April 24^th

A recent drone strike has killed two western prisoners of Al Qaida. The same strike also killed four Al Qaida members but the unfortunate collateral damage is getting all of the attention. Any friendly fire damage is regrettable but all wars produce them. It appears that these killings of innocents are much more regrettable because they were produced by drones. In at least one daytime talk show the liberal half of “Morning Joe,” Mika Brzezinski, is scandalized by the use of drones for any reason. She is sure they will be used to infringe upon our liberties.  When they are used to successfully attack our enemies and collateral damage results, that scenario, for her, is beyond the pale.

Mika, and some others of her persuasion, are too young to remember the events of WW 2. Then American and British submarines targeted Japanese troop ships, many of which were known to be carrying allied prisoners. These ships were targeted and sunk all the same. The risk to prisoners was outweighed by the need to eliminate Japanese shipping capability. The result was that an estimated 20 thousand allied casualties occurred as a result of these sinkings. The lists of ships sunk and the toll of prisoners drowned is available on the internet. The toll of American submarines sunk by the Japanese is also available. There were also enormous civilian casualties from Allied bombing of Berlin and Tokyo and there were enormous losses of AAF crews manning those bombers. Unfortunately the civilian losses in that war were often deliberately inflicted in the mistaken belief that it would lead the enemy to a quicker surrender; that didn’t happen.

More recently in Iraq and Afghanistan where we suffered about 6.5 thousand dead, the Iraqis alone have had well over 150 thousand civilian casualties and another 20 thousand Afghani civilian casualties can be added to that. But what about civilian casualties from drone strikes? That’s not easy to determine. If you go online you can find estimates of total casualties by country, then of those the number of civilian casualties, and of those the number of children casualties. This site, which presumes to be responsible, provides a minimum and a maximum in each category. Unfortunately these can vary by 250 percent. It is difficult to put much reliance on data producing such disparity. It’s obvious that there are civilian casualties and that some of them are children. That happens in a war; it certainly happened in Berlin and in Tokyo, and in a war it may be unavoidable. The one area where there are no casualties is the drone operators. None of them have been killed, quite unlike the casualties from B-17 raids over Germany when ten percent losses per daily raid were recorded. It has been suggested that drone attacks are unfair because there is no risk to the attacker; to talk about fairness when discussing warfare is at the very least, curious.

The upshot here is that the civilian casualties from drone strikes are far lower that the civilian casualties would be from an invasion using conventional warfare. The only way to reduce civilian casualties to zero is to stop fighting. Can one side do that without committing suicide?