Droning On

I am indebted to my friend Dr Tomasz Pierscionek for much of the information set out in this post.

Although, at least officially, it was not until yesterday that drone attacks came to be controlled from the United Kingdom (there are RAF wings for that - can you believe it?), the NATO drone bombing of Pakistan has been going on since 2004, that of Yemen since 2008, and that of Somalia since 2009. There were 50 or 60 strikes against Pakistan under Bush. There have been 300, five or six times as many, under Obama, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. There is now talk of drone bombing Mali, if that is not already happening.

There have been three to four thousand deaths as a result of drone strikes since 2004. Any military-aged male, itself loosely defined, is defined as a military target. Only two per cent of those targeted have been senior "al-Qaeda" figures. After all, how many of those are there? All men carry guns in, for example, Waziristan, so anyone can be deemed to "look suspicious". Imagine if that were applied in parts of the United States.

Drones are war without risk to the perpetrator, and a regression to the nineteenth-century view that anything goes, "as long as our people are not killed." The bodybags and the wounded changed public opinion on Vietnam, and Wooten Bassett is having a similar effect. But drones carry no such risk. They can be operated from seven thousand miles away, and we could not have intervened in seven countries since 2001, with more on the hit list, without that capacity. The 2010 Strategic Defence Systems Review called for drones to be given an increasingly larger role, since they are so much cheaper than F16s, and we are not exactly in the midst of an economic boom.

In 2001, the United States gave itself the right to bomb "al-Qaeda" everywhere. And there is someone who does not like America anywhere. What if Cuba were to say that, and launch a drone strike against Miami? What if Russia were to say that, and launch a drone strike against the Chechens in London? 74 countries already have drones, with Russia, China, India, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates known to be developing armed drones.

However, the United States Congress will not allow armed drones in Turkey, a member of NATO, since only Israel is allowed to have them in that region. But there are 700 bases worldwide where drones could be stationed, with a deal only just having been struck to construct one in Niger as part of the New Scramble for Africa that has already seen more Chinese than anyone else evacuated from Libya.

As for the kill list, some pretence at a concept of due process is now being concocted. The terms in circulation are "imminent threat" and "negative predispositions towards the United States".