British Peace Groups mount
protests against new
Drone Warfare RAF Base:
Britain has been controlling its armed drones in
the skies over Afghanistan from a US base in Nevada until now; however, from
later in 2013 (like much to do with Britain’s drone wars, the exact details are
being kept secret) it will begin operating drones directly from the UK at the
new British home of drone warfare, RAF Waddington.
On Saturday April 27, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Drone Campaign Network,
Stop the War Coalition, and War on Want are organising a march to RAF
Waddington near Lincoln to say a loud and clear ‘No to Drones’. A march will proceed from Lincoln station to
the main gate at RAF Waddington – a distance of about 4 miles. At Waddington a
rally will be held and key speakers will protest on the growing use of drones and remote
warfare.
This year, the UK will double its
number of armed Reaper drones in Afghanistan and these will be run from the
Waddington base.Over the past four years the US has launched hundreds of drone
strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, with reliable reports showing
thousands of people have been killed, including hundreds of children.
In Afghanistan where the US and UK have launched
over 1,500 drone strikes, it is simply not known how many people have perished
in these strikes. In Gaza too, many Palestinians have been killed by Israeli
drone strikes. Drones have become the latest weapon of choice in
the so-called war on terror. Drones make it much easier for politicians to
launch military intervention and assassinate suspects anywhere in the world.
Drones are making the world a much more dangerous place.
See information PDF here:
How to get there:
Transport
for the demonstration at RAF Waddington is being arranged from all over the UK,
and already plans are in place for coaches from London, Birmingham and
Manchester, and to confirm details of travel from further towns and cities in
the coming days, further information is available on the transport page on the
Stop the War website here: http://bit.ly/ZufNFB
Londoners can buy their coach tickets online now (cost is £17 return) from the
link above, or by calling the Stop the War office. Anyone who can help arrange
group transport to Lincoln from their own area can get in touch with the
organisers on 020 7561 9311.
Spread the petition: call on the British Government to abandon the use of drones as
a weapon of war:
In just a week nearly 2,000 people have signed the petition calling on the Government
to cease using drones -- including former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis
Halliday. Supporters can add their names and help spread the petition here stopwar.org.uk/drones.
US increases reliance on Drones
The Pentagon's and the CIA's massively scaled-up
use of drone aircraft around the world is highlighted by Medea Benjamin in her
book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.
In 2000, the Pentagon had less than 50 drones; ten years later, that number
is 7,500 - an increase of huge proportions. In 2003, the U.S. Air Force was
flying a handful of round-the clock drone patrols every day; by 2010 that
number has increased to 40 per day. "By 2011, the Air force was training
more remote pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined" explains
Benjamin, citing Mark Maybury, Chief Scientist of the Air Force who said in
2011 "Our number one manning problem in the Air force is operating our
unmanned platform".
The reasons for the explosion
in the use of drones to wage wars around the world are obvious enough. Training
drone pilots is faster, less grueling and cheaper compared to traditional
pilots. It takes two years to prepare an Air Force recruit for deployment as a
pilot, but only nine months to train a drone operator. And, of course, the
consequences of drone operator error are no more than the price of the drone
itself. As Benjamin writes:
There’s no pilot at risk of being killed or
maimed in a crash. No pilot to be taken captive by enemy forces. No pilot to
cause a diplomatic crisis if shot down in a “friendly country” while bombing or
spying without official permission. If a drone crashes or is shot down, the
pilot back home can simply get up and take a coffee break.
But more important is that the
use of drones to carry out missions in far-flung countries has enabled the
Obama administration to avoid any formal declaration of war while raining down
lethal force from the skies–a clear attempt to skirt both U.S. and
international law regarding war. As Nick Turse writes in The Changing Face
of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases and
Cyberwarfare:
"The American war in
Pakistan–a poster child for what might now be called the Obama formula, if not
doctrine. Beginning as a highly circumscribed drone assassination campaign
backed by limited cross-border commando raids under the Bush administration,
U.S. operations in Pakistan into something close to a full-scale robotic air
war, complemented by cross-border helicopter attacks, CIA-funded “kill teams”
of Afghan proxy forces, as well as boots-on-the-ground missions by elite
special operations forces".
The U.S. has now deployed
drones armed with lethal force in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.
Some 60 bases throughout the world are directly connected to the drone
program–from Florida to Nevada in the U.S., from Ethiopia and Djibouti in
Africa, to Qatar in the Middle East and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian
Ocean.
According to Turse, for the
last three years, Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater (infamous for its criminal activities in Iraq), has
been in charge of arming the fleet of Predator drones at CIA clandestine sites
in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Obama administration’s
aggressive use of drone warfare is yet further confirmation that Barack Obama’s
policies represent the continuation rather than the repudiation of the U.S.
government’s militaristic foreign policy of the Bush years.
