The Wall Street Journal is officially in love with President Obama's undeclared air war inside of Pakistan's borders. In an unsigned editorial, the paper enthusiastically endorses Obama's use of predator drones to bomb areas throughout Pakistan. The WSJ editors praise the administration, saying "to its credit, [the White House] has stepped up the use of Predators." The editors declare: "When Pakistan's government can exercise sovereignty over all its territory, there will be no need for Predator strikes. In the meantime, unmanned bombs away."
The paper accurately notes some of the reasons for opposing drone strikes: "the belief that the attacks cause wide-scale casualties among noncombatants, thereby embittering local populations and losing hearts and minds." The WSJ also accurately reports:
Lord Bingham, until recently Britain's senior law lord, has recently said UAV strikes may be "beyond the pale" and potentially on a par with cluster bombs and landmines. Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says "the Predator [drone] strikes have an entirely negative effect on Pakistani stability." He adds, "We should be cutting strikes back pretty substantially."
But Bingham and Kilcullen are naive fools, according to the WSJ editors. Moreover, they are fools who have been suckered by evil un-embedded reporters. "If you glean your information from wire reports - which depend on stringers who are rarely eyewitnesses," the editors quip, "the argument [against drone attacks] seems almost plausible." Right, these "stringers" who often risk their lives to reveal the human toll of U.S. bombings are far less credible than the fat cat editors of the WSJ (some of whom are probably in the Hamptons having servants clip their toe nails or mix their Martinis as I write this).
The WSJ editors descend from their thrones to mingle among the mortals and teach us the error of our ways:
Yet anyone familiar with Predator technology knows how misleading those reports can be. Unlike fighter jets or cruise missiles, Predators can loiter over their targets for more than 20 hours, take photos in which men, women and children can be clearly distinguished (burqas can be visible from 20,000 feet) and deliver laser-guided munitions with low explosive yields. This minimizes the risks of the "collateral damage" that often comes from 500-pound bombs. Far from being "beyond the pale," drones have made war-fighting more humane.
Ah, yes, that famous humane war we have all been waiting for. Finally!
The WSJ editors then reveal the highly independent, impeccable source for their information: "A U.S. intelligence summary we've seen corrects the record of various media reports claiming high casualties from the Predator strikes." Wow. Remember when the Bush administration was correcting all those errors about Saddam's WMDs? Not surprisingly, the WSJ states that "In each of the strikes in 2009 that are described by the intelligence summary, the report says no women or children were killed. Moreover, we know of planned drone attacks that were aborted when Predator cameras spied their presence."
The WSJ wants this U.S. "intelligence" shared with the American public and the world, arguing, "We understand there will always be issues concerning sources and methods. But critics of the drone attacks, especially Pakistani critics, have become increasingly vocal in their opposition. They deserve to know about the terrorist calamities they've been spared thanks to these unmanned flights over their territory."
It is very telling that the WSJ editorial-with no apparent shame-fails to mention the U.S. drone attacks last month that may have killed more than 80 people in Pakistan, including as many as 70 people in a U.S. bombing of a funeral procession in a tribal area. The WSJ editors defend the attacks, saying they are killing "high value targets," saying of those killed by U.S. drone strikes, "Is the world better off with these people dead? We think so." But the fact is that some statistics from the Pakistani government suggested that of the 700+ people killed in these U.S. drone strikes since 2006, 14 were "high value targets" or "al Qaeda" leaders and the vast majority were civilians. In this case, the real question is: "What does it say about the U.S. that its government authorizes the killing of these civilians?"
© 2009 Jeremy Scahill
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