05-16-2013, 11:15 AM
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The People's Post
Industry Role:
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: invisible 7-11
Posts: 67,365
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dehumanising war will turn out to be a very bad thing.
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This is a halfway stage between old and new wars ? such as happened in Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan ? where an invading army finds itself at a loss as to how to fight what is essentially a guerrilla war fought by people trying to rid their country of a force that has come in from outside and is trying to impose its own solution on their state?s difficulties. But when, politicians having realised they are never going to ?win? this war, the invading troops are pulled out
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Killing at a distance dehumanises those doing it ? it is not killing but a computer game. Scoring a ?hit? that involves no blood, no entrails, no broken lives brings no guilt, no remorse and no proper awareness of the hurt inflicted on others. But with the physical damage being inflicted on Western forces (in the US Army alone 73,674 soldiers have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and 30,480 soldiers have returned from combat with traumatic brain injury), this, in itself, is a good enough reason to use nothing but drones, and if both sides use them then the only casualties will be absolutely guaranteed to be civilian. It is bad enough that the US thinks it is fighting a global war on terror, so all the world is a battlefield. What price the world if another state takes that attitude thinking, quite rightly, that the US drones are a form of terrorism?
Using drones also dehumanises the people they kill. These are not fellow humans but terrorists, not civilians but collateral damage, not 8-year-old boys or old men of eighty but potential combatants. The enemy becomes nothing more than a fly to be swatted, a worm to be stepped on. President Obama has to personally authorise US drone strikes, more than 300 of them in his first four years of office.
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But if armies become mere operators of drones, or the ?super soldier?, guilt-free and heartless, becomes reality, then there really is no end to war. For the publics? reaction to damaged soldiers coming back home and being a drain on families? emotions and the public purse because of PTSD or multiple disablements will be the only thing that just might finally persuade the politicians that war is not worth the fighting.
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