The Damadola airstrike - (aka, 18 civilians killed in Pakistan by US bombing drones)

I'm glad someone at Wikipedia has created an article to document the Damadola airstrike in Pakistan. One of the questions I've been trying to answer is: What are the names of the civilians who were killed? The Wikipedia authors haven't had more luck than me, apparently. We just know of 17 or 18 civilians, or maybe it's 13 or 14, depending who you believe at the moment.

Like most news stories reported by the mainstream media you have to wonder how we verify anything the news tells us. Who told the media that two secretly deployed drones bombed a Pakistan village? I can only guess it was our own government touting what it believed was a military success. But I have no idea. I have searched for the names of the civilians, but no one has reported them. This just confirms my belief that the mainstream media is more about titillation than information. Even Arab and Muslim news sources are no more specific about the details of who was actually killed, except one civilian whose house and family were destroyed who was a known al Qaeda sympathizer. The innocents remain nameless. Why? Decency? I suppose we can give that benefit of the doubt. I just thought no one really cared enough to ask who they were. I'd like to know.

When we prefer not to see dead bodies and real violence (though we apparently love cathartic movie violence, as shown by the box office receipts for "Hostel"), we lose visual confirmation of the supposed "facts" the media reports to us constantly. The more I read and watch the news, the more I realize that I can get the news much faster and more in-depth online than on TV. But even then, reading the same story from multiple angles, pro-American and anti-American, neutral, left and right, I am left hungry for details, for names, addresses, images, firsthand accounts . . .

Some things are clear though, regardless of the foggy haze that obscures our vision of the facts around the nation and the world: the US is a nation vigorously at war, strenuously trying to solve some of the world's toughest problems with bloodshed and violence. Even John McCain says about the Damadola strike (on Face the Nation):
"It's terrible when innocent people are killed; we regret that [. . .] but I can't tell you that we wouldn't do the same thing again. We have to do what we think is necessary to take out al Qaeda, particularly the top operatives."

He also said the following (according to the online edition of The Courier Mail), which confirms the complete loss of reason, which seems to have infected all our top government leaders:

"This war on terror has no boundaries"

McCain's first statement is just jaded. But the second exemplifies the US government's ant-terrorism fanatacism, which is just as irrational as the fanaticism of violent Muslim extremists. Why? Because we are violating the boundaries of other countries and killing their civilians at will and without permission (think about it: what country would willingly grant another the power to kill its civilians?) in a crusade to eradicate terrorists. Folks, if there are no boundaries, then there is no US. McCain's logic is as absurd as it is exemplary of current US foreign policy: "better to ask forgiveness than permission," except the US barely pauses for the formality of asking forgiveness. Our leaders offer apologies and economic or military gifts and wave their hands frantically about the War on Terror; they don't ask forgiveness. We have given notice to the rest of the world, if they are paying attention, that the the US no longer recognizes your borders in its quest for retribution and cleansing the world of terrorists. And what is a nation without borders but an uncharted expanse of land? There's a slippery slope to the decline of civilization.

Of course, McCain is not totally irrational. He doesn't really mean there are "no" national borders. What he means is, the US doesn't respect any other country's borders or the lives of their civilians or the decisions of their leaders. That's all. Our borders are quite intact, thank you. And we will maintain them at the cost of ruining our reputation as a civilized nation. What hypocrites we must become to wage this war on terrorists. The end justifies the means, though, right?

Do I need to interpret the following quote on freedom from Abe Lincoln? Or is it clear that what he said here about freedom encapsulates a principle of fairnesss (i.e., justice) that applies in our time and to the sovereignty of nations and the integrity of national borders? If we say that other countries have no borders, then we cannot expect our borders to be respected and we declare ourselves a hostile nation to the world:

"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it." -- April 6, 1859, Letter to Henry Pierce

I just saw news footage of the election in Palestine where there was reportedly a 78% voter turn out! HAMAS is one of the political parties representing there. The leader of HAMAS was on the news, dressed in western business attire, submitting his ballot and stating to a news camera that his organization's "attitude" is that all problems of modern life are to be solved by the Islamic religion, period. Such is the extremism, the black and white thinking, the dogmatism of peoples in this world which our country must deal with. Our leadership's current response is to fight fire with fire, live by the sword, answer fundamentalism with fundamentalism. Our response to the world lacks subtlety, but so do those we wish to influence (if we take the HAMAS leader's words as reflective of his true position).

There will be military conscription if the US continues the mantra of "stay the course" spoken by our President. The US needs to develop its diplomacy, its persuasiveness to scale to meet the world's problems head-on. No country can forever maintain such an aggressive stance to the rest of the world. Soldiers get killed and battalions must be replenished, just like any other military resource. The world is a very big place. India and China both have far, far more people than the US does, and China especially seems to have a predisposition to treat its people as disposable resources. The US is setting dangerous precedents in blowing off the UN, crossing borders and killing the civilians of other countries in military operations as it pleases, always following up with diplomacy and promises, never leading with them.

I don't like the trend I'm seeing. I am worried about this country's near future, which looks to be fraught with wars for, rough guess, at least a decade. This matters to me because the state of the world affects how we all feel and act. And something like a draft, which isn't hard to imagine, taking our young men and women away to fight because our diplomats are too stupid or lazy to think of a more intelligent, compassionate response to the world -- such a thing will affect many of us and those we know and love. And if this country's leaders become desperate enough and continue to respond to the pressures of the world with violence, well, I don't see why they wouldn't choose to nuke some of our "enemies" rather than incur a revolution (which they'd be unable to quell if our military is all engaged in wars overseas). I don't mean to be a Cassandra. I am just speaking as an average citizen, not even a political one, just someone who's poked his head up from work and a divorce to see what's going on in the rest of the world. I can't ignore it. 2006 has so far been a bloody and tyrannical year, and the blood is on America's hands, and the tyrant is us.

Certainly there's an advantage to being the winner in any life or death situation. If it's come to that and it's the US versus the rest of the world, then by all means, let's fight. But my point is that our leaders should be using higher human traits such as intelligence, compassion, diplomacy and negotiation -- not the barbarism of violent force, threats, and harsh language which our, supposedly, inferior enemies use to achieve their aims. I can't believe our leaders are not cognizant of the irony of their reaction to terrorists.