Pissing Against the Wind
S.A.M. said:
And even then, what are the casualties of the USS Liberty called? Are they not collateral damages?
No. They are, as I understand the situation, murder victims.
"Collateral damage" is a euphemism, or what I (taking after Christopher Cerf and Henry Beard) refer to as Bureaucratically Suitable (BS) language.
Back in the
Politically Incorrect days, Bill Maher often espoused the motto, "Satirized for your protection". Which, of course, derives from, "Sanitized for your protection." And this, taken figuratively, is how Americans treat news and other vital information.
For starters,
Wikipedia notes:
The USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide defines the term "[the] unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel, occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces". Another United States Department of Defense document uses "Unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack."
In the public relations context, this makes a big difference. Within the confines of the term, there is no real distinction between a building or a person. This is convenient for the military insofar as the people will generally grow weary of hearing about "innocent civilian death and maiming". But "collateral damage"? You get a considerably longer run out of that idea.
At the most superficial valence, collateral damage and terrorism is a sticky consideration. A suicide bomber targeting police trainees in Iraq or Afghanistan might also kill some civilians who were not directly targeted. This, in effect, could be called collateral damage. Applied to the 9/11 attacks, it's much more complicated. One could argue that the only collateral damage on that day was a field in Pennsylvania and some lightposts allegedly knocked over by a low-flying 757 immediately before it slammed into the Pentagon.
One might postulate that, a fully-fueled 757 being the impoverished warrior's F-16 or cruise missile, the passengers that day were collateral damage. This doesn't hold up, though. The WTC attack was intended to kill civilians, and, furthermore, it is believed that the first casualties on September 11, 2001, were Daniel Lewin, co-founder of Akamai Technologies, and two flight attendants, killed aboard American Flight 11 before it hit the North Tower. One cannot argue Lewin was a combatant and operational risk, because the decision was made not to steal an empty 757, but, rather, to hijack airplanes loaded with civilians.
At another valence, one might argue that terrorism itself is the collateral damage of exploitative economic and political policies, and here the question becomes whether or not we believe the effects of American institutional behavior were calculated—a far-flung, "Let them eat cake," attitude. Ignorance and apathy are, in my opinion, demonstrably the problem. The accountant working in the World Trade Center is not thinking about exploitation, but, rather, "feeding the family".
We can easily suggest that the Iraqi Bush Adventure was not, by any definition, a last resort; but in that context, we must also ask whether Osama bin Laden, in 1996, was premature in declaring his war against the United States. He told us he was coming; what he did not say, however, was, "We're coming. If you want to talk and see if we can avoid this, then let us do so." This notion need not regard 9/11 itself; Al Qaeda hit the
U.S.S. Cole (a legitimate military target) and two United States embassies (quasi-legitimate targets)—the war was afoot.
Some would suggest that the idea of terrorism being a collateral consequence of American policy decisions reduces human beings to automata, but this argument presupposes that decent, responsible people would never object so strenously to perceived abuse that they would take up arms. Still, though, the manner in which one fights back is very much their own decision.
Given lax security concomitant to American postures of freedom, the 9/11 hijackers could easily have strapped bombs to themselves and attended Fleet Week in Portland, Oregon. Blowing themselves up in clubs in order to kill U.S. Navy personnel would allow a better argument that civilian casualties were collateral damage; assuredly, the collateral ratio would have been something less than the 9:1 ratio of American drone strikes in Pakistan or the infamous 207:1 (low end) ratio in pursuit of Baitullah Mehsud. But the hijackers chose, instead, to kill mass numbers of civilians according to a more figurative and removed culpability.
I think the basic rhetorical problem with this second valence of collateral damage is that it has no real limits. If, for instance, it could be definitively shown that a participant in the midnight basketball programs cancelled by the Republican-led Congress after the '94 election went on to kill someone in a gang shooting, what would Newt Gingrich's culpability be?
I've always found the $33 million wrongful-death judgment against O.J. Simpson a curious outcome. One would think acquittal by a jury would have been a sufficient response. Should we argue, then, that his kidnapping and robbery stunt, the resulting charges, and nine-year prison sentence upon conviction are collateral damage of a mourning family's bitter pursuit of money in lieu of the justice prosecutors were unable to achieve? Is Marcia Clark, who led an inept prosecutorial team, culpable in Simpson's Vegas stunt? How about Mark Fuhrman, the racist cop who helped blow the trial, or Andrea Mazzola, a forensic scientist who mishandled blood evidence?
At what point is Jim Denton, my elementary school principal, who told me when I was ten that the solution to racial antagonism was to try harder to fit in, responsible for anything I say at age thirty-six about racism in America? Or anything that I do at all? One could argue that his behavior contributes to my state of mind even today, but is he culpable in my use of drugs?
Is Barack Obama in some way responsible for racist rhetoric bandied about by Tea Party supporters because he won't guide the nation back to some Golden Age ("Give me back my country!") that never existed?
What are the boundaries of one person's behavior being responsible for another person's conscious decision to do harm?
It is a very difficult question. Quite clearly, generations of racism in American society have some role in limiting the options of young black men in the 1980s, but to what degree is that racism responsible for any one person's decision to join a gang, or act as wheelman for a drive-by?
After all, we can
expect a certain amount of blowback related to certain behaviors. While it is tempting to use a hornet's nest metaphor, people aren't hornets. They're people. Behavioral sciences are not so refined as to be capable of demonstrating certain decisions as inevitable outcomes of remote factors°.
If the terrorist sets out to kill military personnel, then civilian casualties can be called collateral damage to the same degree our drone strikes in Pakistan kill innocents. But if the terrorist sets out to kill anyone they can, regardless of active combatant status, in order to make a political statement, there is no issue of collateral damage, except perhaps in a public relations context.
Of course, that consideration is complicated by increasing abuse of the words "terrorism" and "terrorist".
In the end, however we assess collateral damage, it may well require a case-by-case examination. It's not that definitions are inevitably variable between the cases, but that circumstances describe differently the nature of each act in question.
As such, I think it's fair to suggest that certain specific "terrorism" in response to American policies cannot be classified as collateral damage by
any logic, since inviting them to the dance was part of the point. You know, like President Machismo declaring, "Bring it on," so that, "We fight them abroad so we don't have to fight them at home." I mean, really, did we expect them to wait for an
engraved invitation? A public challenge by a head of state, backed with the presence of an invading and occupying army, seems sufficient.
____________________
Notes:
° certain decisions as inevitable outcomes of remote factors — Consider swarm behavior in ants and bees. And then consider human beings in a riot. If there is a threshold at which humans inevitably lose their self-will and become part of a mob mentality, we have not the observational capabilities to determine a functional descriptive paradigm explaining the point of transformation, or what factors contribute to what degree or by what means.
Works Cited:
Wikipedia. "Collateral Damage". February 25, 2010. Wikipedia.com. March 5, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage
See Also:
United States Air Force. "Attachment 7: Collateral Damage". USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide. February 1, 1998. FAS.org. March 5, 2010. http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.htm
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