A US drone targeted a wedding in Yemen last week and killed more than a dozen people.
On my wedding day, my wife and I hired a couple of shuttle vans to ferry guests between a San Clemente hotel and the nearby site where we held our ceremony and reception. I thought of our friends and family members packed into those vehicles when I read about the latest nightmarish consequence of America's drone war:
"A U.S. drone mistakenly targeted a wedding convoy in Yemen's al-Baitha province after intelligence reports identified the vehicles as carrying al Qaeda militants," CNN reported, citing government sources in Yemen.
"The officials said that 14 people were killed and 22 others injured, nine in critical condition. The vehicles were traveling near the town of Radda when they were attacked."Can you imagine the wall-to-wall press coverage, the outrage, and the empathy for the victims that would follow if an American wedding were attacked in this fashion? Or how you'd feel about a foreign power that attacked your wedding in this fashion?
The
L.A. Times followed up on the story and found slightly different casualty figures: "The death toll reached 17 overnight, hospital officials in central Bayda province said Friday. Five of those killed were suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda, but the remainder were unconnected with the militancy, Yemeni security officials said."
More than a dozen dead, many more injured, and an unknown number of survivors whose lives have suddenly taken a nightmarish turn the likes of which we cannot imagine, and all for the sake of five people suspected of ties to al-Qaeda.
How many actual al-Qaeda terrorists would we have to kill with drones in Yemen to make the benefits of our drone war there outweigh the costs of this single catastrophic strike?
Comment: 5000 nuclear weapons in the arsenal, and a lot of empty rhetoric being bandied about: making the world safe from terror attacks, 'war on terror', etc. while, simultaneously, this same government strategically, surgically strikes upon civilian populations, funds, arms and facilitates atrocities, illegal military occupiers, mercenaries and extremists, colludes with and supports perpetrators of crimes against humanity in other countries, and insistently seeks to build up its own nuclear defense shield. No hypocrisy there, right?