Why We Should Care More About 'Blowback' from U.S. Foreign Policy
Less than a year after President Obama was sworn into office, Yemen announced that it had conducted a series of military strikes on al-Qaeda training camps operating in its southern province. The Pentagon wouldn't comment on the matter, and Yemen repeatedly insisted that it acted alone. But a Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Shaye, traveled to the scene of the attack, where he discovered the remains of American missiles and cluster bombs, and reported on the innocents that were killed. "To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested," Jeremy Scahill reports. "The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament."
The journalist who exposed the civilian casualties and the Yemeni lies about American involvement is now in prison, accused of assisting terrorists, though no evidence has been presented to support that charge. Nearly pardoned by Yemen's government, he remains in custody, to the dismay of human rights groups. As Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum debate what that means, I want to remark on the domestic political angle. Judging by the apathetic reaction to the imprisonment of innocents at Guantanamo Bay, I don't expect Americans would care if their president was complicit in unjustly imprisoning a foreign journalist. But the raid -- the one that killed all those women and children -- is just the sort of bungled effort that creates antagonism toward America, aids in terrorist recruitment, and ultimately makes us less safe. It's certainly part of why some Yemenis are increasingly radicalized against us. And it is an awful human tragedy, the sort that no American would want on his or her conscience. Had you heard about it before now, even as a single data point?
President Obama is likely to campaign in part on his repeated successes in killing various al-Qaeda members, Osama bin Laden foremost among them. It's perfectly legitimate for him to do so. But the various assessments of Obama's foreign policy record, whether offered by the mainstream media, the conservative press, or the Republican presidential candidates, almost invariably ignore the cost of waging undeclared, under-the-radar drone and missile wars in numerous Muslim countries. During the Bush Administration, the blowback critique was commonplace. It even persisted into the early days of current administration. Said Obama himself:
Instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al-Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists than it ever detained.
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/why-we-should-care-more-about-blowback-from-us-foreign-policy/254537/
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