Another One Bites the Dust

As a mediating point, I should note that the scope of a question like "what can violence solve?" is pretty wide and unlikely something that can be answered through an internet discussion. Equally important, perhaps, is the fact that none of the examples under debate are close parallels to the targeted killing of a handful of people. On the one hand, advocates of the attack (such as myself) generally aren't going to suggest that we adopt the level of violence necessary to "solve" the problem of terrorism in the Arabian peninsula. In other words, at least I'm not going to advocate widespread use of murder and population extermination as a means of eliminating terrorism (for a whole host of reasons ranging from ethics to practicality). On the other hand, advocates of the attack aren't claiming that this strike alone (or even all of the targeted attacks put together) could possibly solve the conflict.

In fact, I don't see this situation as one which is very similar to Iraq or Afghanistan. Most of what is going on in the southern part of the peninsula is actually, as I understand it, unrelated to the United States and our image in the world. They are experiencing a near-civil war due to the same problems of corrupt authoritarianism that the rest of the region is, coupled with a government (like Libya, Iran, or Syria), which doesn't feel particularly reluctant to use ghastly amounts of force on its population. The growth of terrorism in Yemen seems to be due to the relative safety that the breakdown of state authority (largely due to its own heavy handed actions) has provided to terrorists wishing to operate from there. In other words, American use of military power in the region isn't the cause of the growth of terrorism there. It may increase or decrease it (I believe the latter for the al-Awlaki case), but our presence in that part of the peninsula isn't pronounced as it is in other parts of the Middle East. For example, a casual glance at the obituary list of AQAP leaders shows that Saudi Arabia is by far a much more present antagonist for the organization, killing many more members than the US does.

In this context, I think that assassinations of AQAP leaders by the US military just isn't the kind of negative PR that it could be elsewhere (though I think in general that targeted killings aren't a significant source of grievance towards the US - torture and collateral damage takes that prize). Of course, given our odd relationship with the Yemeni government and the unpredictable dynamics of the widespread social unrest in Yemen, I'd still generally want very, very few US military strikes in the area - and in the rest of the world for that matter. This one, in my opinion, is justified but I share apprehensions with critics of the attack if this incident proves to be part of a larger chain.

Let me say it another way. In a war, you can have a situation where things escalate to a point that shooting starts, or just before the shooting starts but both sides realize things have gone too far and look for a way to pull them back. IE Cuban missile crisis, could have been the end of everything but luckilly things pulled back. OR you have a situation where one side is the aggressor and must be stopped with force. Now you use that force until he wins, or you win, that does not necessarily mean you have to kill everyone, however it may mean that you bring him to the table to negotiate for peace because he no longer sees force as a way of achieving his goals. This works well with state actors who have something to lose.

When you deal with non state actors, they are by all accounts criminals, and they should be treated as such as far as the law can reasonably treat them. This means that in the case of this thread yes I believe he was a valid target, however I would not advocate shooting him if he was in a school full of children because well thats overkill and pointless. you can wait 5 minutes till he leaves the school and kill him on the road or what have you. Altho I used a very extreme set of examples I did so because I feel that the people arguing against are using equally extreme opposite examples. IE Violence never solved anything ever. We both know that is simply not true. You can also look back and you will see that I have never seriously said torture was ok it's a war crime and does not get good intel. thats been known for decades. I should not have boiled my arguments down to sound bytes because they lost alot of meaning but to be honest I don't feel that had I spent the time to go into the amount of detail that Red Bstd has gone into at times I would be doing anything more than waste my time.

Of course the Afghani war was unpopular at home in the USSR. The heavy handedness of Soviet military force also hurt the Soviet image abroad. The conflict was definitely harmful for the USSR. I'm not sure, though, what part the actual violence from the mujahideen played in that scenario, though. Gorbachev was willing to slash expenditures in foreign policy pretty much across the board: he announced the Sinatra Doctrine in reference to Eastern Europe, cut off military aid and arms sales to countries like Iraq, and worked to reduce the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Violence doesn't seem to play much of a causal role here, given that we seem to be able to say that we could have expected him to try eliminating that cost regardless of what the Afghanis did.

I don't want to be pedantic here, but it seems like you'd want examples in which violent resistance played an uncontroversially large causal role in ending a conflict (and ideally examples which didn't immediately lead to worse conditions than had the violence never been utilized). I don't want to sound like too much of an apologist for Soviet military actions, but let's imagine for a minute that the mujahideen hadn't fought back. The Soviet-backed Najbullah government was unquestionably unpopular, unreasonable, and murderous (like all of its predecessors), but sincerely interested in promoted women's rights, land reform, infrastructure-building, and other social engineering schemes which could have moved the country forward decades in terms of catching up with its neighbors in terms of quality of life. I can't honestly say that anyone ended up better off after violent struggle became the preferred tool of resolving the - often legitimate - grievances that the mujahideen had.

Fair enough. I got into Moscow just after 4:00 am, though, so I've had time to waste by posting stuff at a 24-hour coffee house while waiting for my potential landlord to wake up...

It was this or play more Plants vs. Zombies.

No, I'll be completely honest and say that violence on a large scale has horrific results and I won't pretend that that it magically solves everything. What it is good for is getting people to grow tired of it and to reevaluate if their position is really worth all the killing and eventually make peace. For a while anyhow.

War should be used as little as possible as a way to resolve disputes as it tends to create as many problems as it solves. However violence in the case of a drone strike to kill a high ranking member of a terrorist organization and disrupt it's ability to function is a good use of said violence in this case. Now as i said if he were in a country with a function police force that could arrest him then I would say that the cops should knock in his door and grab him and he should go away for a very long time. We don't have that luxury in Yemen however do we.

Might you have packed a camera? And might I impose upon you to take MANY MANY photographs of any pre soviet style architecture you come across? The older the better, I am a fan of medieval and renaissance architecture, and altho I realize that much of it has been torn down you might come across an old wall or castle in your travels in eastern Europe. I like to try and recreate the look of the architecture when I build Castles out of Lego.

Yeah I got fed up with the thread a bit and just decided to keep moving in the opposite direction of a few people.

EFF files FOIA suit again, to obtain information about Predator drone flights in the U.S.

These are not armed drones, you say. True enough, but we already have State Police sharpshooters firing from helicopters to stop fleeing cars.

That's Texas, you say, and I'll have to give you that one.