SLATE COLUMN: on Thursday, President Obama confessed to a terrible mistake. An American drone strike on al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan, carried out in January, accidentally killed two hostages—Warren Weinstein of the United States and Giovanni Lo Porto of Italy—who were concealed at the site…
But these two deaths, tragic as they are, don’t change the fundamental truth: For civilians, drones are the safest form of war in modern history. As I’ve documented before, they’re more discriminating and more accurate. If you want to minimize civilian casualties, getting rid of drones—and steering warfare back to bombing and shelling—is the worst thing you could do…
Compare those numbers with any other method of warfare. Start with an apples-to-apples comparison: the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s analysis of “other covert operations” in Yemen. According to BIJ’s methodology, this category consists of nondrone attacks by U.S. forces, “including airstrikes, missile attacks and ground operations.” BIJ counts 68 to 99 civilian deaths in these operations, among 156 to 365 total casualties. That’s a civilian casualty rate of 27 percent to 44 percent: three times worse than drone strikes in the same country. Or look at the bureau’s data from Somalia. For drones, the BIJ counts 23 to 105 casualties, of whom zero to five were civilian. For other covert operations, the BIJ counts 40 to 141 casualties, of whom seven to 47 were civilian. If you go with the low-end numbers, drones have a perfect record in Somalia. If you go with the high-end numbers, drones are seven times safer than the alternatives… (more)
EDITOR: Compare with sending troops and occupying a country, such as Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have been kill.
We wish there were a more humane way to fight a war, but drones seem to be the most humane means for ouir day.
