Lawrence David Freedman Quotes
It’s hard to know whether drone strikes have provoked more anger than other forms of Western power.
There was extensive hostility expressed by civilian populations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States made Drone strikes to take out terrorist leaders. However, there was much anti-American feeling in Pakistan before the Drone strikes.
Lawrence David Freedman The Drone Revolution Foreign Affairs. November/December 2016 Volume 95, Number 6
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Although the Amerian Drone program did inadvertently kill untargeted or mistakenly targeted civilians at that time, the collateral damage rate was smaller than any other weapons system available to the American forces. War has always produced unintended collateral damage. The only way to stop the killing of innocent civilians then and now is to stop the war.
Ironically, one of the major objections to drone strikes is that they have caused civilian casualties.
This is always a problem in parts of the world where conflicts operate with many different parties and theater are personal grudges and scores to settle.
Hamas had fired thousands of rockets and other missiles at Israeli population centers—war crimes under the Geneva Conventions. Israel finally retaliated against Hamas facilities in Gaza. However, in an unprecedented effort to avoid civilian casualties, the Israeli Defense Forces warned the people by indicating which targets they were going to strike. They also dropped leaflets in Arabic telling the civilians that they are not the targets but to try and avoid harm to them and their families, they should evacuate the neighborhoods that would be under attack. Hamas had placed their missile launchers and other weapons in and near schools, hospitals, mosques and civilian housing risking their civilian population—see {640841}.
Many of the Pakistani leaders publicly opposed and complained about the Drone program, while privately they supported it and in some cases even requested drone strikes. In this case the Prime Minister would lead a protest against the Drone program in the National Assembly and then let the issue drop.
Executive Order 12333 prohibits political assassinations. The administration took the position that the prohibition did not apply to war where assassination (targeted killing) of enemy leaders is clearly permitted. The problem was that the George W. Bush Administration did not classify the “War on Terror” as a war. They didn’t want to treat captured jihadists as prisoners of war. The Obama administration also would not ask Congress for a Declaration of war, and this caused the moral, ethical, and legal ambiguity that has plagued targeted killings by drones or other means throughout the Afghan and Iraq Wars which were legally not wars.
