In April we learned three months
after the event that an American drone strike in Pakistan inadvertently killed Warren
Weinstein, an American held as a hostage in Pakistan. President Obama made a
public apology, stating “I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the
United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.” (“American
killed by US drone in Pakistan,” BostonGlobe.com, April 24, 2015.)
Unfortunately this was not the
only innocent person killed by drone strikes. An Associated Press article by
Sebastian Abbot attempted to make the case that few civilians have been killed
by U.S. drones (e.g., “Most
killed by US drones are militants, study finds,” Boston Globe, Feb.
26, 2012, p. A3). The article establishes that 30%, meaning “only” 30%, of
those killed by drones in Pakistan were civilians or other non-militants.
That 30% at that time—over three years ago—amounted to about 56 civilians or
other non-militants killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan. The
killed included children. Later, on July 22, 2013, the London-based non-profit The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
reported that a Pakistani document revealed that “of 746 people listed as
killed in the drone strikes . . . at least 147 of the dead . . . are clearly
stated to be civilian victims, 94 of those are said to be children.” This is
not counting civilians killed by drone strikes in other countries.
The killed civilians were not in
a war zone. They were not on a battlefield. They were killed similar to the way
Warren Weinstein was killed, inadvertently in an attempt to kill the active
perpetrators of violence.
There was no public official apology
from President Obama for the death of those innocent Pakistanis. The
reports of these deaths of innocents, when such reports existed at all, were
mostly hidden in small articles in back pages, often under reassuring headlines
like the one above.
The only conclusion I can draw
from this sequence of events is that the United States regards the life of an innocent
American far more highly than that of an innocent Pakistani. (Did you make the
distinction in your own mind: “Oh, those were not Americans, they were
Pakistanis?”)
There has been a persistent national
preference for preserving American lives over other innocent lives. The 2003
invasion of Iraq and its aftermath cost several hundred thousands of Iraqi
civilian lives, all in the name of advancing democracy and perhaps
civilization. Iraqi civilians, including children, were pawns in a global
contest for power. Their lives apparently did not matter—
at least not enough to warrant the kind of official
regret expressed by the President about Mr. Weinstein.
It should not surprise us, then,
that there are people in Pakistan and the Middle East who hate the United
States and are resorting to terrorism in an attempt to destroy it. Unfortunately,
the behavior of our country towards innocent lives is creating its own enemies.
This behavior and the reactions to it cannot but help lead us down the road
towards greater conflict and more war, increasing the threat of involvement of
those with or developing nuclear weapons.
It should be clear from these events
that reflect relative indifference to non-American civilian deaths that we as a
nation continue to be headed in the wrong direction.
What can we do to turn our
nation around and make it a force for lasting peace? Killing innocent civilians
of any nationality in any country is not the way to do it. Regarding civilian
deaths as merely collateral damage is not the way to do it. Treating American
lives as more important than the lives of non-Americans is not the way to do
it.
What this indifference to non-American civilian
lives reveals is a rejection of the values underlying democracy, values that maintain that all people are of equal worth.