Roland Gupta is a contributing editor at TomDispatch, a fellow at the New America Foundation, and an Adjunct Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. His new book, The Fight for the World: U.S. Proxy Wars, Pakistan’s Nuclear Threat, and the New Global Security Order, will be released next month by AK Press. To learn more and donate to his work, visit his website.
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Copyright 2015 Roland Guha
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Tom Engelhardt says this may be the single most important news of 2014 so far: When US drone strikes kill civilians in a foreign country, it’s a huge national security scandal. The killing of Osama bin Laden and other high-profile al Qaeda figures brought to light Washington’s deep secrets. That revelation was not enough for the Bush and Obama administrations; they carried on bombing Afghanistan in the years to come. So the Obama administration is now moving forward with the drone war on Yemen, where it has carried out at least 14 drone air missions and killed about 20 civilians, most of them militants linked to the Iran-backed Houthis who are trying to overthrow the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The US believes that Yemen’s civil war and ongoing conflict are directly connected, and not just to Iran, which backed and armed the Houthis. But while the drone war has been killing tons of Yemen’s civilians in the name of fighting “terrorist groups,” the United States has been trying to kill Yemeni civilians in the name of terrorism, too. At least a dozen people are said to be dead in the latest drone strike, yet many other Yemeni civilians have been killed by US missiles that fall from the skies. US officials are saying that the alleged “martyrdom” of the two al Qaeda operatives, and the apparent threat against Americans, explains the drone war. But it’s just another reason to end it. In the days after September 11, 2001, the United States killed scores of civilians in countries surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Algeria