The withdrawal of combat
troops from Iraq–after failing to renegotiate the terms of the Status of Forces
Agreement with the Iraqi government–occurred on Obama’s watch, but the U.S.
still plans to keep thousands of “non-combat” personnel in Iraq. Meanwhile,
Obama carried out a troop surge into Afghanistan that doubled the number of
U.S. soldiers in that country.
All along the way, the use of
drones has accelerated–especially during Obama’s presidency, as this infographic effectively
illustrates. They are seen as the ideal solution for a military that is
overextended after 10 years of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq–without
achieving a decisive victory, but at enormous economic, political and
diplomatic cost. Drones, by contrast, have a “lightweight footprint,” allowing
them to operate behind a veil of secrecy. They provide intelligence, lethal
force and global reach on the cheap, while simultaneously giving U.S. military
strategists plausible deniability to avoid accountability for their actions.
So when Sen. Lindsey Graham
(R-South Carolina) recently blurted out in late February that U.S. drone
strikes had killed 4,700 people, the military establishment no doubt shuddered.
Graham was speaking to the Rotary Club in Easley, South Carolina, and was the
first government official to provide a figure for the number of casualties in
the drone wars–his number was around one-and-a-half times greater than
unofficial estimates based on press accounts and other eyewitness reports.
Graham wasn’t
bemoaning the high death toll–he was enthusiastic about it. Graham went on to
say that he approved of the U.S. targeting of American citizens abroad and even
the use of drones on the U.S.-Mexico border. Of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.
citizen killed in a drone strike in 2011, Graham said, “He’s been
actively involved in recruiting and prosecuting the war for al-Qaeda. He was found
in Yemen, and we blew him up with a drone. Good.” “I didn’t want him to have a
trial,” he continued. “We’re not fighting a crime, we’re fighting a war. I
support the president’s ability to make a determination as to who an enemy
combatant is.”
While 56 percent of respondents
support using drones against “high-level terrorist leaders,” only 13 percent
think they should be used against “anyone suspected of being associated with a
terrorist group.” And only 27 percent supported using drones “if there was a
possibility of killing innocent people.” Another 13 percent opposed the drone
program entirely.
Given that only a minority of
those killed by drones to date are “high-level leaders”–the New American
Foundation estimates it’s as low as 2 percent–Americans may be more sceptical
of the policy the more they learn about it.
Still, the military
establishment has a secret weapon in the public relations battle to preserve
support for its favorite secret weapon–Barack Obama himself. Polling done by
political scientist Michael Tesler found that significantly more whites “racial
liberals” (a pollster category for liberals who are liberal on questions of
race) supported the policy of targeted killings once they were told that the
Obama administration had carried out this policy. As Walsh writes: Only 27
percent of white “racial liberals” in a control group supported the targeted
killing policy, but that jumped to 48 percent among such voters who were told
Obama had conducted such targeted killings. White “racial conservatives” were
more likely than white racial liberals to support the targeted killing policy
overall, and Obama’s support for it didn’t affect their opinion. The Obama administration is
thus the perfect mouthpiece for reestablishing the military’s prestige among a
war-weary public–and drones are the perfect vehicle.
In this respect, Obama is
bringing U.S. military strategy full-circle. In 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defence
Donald Rumsfeld began his “revolution in military affairs,” steering the
Pentagon toward a military-lite model of high-tech, agile forces. The concept
came to a grim end in Iraq’s ruined cities. A decade later, the last vestiges
of its many failures continue to play out in a stalemated war in Afghanistan…in
the years since, two secretaries of defence and a new President have presided
over another transformation–this one geared toward avoiding ruinous,
large-scale land wars, which the U.S. has consistently proven unable to win.
Drones are really a symptom of
the reorientation of U.S. foreign policy away from the cowboy imperialism of
the Bush years. The U.S. has by far the most
lethal and technologically advanced military force on the planet, but, with its
treasury drained and the rapid rise of global competitors, especially China,
the "Obama Doctrine" employs different strategies to achieve the same goals:
fewer tanks, more spies and special forces; fewer invasions, more secret bases
and drones; and whenever possible, offloading direct responsibility for
fighting onto proxy forces and friendly (to U.S. interests) well-armed
dictators.
In the world capitalist economic system built around
competition and the maximisation of profit and control of resources, this competition compels nation
states to arm themselves for military conflict–or be overrun. And it’s the
U.S.–which spends as much as the other countries in the top 20 military
spenders combined–that does the lion’s share of overrunning.
So, while it’s essential to
oppose drones and the various imperial adventures they enable with horrendous
human casualties and suffering, the economic system that gives rise to military
conflict must also be challenged.
