Rigby5
Diamond Member
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When it came to âcollateral damage,â there was no need to count because there was nothing to tote up or, at worst, such civilian casualties were âin the single digits.â That this was balderdash, that often when those drones unleashed their Hellfire missiles they were unsure who exactly was being targeted, that civilians were dying in relatively countable numbers â and that others were indeed counting them â mattered little, at least in this country until recently. Drone war was, after all, innovative and, as presented by two administrations, quite miraculous. In 2009, CIA Director Leon Panetta called it âthe only game in townâ when it came to al-Qaeda. And what a game it was. It needed no math, no metrics. As the Vietnam War had proved, counting was for losers â other than the usual media reports that so many âmilitantsâ had died in a strike or that some al-Qaeda âlieutenantâ or âleaderâ had gone down for the count.
That era ended on April 23rd when President Obama entered the White House briefing room and apologized for the deaths of American aid worker Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, two Western hostages of al-Qaeda. They had, the president confessed, been obliterated in a strike against a terrorist compound in Pakistan, though in his comments he managed not to mention the word âdrone,â describing what happened vaguely as a âU.S. counterterrorism operation.â In other words, it turned out that the administration was capable of counting â at least to two.
And that brings us to the other meaning of âWho counts?â If you are an innocent American or Western civilian and a drone takes you out, you count. If you are an innocent Pakistani, Afghan, or Yemeni, you donât. You didnât count before the drone killed you and you donât count as a corpse either. For you, no one apologizes, no one pays your relatives compensation for your unjust death, no one even acknowledges that you existed. This is modern American drone reality and the question of who counts and whom, if anyone, to count is part of the contested legacy of Washingtonâs never-ending war on terror.
Once upon a time, of course, enemy deaths were a badge of honor in war, but the American âbody count,â which would become infamous in the Vietnam era, had always been a product of frustration, not pride. It originated in the early 1950s, in the âmeat-grinderâ days of the Korean War, after the fighting had bogged down in a grim stalemate and signs of victory were hard to come by. It reappeared relatively early in the Vietnam War years as American officials began searching for âmetricsâ that would somehow express victory in a country where taking territory in the traditional fashion meant little. As time went on, the brutality of that war increased, and the promised âlight at the end of the tunnelâ glowed ever more dimly, the metrics of victory only grew, and the pressure to produce that body count, which could be announced daily by U.S. press spokesmen to increasingly dubious journalists in Saigon did, too. Soon enough, those reporters began referring to the daily announcements of those figures as the âFive OâClock Follies.â
On the ground, the pressure within the military to produce impressive body counts for those âFolliesâ resulted in what GIs called the âMere Gook Rule.â (âIf itâs dead and itâs Vietnamese, itâs VC [Viet Cong].â) And soon enough anything counted as a body. As William Calley, Jr., of My Lai massacre fame, testified, âAt that time, everything went into a body count â VC, buffalo, pigs, cows. Something we did, you put it on your body count, sir⌠As long as it was high, that was all they wanted.â
When, however, victory proved illusory, that body count came to appear to ever more Americans on the home front like grim slaughter and a metric from hell. As a sign of success, increasingly detached from reality yet producing reality, it became a death-dealing Catch-22. As those bodies piled up and in the terminology of the times a âcredibility gapâ yawned between the metrics and reality, the body count became a symbol not just of a war of frustration, but of defeat itself. It came, especially after the news of the My Lai massacre finally broke in the U.S., to look both false and barbaric. Whose bodies were those anyway?
In the post-Vietnam era, not surprisingly, Washington would treat anything associated with the disaster that had been Vietnam as if it were radioactive. So when, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administrationâs top officials began planning their twenty-first-century wars in a state of exhilarated anticipation, they had no intention of reliving anything that reeked of Vietnam. There would be no body bags coming home in the glare of media attention, no body counts in the battle zones. They were ready to play an opposites game when it came to Vietnam. General Tommy Franks, who directed the Afghan invasion and then the one in Iraq, caught the mood perfectly in 2003 when he said, âWe donât do body counts
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'Bug Splat': Body Counts, Drones, and âCollateral Damageâ
Tom Englehardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | - The Obama administration has adamantly refused to count. Not a body. In fact, for a long time, American officials associated with Washingtonâs drone assassination campaigns and âsignature strikesâ in the backlands of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen claimed...
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