"We don't do body counts." - General Tommy Franks
More on how our warmongering officials and pundits, and subservient media, tend to blame the victims for killing civilians and rhetorically downplay our responsibility by adulating our war technology. I wrote this in a discussion about how "smart bombs" had "technical glitches", which incoveniently ended up mass murdering Afghan civilians:
"Nasty Dictators forced us to kill the civilians" is a very old rhetorical ploy used to assuage the conscience when there are disproportionate civilian casualties. . .
The intentional NATO bombing of Serbian TV stations in 1999 which resulted in about a dozen civilian casualties of reporters and station employees was similarly justified as the fault of a Nasty Dictator (the stations constituted the "brains of Milosovic" according to NATO.) There are many examples of this spin in the Mideast in particular, such as the alleged "Arab irregulars dressed as women" who were used as a post-facto justification for the Deir Yassin village massacre by Israeli forces in 1948.
We are all familiar with the justification for the 300,000 child deaths resulting from the sanctions on Iraq: all the fault of Saddam, don't you know. And who can forget the official State Dept. press release which stated quite openly that the downing of Iran Air 655 was actually the fault of the Iranians themselves (who had "permitted" the plane to fly near the Vincennes -- which was illegally inside Iranian territorial waters, a fact conveniently omitted from the press release and not disclosed for another 4 years.)
Sometimes, the Blame-the-Dictator spin turns into the Blame-the-Civilian-Victims. For example, during the buildup to Persian Gulf War II, some on the Right blamed the suffering of the civilians in Iraq under the sanctions on the Iraqis themselves, because they had "failed" to rise up and topple Saddam (in fact the Shia did rebel against Saddam after the first Gulf War -- and were abandoned to their fate by Bush Senior.)
Ironically, this blame-the-Civilian-victim spin has seen a lot more use lately, in proportion to the rise in civilian casualties resulting from the deployment of regular dumb bombs and the "smart bombs" which turn out to be not-so-smart. And so now it we have a Blame-the-Bomb version of this spin too.
In Afghanistan alone, smart bombs have been dropped on wedding parties, pickup trucks full of pro-US civilians, a few mosques, US forces and allies, and even Red Cross food distribution centers (bombed twice.) Something like 60-70% of the bombs used in Afghanistan were of the smart variety (compared to 3%
used in Persian Gulf War I and 30% in Yugolsavia) and yet according to two studies the proportion of civilian casualties per bomb has actually increased along with the increased smartness of the bombs. (See Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties)Of course we can say that the problems are not with the bombs themselves but with minor technological glitches in the particular bomb. But all of these are just distinctions without a difference to the civilians who are bombed, and miss the point: The function of these spins is to absolve us of any responsibility for the consequences of our actions. If something goes wrong, its not our fault, its the bomb's fault for not being as smart as we thought it was, and its the fault of the Nasty Dictator who forced us to drop the bombs in the first place, etc.
And combined with that, the technological superiority of the weapons are used to further prove the justness of our wars and, by implication, our moral/cultural superiority and righteousness in waging the war. For example, during Persian Gulf War I, the Patriot Missile was practically apotheosized as representing everything good about America -- first-world, modern, patriotic, the great defender of our defensive forces who were defending the defenseless, effective, determined, and accurate -- in short not really a missile but also mom, the flag and apple pie too. The Patriot became the subject of mass adulation and endorsement by the President himself during his subsequent visit to Raytheon's missile factory.
And facing the Patriot, in the other corner of the ring, were the SCUDS, which represented everthing bad about the other side: backwards, technologically obsolete, indiscriminate, inaccurate, unreliable, cheap, ineffective, and third world. (Only later did we find out that in all liklihood, not a single Patriot missile had actually hit its intended target.)
So now here we are marveling at the smartness of our "smart bombs" and speculating about dropping a few of them someplace new. No need to be concerned the legalities or moralities or motivations or even the consequences of such a move--after all our bombs are smart because we're smart and so we're better and so our cause must be just and so there's no real reason to worry about civilian deaths or anything else.
But if perchance some of those smart bombs do kill some conveniently nameless, faceless civilians war "over there" -- their deaths are really the fault of their Nasty Dictators, and whatever failures our weapons had are naturally always simply "accidents" and technological "glitches" like what happened aboard the Vincennes--but certainly nobody's fault, and so no negative conclusions should be reached on that basis about us, our policies, or the superiority of our culture or the justness of our wars. The smartness of our smart bombs and the nastiness of the Nasty Dictators absolve us of any responsibility, not to mention the constraints of international law. But if they kill any civilians -- or even our military personnel or our mercenaries -- its because they're bad people from a bad civilization where "Something Went Wrong."
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