A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in Yemen

The Killing

On October 14, 2011, we -- you and I and all our countrymen -- burned a child to death in a Drone strike in Yemen.

Sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi was killed by a Hellfire missile shot by a Drone in Shabwa, Yemen.

Abdulrahman was eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road in Shabwa, Yemen.  He was with his his cousin, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and seven other friends, when the Hellfire stuck.

This is he place where the nine were eating dinner:

All that was left of Abdulrahman was a piece of skin.  There is no mention of the fate of the other eight guys.

The bit of Abdulrahman's flesh was placed in a casket that headed a funeral procession of many mourning, raging, and now-vengeful Yemenis.

Sixten-year-old boys may be mean as snakes or sweet as angels.  Most are some mixture of both.  There will never be an opportunity to determine what Abdulrahman was:  though the US Constitution guarantees "any person" the right to due process before our government can proceed against him, Abdulrahman was given no process visible to the public.  He was charge with no crime, nor alleged to the an enemy of the people.

A White Paper released by the Administration recently stresses that every effort must be made to capture a person before he may be killed by Drone. The supreme commander of the armed forces in Yemen is Field Marshal Abd Rabbuh Mansur Al-Hadi, the President of the Republic.  President Al-Hamid  has 401,000 active military personnel, largely paid for ty the US.

It belies belief that we could not have persuade President Al-Hadi to arrest Abdulrahman in remote Shabwa.  Why that did not happen has not been explained.

Shabwa is the name of a town and of a province.  Much of the province is part of largest sand desert in the world.

 Eccovi!

  Judge ye!

We killed thousands and thousands of  Germant youngmen in the  carpet-bombing of German cities in WWII.  We did not weep for them.

War is brutal.  We weep for our own killed in war, but we do not weep for Them who are killed in war, though if we had known them, we might have loved hem.

Drone strikes are different, more personal, more intimate, than conventional war.  "Mistakes" are more avoidable and are intended to be avoided.  

Serious, responsible men  -- caring mn, on all accounts --  carefully select which individual is to live and which  die, by Drone strike.  These men carefully weigh how many of the innocent persons near the "target" they may kill, and exercise a degree of retrain if the "colateral damage" be thought to be too great.  None of the men they kill is guilty of any crime, under our law.

I agree that Drone strikes are infinitely preferable to trench warfare.

Drone trikes are said to be necessary, in this New War We Wage, to protect American lives, as if, in this Global Village we, perforce, inhabit, American lives have more value than Pakistani or Yemeni lives. I would be enraged if a Drone were to kill my 16-year old grandson.  My heart goes out to Mr. and Mrs  al-Aulaqi, Abdulrahman's grandparents. I hope yours does, too, and I hope you will understand why I believe that that his killing is unacceptable.

It was, somehow, thought to be necessary or desirable to kill Abdulrahman, his his cousin Abdulrahman, and their seven friends, with Hellfire.

We can, of we like, side with Ezra Pound, whom I love and with whom I side in certain moods:

Damn it all!  all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come!  Let's to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah!  when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

∼  ∼  ∼

May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace!"

Or you may chose another side.  Religions has wrought grate damage, and continue to do it today; and they have produced some ways of looking at the world worthy of your consideration.

Form Paul Tillich, philosopher and theologian. 

You don't conquer the anxiety of dying; you meet it with courage.

From John Donne:

 'No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee....'

From Dylan Thomas' mysterious and awsome way with words:

For the drooping of homes
That did not nurse our bones,
Brave deaths of only ones but never found,
Now see, alone in us,
Our own true strangers' dust
Ride through the doors of our unentered house.
Exiled in us we arouse the soft,
Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks. 

Or [my preference] from the Buddhists in the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Khmer Rouge slaughtering relatives and friends on all sides of them:

Hatred never ceases by hatred,
but by love alone is healed;
This is a great and eternal law.

I do not mourn Abdulrahman's death.  I wish to prevent more deaths like his.  I wish for a better future for my grandchildren, when all nations have killing Drones, and even in remote Aina Haina in far-off Honolulu  . . .

. . . brave men and women may tremble at the sound of a Drone, searching, searching . . . 

Yemen, though poor and starving, is rich in culture and history.  See, e.g., this beautiful video from Habba, just down the road.

 

I am shamed with the way my country treats Yemeni.  I am outraged by  the fact and manner of Abdulrahman's death.  I am angey with President Obama, for whom I voted twice.   I am delighted that Mr. Romney is not our president

And (non sector)

DON'T BOMB IRAN!!!