Getting kids to go to bed at night, and to stay there till morning, and not get up, again and again, is possibly life’s greatest challenge. When I had young children, I was willing to do whatever it took.
Drink of water? Sure. Okay. No more.
Drone strike? Well, as tempting as that sounds … no.
But according to The Washington Post, Farea al-Muslimi, a young Yemeni man, testified before the United States Senate that some parents in his country have taken to threatening their children at bedtime, “Go to sleep or I will call the planes.”
Pretty funny. Until it dawned on me that our USA is now scarier than the monster hiding underneath the bed.
“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village,” Muslimi warned, “one drone strike accomplished in an instant: There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”
Georgetown University Law Professor Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon advisor, testified: “Every individual detained, targeted, and killed by the U.S. government may well deserve his fate. But when a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”
Anything that undermines the rule of law, undermines the United States of America.
It’s long past time we put the lawlessness of the killer drone program to bed … and not just till morning.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
7 replies on “Sleep Rules?”
Paul,
Here is the question that comes to mind. Where is the responsibility for these “innocents” for harboring terrorists in their homes, villages and countries? If they were not already predisposed to hate us, I don’t think they would be allowing the al-Awlakis of the world to operate freely among them. If they were doing something like this in America they would be tried as accessories at least. But because we go in and target terrorists where the locals support- or at least look the other way- while active terrorists thrive, somehow we are the bad guys for taking matters into our own hands without putting our own soldiers at risk? These communities BREED the terrorists, and they are not innocent.
Rollin … the presence of our military bases and drone attacks on foreign soil is a repulsive to those who LIVE there as armed Chinese troops and drone attacks in Boston would be to us.
Rollin, you are correct. Mr. jacobs, like his ideol Ron Paul (at the debate sponsored by THE AMERICAN HERITAGE FOUNDATION) and his son, Rand paul, think it is better if there is American blood shed, THEN try the people (? I question if they are human).
When the guys with the AKs show up and say that they are going to hang around for a few days, the villager that doesn’t go along or that tries to undermine their efforts will find his torso missing. Hard to not aid and abet under those conditions. Choice of immediate local death versus occasional sky death is not much choice.
It is very difficult to make friends in the midst of a war, people are not disposed to like those who are seen to be responsible for the deaths of their family, friends, and neighbors. In that situation they rarely buy into the concept that it was “for their own good”.
That is a fallacy of “nation building”.
In the Middle East and other parts of the world (including historically in Europe)there are predispositions to “local” conflicts which were essentially continuous until the carnage was compounded to unsustainable by the efficiency of the tools of modern war.
Our present, and historical problem is that as soon as there is a non-local player, in the past Europeans, last in Afganistan the Russians, and more recently the US, the normally warring locals will tend to agree the foreign power is the true “enemy”, unite to expel it, and then get back to the historical norm of fighting with each other.
Like it or not, that is the lesson of history, and it will be repeated until learned.
Dr. Ben Carson recently quipped that it would be wonderful if governments could learn from their mistakes. Well, that has not happened yet, in either foreign affairs or economics.
Perhaps we should learn from history that such an advance in societal or governmental intelligence cannot be rationally anticipated.
How about when individuals decide their religion gives them the right to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime, because they are of a different faith?
Remember 9/11/2001. NO ONE who was killed on that day was doing anything to harm Muslims anywhere in the world. For that matter, neither was our government.
We’ve been hearing for two decades that we were ‘occupiers’. Now, we are resisting the impulse to involve ourselves in Syria and are being threatened with revenge for ‘failing to come to the aid’ of those in danger. We can’t win. The drone strikes are targeted. The people who wanted us out had the opportunity to do something about it after 9/11. They could have prevented our ever entering Afghanistan. They chose not to.
There are two ways to protect ourselves:
1. vacate Muslim lands, never to return, for any reason, including natural disasters.
2. Ban Muslims of all nationalities from entering the US for any reason for at least a century.
Answer for Rollins. Nobody is predisposed to hate us. It’s a learned behavior, at this point, passed on from generation to generation.