{"id":2667,"date":"2013-12-20T16:29:02","date_gmt":"2013-12-20T22:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=2667"},"modified":"2013-12-20T16:29:02","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T22:29:02","slug":"bride-and-boom-were-number-one-in-obliterating-wedding-parties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/bride-and-boom-were-number-one-in-obliterating-wedding-parties\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBride and Boom!\u201d We\u2019re Number One… In Obliterating Wedding Parties"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

The headline — \u201cBride and Boom!\u201d — was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half.\u00a0 Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point\u00a0covering<\/a>\u00a0most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned\u00a0New York Post<\/em>.\u00a0 The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those \u201csurgical\u201d strikes of which Washington is so proud. \u00a0As one report\u00a0put it<\/a>, \u201cScorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners — \u201cterror\u201d or \u201cal-Qaeda suspects\u201d — in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them.\u00a0 Try to imagine the equivalent for theNewtown massacre<\/a>\u00a0the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers.\u00a0 Since even the\u00a0New York Post<\/em>\u00a0wouldn\u2019t do such a thing, let\u2019s posit that the\u00a0Yemen Post<\/em>\u00a0did, that playing off the phrase \u201chead of the class,\u201d their headline was: \u201cDead of the Class!\u201d (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege.\u00a0 The media would descend.\u00a0 The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House.\u00a0 You\u2019d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.<\/p>\n

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere\u00a0in America<\/a>\u00a0on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24\/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.<\/p>\n

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones?\u00a0 No such luck, so if you\u2019re a Murdoch tabloid, it\u2019s open season, no consequences guaranteed.\u00a0 As it happens, \u201cBride and Boom!\u201d isn\u2019t even an original.\u00a0 It turns out to be a stock\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0headline.\u00a0 Google it and you\u2019ll find that, since 9\/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in\u00a02005<\/a>, for \u201cthe first bomb-making husband and wife,\u201d two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in2007<\/a>, for a story about a \u201cbride,\u201d decked out in a \u201cprincess-style wedding gown,\u201d with her \u201cgroom.\u201d Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male \u201cterrorists\u201d in a \u201cnutty nuptial party.\u201d \u00a0Ba-boom!<\/p>\n

As it happened, the\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0by Andy Soltis accompanying the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0headline last week began quite inaccurately.\u00a0 \u201cA U.S. drone strike targeting al-Qaeda militants in Yemen,\u201d went the first line, \u201ctook out an unlikely target on Thursday — a wedding party heading to the festivities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soltis can, however, be forgiven his ignorance.\u00a0 In this country, no one bothers to count up wedding parties wiped out by U.S. air power.\u00a0 If they did, Soltis would have known that the accurate line, given the history of U.S. war-making since December 2001 when the\u00a0first party<\/a>of Afghan wedding revelers was wiped out (only two women surviving), would have been: \u201cA U.S. drone… took out a\u00a0likely<\/em>\u00a0target.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all, by the count of TomDispatch, this is at least the eighth wedding party reported wiped out, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began and it extends the extermination of wedding celebrants from the air to a third country — six destroyed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and now the first in Yemen.\u00a0 And in all those years, reporters covering these \u201cincidents\u201d never seem to notice that similar events had occurred previously.\u00a0 Sometimes whole wedding parties were slaughtered, sometimes just the bride or groom\u2019s parties were hit. Estimated total dead from the eight incidents: almost 300 Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemenis.\u00a0 And keep in mind that, in these years, weddings haven\u2019t been the only rites hit.\u00a0 U.S. air power has struck gatherings ranging from\u00a0funerals<\/a>\u00a0to a\u00a0baby-naming ceremony<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The only thing that made the Yemeni incident unique was the drone.\u00a0 The previous strikes were reportedly by piloted aircraft.<\/p>\n

Non-tabloid papers were far more polite in their headlines and accounts, though they did reflect utter confusion about what had happened in a distant part of distant Yemen.\u00a0 The wedding caravan of vehicles was going to a wedding — or coming back.\u00a0\u00a0Fifteen<\/a>\u00a0were definitively dead.\u00a0 Or\u00a011<\/a>.\u00a0 Or\u00a013<\/a>.\u00a0 Or\u00a014<\/a>. \u00a0Or\u00a017<\/a>.\u00a0 The attacking plane had aimed for al-Qaeda targets and hit the wedding party \u201cby mistake<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Or al-Qaeda \u201csuspects\u201d had been among the wedding party, though all reports agree that innocent wedding goers died.\u00a0 Accounts of what happened from Yemeni officials differed, even as that country\u2019s parliamentarians\u00a0demanded<\/a>\u00a0an end to the U.S. drone campaign in their country.\u00a0 The Obama administration\u00a0refused<\/a>\u00a0to comment.\u00a0 It was generally\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that this strike, like others before it, had — strangely enough — upset Yemenis and made them more amenable to the propaganda of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.<\/p>\n

