt "right" politically, did more harm than good.  

Drone on, you crazy diamond.

I don't know why the reporting on Texas Governor Rick Perry's complaint regarding the insufficiency of the Obama Administration's border security misses an important detail--but it sure seems to.

See it is pretty interesting that Governor Perry wants there to be drones at the US/Mexico border, and it's very true that he's been saying so since 2010. In fact, it was a thing he mentioned a handful of times when he was running in the 2012 presidential primary.  But the thing of it is--we have drones at the border. We have had them. Since 2010.  We've been increasing the use of them, too.

Now, it is true that we use them pretty much for surveillance and not as a "deterrent", but I'm not sure what Perry is saying we should be doing that's different. They are Predator drones. They are the same equipment we've been icing terrorists with. I guess we could have more of them.  In a small way, I know that if we used a drone to fire on a drug cartel member, I would personally probably be pretty much as tear-free as a baby shampoo ad.

But the thing of it is--we do actually have drones at the US/Mexico border. We've had them since 2010. Thus far, they haven't really been a deterrent, as such. And I tend to think that if we fired on unaccompanied minors on the Mexico side, we'd have something of an international incident, so that can't possibly the kind of deterrent Rick Perry is talking about.

I sure wish I knew what he meant. I'm not entirely sure he knows what he means, though, so that's pretty even.