I have been meaning to discuss an article from the 4 May 2016 edition of The Sun for almost a month, but I have put it off in part because the whole issue is so utterly depressing. There have been a few different short pieces in mainstream media outlets featuring the perspectives of drone operators, some of whom are females. Yes, for the first time in history, women can hope to achieve full equality in the military realm, because physical strength is no longer a requirement for active combat duty. Pushing buttons and manipulating joysticks to annihilate human beings is an equal opportunity vocation.
In the article in The Sun, a female Royal Air Force Reaper drone operator shares her view of what she is doing as she facilitates the execution of persons located thousands of miles away. When asked to elaborate upon their role, drone operators generally fall into one of two camps: either they have abandoned the profession and now regret what they did, or they are still “lighting up” targets in good conscience and believe themselves to be saving the world from evil. Both Canadians and Americans have expressed reservations about what they were asked to do while serving as drone operators. Unsurprisingly, given the normalization of drone warfare under US President Obama, there are also quite a few targeted killing enthusiasts.
Tina, a British drone operator, certainly falls into the category of enthusiast. For those who fail to grasp the importance of what she is doing in using drones to annihilate suspected members of ISIS, she offers the following explanation:
“I compare these guys to the Nazis, the way they came along and treated people and tried to enforce their beliefs on people. They’ve got to be stopped. If we weren’t doing what we are doing now this could spread across the whole world. We’re here to maintain the freedom of the people and protect the people.”
Well, Tina, I’ve got a nice parcel for you down by Alligator Alley. ISIS is nothing like the Nazis, first and foremost because they have no nation state. As a nonstate organization, ISIS is entirely devoid of a military industry and has depended on weapons supplies from the very countries which claim to be their adversaries. That’s right, Tina: from 2012 to 2013, 600 tons of weapons were provided covertly by the CIA to “appropriately vetted moderate rebels”. The result of that provision? A massive takeover by ISIS of large swaths of land in both Syria and Iraq.
Now the radical Islamist group has made inroads into Libya as well. How could that be? Because NATO deposed the central government authority of that nation in 2011, leaving a power vacuum behind, just as Western powers had done in Iraq back in 2003. While we’re on the topic, the coalescence of ISIS into an identifiable enemy came about only because of the invasion of Iraq. A short history of ISIS can be found here (for those who missed the most visited page at this blog).
Earlier this year, President Obama identified the poor planning of the Libya intervention – what to do post-Gaddafi – as his biggest foreign policy mistake. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in contrast, has characterized the Libya intervention as a shining example of “smart power at its best”. But I digress.
The point, dear Tina, is that whatever military power ISIS has managed to use to oppress and kill the people whom you take yourself to be defending was provided to them by the US, UK and other governments. No doubt it may make it easier for you to sleep at night in the belief that your hitman-like role is for the good of humanity, but I regret to inform you that Nazi soldiers believed the very same thing, mutatis mutandis. They, too, were told that they were fighting to save people from The Evil Enemy.
Ironically, if any analogy between Nazi Germany and the drone program holds it is that a bureaucratic institution of homicide is being run by the likes of Adolf Eichmann all over again precisely and only because of the willingness of people like you, Tina, to follow their orders to kill unarmed persons who could not possibly harm you, even in principle, because they have no idea who or where you are.
Laurie Calhoun, a philosopher and cultural critic, is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age(Zed Books, September 2015; paperback forthcoming in 2016) and War and Delusion: A Critical Examination (Palgrave Macmillan 2013; paperback forthcoming in 2016). Visit her website.