this year is the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, what was known as the war to end all wars. Clearly somebody got that wrong. In the UK there is an organisation dedicated to stopping all war: the Stop The War Coalition. Founded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it is based in the capital but attracts support from all over the world.
The organisation is run by “the usual suspects”, ie it has an extreme left wing bias, but somebody has to stop the war or die trying. It is currently running a number of campaigns, including against the American drone programme. This is one of the great scandals of our age, because the UK as well as the US is engaged in what can only be described as a thinly veiled overt operation of extrajudicial killing, ie murder.
Someone in the United States – an anonymous State Department employee – designates an individual in Pakistan or somewhere else a threat to American security, perhaps a militant with a rifle living in a hovel without electricity or running water; this individual is then found and executed by an unmanned drone. No arrest, no indictment, no trial, simply bang, you’re dead.
Even worse, large numbers of totally innocent people – including women, children and the elderly – become “collateral damage”. The estimated death toll of innocents varies widely, but the official Pakistani Government estimate is surely not to be taken seriously.
There can be little doubt that the Pakistani Government is complicit in the drone attacks on Waziristan, but that is no mitigation. Curiously, the record of the Obama Administration is even worse than that of the Bush Administration.
If we are to stop the war at all, stopping the drone programme will in the long term be every bit as important as sorting out the current nightmare in Syria. Check out the Stop-The-War website for updates about this and other important campaigns.
[The above article was first published February 24, 2014.]
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