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Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Guess Who (Almost) Came To Dinner: Zawahiri CNN reports that "Pakistani intelligence officials have said Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, had been invited to a dinner in the targeted village of Damadola to mark an Islamic holiday but did not show up and sent some aides instead." Bosh, then, on the idea that our Predator drone pilots have no idea what they are doing, or that the CIA thrives off of half-baked information. In the days before drones, one had to get a guy in a fake beard at the table, instead of a Hellfire missile's crosshairs over it. This has a certain charm -- but the drawbacks cancel each other out in the inconvenience department, and leave us -- once again -- with the balance being the lives of the innocent Pakistanis of Damadola village who were blown apart along with the Qaeda cronies. The provincial government of Bajur, in which Damadola is situated, took a measured tone. "It is regrettable that 18 local people lost their lives in the attack, but this fact also cannot be denied, that 10-12 foreign extremists had been invited on a dinner." It would seem, as some have argued, that the more attenuated the link between attacker and attackee, the more strained the laws of just war: if I can blast you from over the horizon, the moral rules of engagement that make battle as gentlemanly a balance of risked harm as possible start to come apart. But the dilemma of obliterating civilians, or not protecting them from obliteration, in exchange for fighting an enemy's troops is as present in low-tech Iraq as it is in the high-tech stratosphere. The stunner, for some, is that we live in an era of proportionately tiny civilian casualties -- if for no other reason than the extraordinary sensitivity of Americans to those innocent deaths. "Extraordinary," I say, in that civilian deaths were once, between the Civil War and Vietnam, considered all part of the ball game. But welcome to the world of partial war. In a war for limited ends, such as the Iraq War, the taste for destruction is much lower, the taste for blood very low. Thirty thousand casualties is a horribly high raw number, but not in terms of the price of conquering a whole country. Defining victory is key to winning it; limited victory, by the same token, insists upon limited means, limited deaths. James G. Poulos blogs at Postmodern Conservative. Blogger News Network is advertiser-supported, and your visits to our advertisers help BNN to meet its expenses. Help keep us afloat! posted by James G. Poulos at 8:57 AM |
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