In the end, reports on a wedding slaughter in a distant land are generally relegated to the inside pages of the paper and\u00a0passing notice<\/a>on the TV news, an event instantly trumped by almost anything whatsoever — a shooting in a school anywhere in the U.S., snow storms across the Northeast, you name it — and promptly buried and forgotten.<\/p>\n

And yet, in a country that tends to value records, this represents record-making material.\u00a0 After all, what are the odds of knocking off all or parts of eight wedding parties in the space of a little more than a decade (assuming, of course, that the destruction of other wedding parties or the killing of other wedding goers in America\u2019s distant war zones hasn\u2019t gone unreported).\u00a0 If the Taliban or the Iranians or the North Koreans had piled up such figures — and indeed the Taliban has done wedding damage via\u00a0roadside bombs<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0suicide bombers<\/a>\u00a0— we would know just what to think of them.\u00a0 We would classify them as barbarians, savages, evildoers.<\/p>\n

You might imagine that such a traffic jam of death and destruction would at least merit some longer-term attention, thought, analysis, or discussion here.\u00a0 But with the\u00a0rarest<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0exceptions<\/a>, it\u2019s nowhere to be found, right, left, or center, in Washington or Topeka, in everyday conversation or think-tank speak.\u00a0 And keep in mind that we\u2019re talking about a country where the slaughter of innocents — in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities, workplaces and movie theaters, parking lots and naval shipyards — is given endless attention, carefully toted up, discussed and debated until \u201cclosure\u201d is reached.<\/p>\n

And yet no one here even thinks to ask how so many wedding parties in foreign lands could be so repeatedly taken out.\u00a0 Is the U.S. simply targeting weddings purposely?\u00a0 Not likely.\u00a0 Could it reflect the fact that, despite all the discussion of the \u201csurgical precision\u201d of American air power, pilots have remarkably little idea what\u2019s really going on below them or who exactly, in lands where American intelligence must be half-blind, they are aiming at?\u00a0 That, at least, seems likely.<\/p>\n

Or if “they”<\/em>\u00a0gather in certain regions, does American intelligence just assume that the crowd must be “enemy” in nature?\u00a0 (As an American general\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0about a wedding party attacked in Western Iraq, \u201cHow many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?\u201d) Or is it possible that, in our global war zones, a hint that enemy \u201csuspects\u201d might be among a party of celebrants means that the party itself is fair game, that it\u2019s open season no matter who might be in the crowd?<\/p>\n

In this same spirit, the U.S. drone campaigns are said to launch what in drone-speak are called “signature strikes<\/a>” — that is, strikes not against identified individuals, but against “a pre-identified ‘signature’ of behavior that the U.S. links to militant activity.”\u00a0 In other words, the U.S. launches drone strikes against groups or individuals whose behavior simply fits a \u201csuspect\u201d category: young men of military age carrying weapons, for instance (in areas where carrying a weapon may be the norm no matter who you are).\u00a0 In a more general sense, however, the obliterated wedding party may be the true signature strike of the post 9\/11 era of American war-making, the strike that should, but never will, remind Americans that the war on terror was and remains, for others in distant lands, a war of terror, a fearsome creation to which we are conveniently blind.<\/p>\n

Consider it a record.\u00a0 For the period since September 11, 2001, we\u2019re number one… in obliterating wedding parties!\u00a0 In those years, whether we care to know it or not, \u201ctill death do us part\u201d has gained a far grimmer meaning.<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the\u00a0<\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and author of\u00a0<\/em>The United States of Fear<\/a>\u00a0as well as a history of the Cold War,\u00a0<\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>, runs the Nation Institute’s\u00a0<\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is<\/em>Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch click here for original article The headline — \u201cBride and Boom!\u201d — was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half.\u00a0 Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point\u00a0covering\u00a0most of the bottom third […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2668,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/JP-BRENNAN-1-articleLarge.jpg?fit=330%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2667"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2669,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667\/revisions\/2669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}