American Exceptionalism and Dehumanization Laid Bare

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has revealed what he says is the death toll in the U.S. drone war overseas. At a speech in South Carolina Wednesday night, Graham said: "We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaeda." Graham’s comments mark the first time a U.S. official has offered a figure for those killed in nearly a decade of U.S. drone strikes abroad. The 4,700 figure matches the high end of an estimate by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has extensively covered the strikes and faced a concerted U.S. government effort to discredit its work.- Sen. Graham Reveals Toll of 4,700 in U.S. Drone War- Democracy Now

This quote witnesses to more than the soul-less blather of an obnoxious pseudo-statesman from a state, whose government, is dysfunctional as his frontal lobe.  This quote encapsulates the tacit justification of not only the drone program, but our greater military approach to not only its current campaigns, but its role in the world and our national interests.  I'd like to analyze this statement through several different lenses.

1. A thought experiment: If this statement had been referencing some kind of domestic war on drugs, and the senator was referring to Americans when he said: "We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of [insert cartel/gang here]" This would be on every news channel as a leading story, reviling the Senator for his lack of care or respect for the lives of American citizens.  Not to mention it would constitute political suicide.  This differentiation in audience response is simply because the men, women and children murdered were not American citizens.  I am just as grateful for and aware of the opportunities and securities guaranteed to me by the Constitution as anyone.  But in this case, it's interpretation seems to symbolize our government's gross misunderstanding of the universal nature of humans' right not to be murdered, and then cursorily disregarded by the ignorant and powerful as collateral damage.  The senator not only disregards the inherent worth of their lives, but also identifies their death as justified, in that it helped us kill other targets (whose aims, allies, groups, and names change every day) that we take for granted are legitimate threats, from a military with an historically bad track record on preemptive warfare.

2. Thought experiment: Had zero terrorist targets been "taken out"  would the 4,700 deaths be justified still under Senator Graham's thinking?  The answer to this question would remain contingent and debatable, not enough information is available but I believe the question illustrates a larger point.  The point being, that these foreign lives have become the means to an end, determined by the interests of a small group of men, remotely.  In addition to all those ethical quandaries, their involvement (the murdered people) is not only accidental, but inevitable, a known unknown if you will.  The "taking out" these particular terrorists seems to be the fully absolving end goal, so I would assume that had the drone program been ineffective at first, that the future goal would still act as a worthy justification, and the murdered civilians as necessary deaths. 

3. What is going on here, is that our government is engaging in , and creating a new kind of warfare.  It is one that is unprecedented:  fighting an enemy  that has no standing army, no state, no cohesive mission.  As this is a new framework of warfare, it is difficult to approach it with the "ethical" frameworks used to "structure" previous conflicts. i.e. Geneva convention, ICC (which the US is not a signatory to), etc... These are just well known examples of precedent for philosophical examination of warfare, though they could not begin to address the brazen adolescent imprudence that has characterized our warfare.  In short, we are making it up as we go along.  And the voices of the military industrial complex symbolized in both parties make the implicit injunction to not question the grave practices that are being carried out by our country.  In the case here, Senator Graham, is ideologically, presenting the ultimate good as fighting terror, a goal which is endless, implying consistent threat and fear, while implying that opposition to this paradigm is relegated to the Utopian idealism of a fantasy world.  I challenge not only his juevenille cynicism, lack of ethical scope, and disrespect for life, but also his use of the word: war, and the validity of the targets he identifies.  I would question whether defeating an organization that repoduces in correlation with Western agression can ever be achieved when our, citizen to "very senior members of al Qaeda" ratio, is what it is.  If the government is going to continue to set us up for a endless war on terror, I would advise a mindful population to begin to care.

4. As long as we can hear: "We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war" and let whoever said it go on as a legislator, and accept new undefined concepts of warfare to be simultaneously created and self regulated by the most powerful military in the world, I question whether it is "we" who are more deserving of the right to life, or the men, women, and children "we" murdered, and dismissed, in the same way one laments a broken egg in a carton one dropped.

"Drones: Seeing Ourselves for What We Really Are"

The recent publicity and controversy over the Obama administration's drone strikes in the Middle East forces a critical conversation on US foreign policy that before was far less pronounced or mainstream.  We have quietly transitioned into a constant state of war, because our war is a containment of terrorists, or "terrorism", spread across the world.  Our remote preemptive approach to perceived threats that has been cultivated in the past years, proceeds the US's interventionist nation building, and "containment policy" of the past decades.  This policy of "proactive" "safeguarding of our interests" has been publicly reaffirmed in the recent hearings concerning the nomination of Brennan to head the CIA.  But it is this very military perspective that our drone policy is simply the logical conclusion of.  Attempts to sugar coat a policy of globally murderous American exceptionalism, in calls for transparency and judicial oversight neglect the very core of the crime we commit.  This is the crime of the devaluation of human life, and the trauma we subject entire generations to, in the name of a war, whose enemies are whoever ends up dead at the end of the day.
The fact that remote killings from the sky are extra psychologically disturbing has brought our policy of preemptive attack to a philosophical trial that before might have been dismissed as pacifist idealism and lefty contrariness.
The obvious defense of the drone program is that they eliminate terrorist threats while keeping troops off the ground and so protect the American public and its armed services.  The clear criticism of this policy is that we are causing substantial civilian casualties, while terrorizing entire populations that live in fear and whose children are dying or surviving, to grow up in trauma.  To say nothing of the outrageous moral aberration  that these policies pose, it would seem strategically counterproductive to fight terrorism, not only in a endless campaign of acute covert raids and assassinations, but also in the inevitably indiscriminate bombings that will serve to cement not only present antiquated religious prejudices but also create new terror and justifiable rage in multiple generations in more countries across a region that is already the most volatile part of the globe.
To take a clear stance against our drone warfare policy is to indite our policy of preemptive warfare.
Our population has grown increasingly detached from our state of war.  We are isolated from the monetary burden (temporarily) via tax cuts that coincided with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  We are isolated from information by a media castrated and lobotomized by chasing ratings and pleasing sponsors.  And we are governed by inert legislative bodies muted by revolving door politics and powerful lobbies.  In short, we do not experience the fact that our country is at war.  Together with our presumed moral infallibility, the pervading fear inherent in a war on an enemy as amorphous as"terror" assures our population's complicity.  Now with a darker, louder, more sinister symbol of our military foreign policy, we may be able to engage its strategic failings and moral  horrors in a viable conversation with stronger political momentum.