So is the Nobel Peace Prize winner gonna start another war?

Get all troops out now.

Off the top of my head here is a list of places the US has engaged in "almost traditional" combat operations at some point since 1990.

I'm sure an accurate list is much longer.

Iraq

Pakistan

Yemen

Somalia

Oman

Afghanistan

El Salvador

Nicaragua

Ethiopia

Indonesia

Cambodia

Panama

Grenada

Haiti

Philippines

Myanmar

armchair_warrior said:

I still can't believe dude won a Nobel peace prize for doing nothing peaceful!

The Nobel Prize committee will never recover from giving Obama an award on the "mere basis" that they thought he would run the US military nothing like Bush.

(the suckers have only themselves to blame)

Lot of folks were concerned about the Nobel Prize organization's process and politics when they made the award.

It is sad to see a reputable organization so quickly lose all of its credibility.

....it's kind of like what happened to the ADL, when they foolishly stated that a mosque and community center should be prohibited in Lower Manhattan.

Everyone with any sense either:

a. stopped donating to them,

b. stopped respecting them as an intelligent source of information,

c. wrote them a letter that says if you ever do something again so stupid, we will withdrawal our support, and/or

d. had their long-held suspicions about the organization being unable to see anything but their own agenda, confirmed.

Hopefully the ADL and the Nobel Prize folks will be able to learn from their mistakes, be forgiven by their supporters, regain their reputations and realize that they will need to repeatedly announce how they will be much more careful in the future.

armchair_warrior said:

No longer so secret drone bases. Future war on the cheap I suppose.

The United States is building a ring of secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of an aggressive campaign against al Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing U.S. officials.

One base for the unmanned aircraft is being established in Ethiopia and another base has been installed in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, the newspaper reported.

A small fleet of "hunter-killer" drones resumed operations in the islands this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned drones could effectively patrol Somalia from there, the report said.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-builds-drone-bases-africa-arab-peninsula-report-044158461.html

Our drones are one of the most disgusting, illegal and morally indefensible "foreign policy" initiatives in recent memory.

And that is truly saying something.

whynot_31 said:

Do you really believe that sending in armed drones is worse than sending in armed humans?

The problem is that the choice isn't "troops or drones". In many cases I think it's "drones or nothing".

Having to send in real live human Americans is somewhat of a check on our awful wars and militarism.

Drones free politicians and military leaders from this constraint.

To know the answer to that the government would have to tell us how much they're relying on drones, and even more importantly to me, how many times they kill innocent people as they're being flown via cameras controlled by computers located in Nevada somewhere.

Drones are the next step in the military industrial complex's ongoing campaign with the government to overcome obstacles such as public oversight or basic human rights of people who are unfortunate enough to not be born in the United States or Europe.

Private military contractors (who shoot their guns at people - not chefs & janitors) are a similar and completely related development.

In my opinion? Yes.

Regardless of who is being armed (proxies, contractors or US military), there are less obstacles when firing cruise missiles from a computer in Nevada than there are when there are boots on the ground. When humans are involved.

I also think the likelihood of innocent civilians being targeted is exponentially higher.

They represent a concrete step forward towards war crimes being committed more often.

No doubt in my mind.

I'm with Booklaw.

Not only are drones here to stay, but I believe that the main thing that has stopped us from killing people elsewhere has not been the certainty (not "risk") of lost lives of service members, it has been the fact that we might not achieve whatever our mission is in the Foreign Land of the Day.

Although "we don't need to, and should not, occupy foreign lands", I suspect that we are going to keep doing it for a variety of reasons.

Hence, I would like the military to have access to more drones.

Over the next 20 or so years, we will see if the combatant to non-combatant kill ratio of drones is better than the present methods (soldiers, artillery, bombers, missiles, etc) we have heavily relied on over the past 50 years.

Depending upon the type and the length of engagement, many traditionally fought conflicts kill 20x as many civilians as they do armed combatants.

Hopefully drones will be better at only killing their target.

Until we make that happen, I'll support technologies that have the potential of being more accurate.

I miss the field of Journalism.

armchair_warrior said:

All those dead Iraqi's one day there would be blood to be paid.

anyway Nobel folks aren't the only ones that has to answer. America media is another group.

here is a interesting opinion on it, from outside US.

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.

Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sycophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”

The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jeremiah Wright. In the midst of the brief stormlet over the issue, one CNN host — inexplicably — decided that CNN was going to be a “Wright-free zone.” He could have hung out a sign: “No bad news about Obama here.”

The media trashed Hillary. They burned Republicans. They ransacked Sarah Palin and her family. But Obama, the cool, the detached, the oracular Obama — he strolled to the presidency.

Palin, in particular, stands out as Obama’s opposite in the media’s eyes. As much as they genuflected to the one, they felt the need to turn rottweiler toward the other. If Obama was sacred , classy, intellectual and cosmopolitan, why then Palin must be malevolent, trashy, dumb and pure backwoods-ignorant.

read more : http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/09/17/rex-murphy-the-medias-love-affair-with-a-disastrous-president/

Did they just argue that Obama got a pass to the presidency but Palin faced undue criticism?

Wait, Really?

C'mon AW, that article is nonsense. Well, not nonsense, there is definitely a large kernel of truth to it; the media absolutely had a love affair with the Obama election campaign.

My problem with the article is that the author claims that the "the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign".

Wait, the media abandoned its critical faculties DURING the last election cycle? Not BEFORE? Really? Critical faculties were in effect during the whole 'weapons of mass destruction in Iraq' scenario? During the 'there is absolute proof of a connection between Iraq and Al Quaida' justification for invasion?

Suuure. The American mainstream media JUST lost their capacity for critical thinking that recently. Please, the same nonsense happened in the 50's, when there were very little "critical faculties" in effect in the media machine's portrayal of Senator McCarthy. Until an individiual, Edward R. Murrow, stepped up to the plate. This stuff has happened since the dawn of modern journalism, I'm sure.