SHAFAQNA PAKISTAN (Shia News Agency)
This week the United States announced that, for the first time, it will sell armed drones to select allied nations. Over the past decade, drones have become something of a poster child for America’s war on terror. Run largely by the CIA, the US drone campaigns around the world have weekly taken out suspected enemies or even ‘targets’ that exhibit (in the judgment of people thousands of miles away and from another culture) enemy-like behaviour. In the process, the Bush and Obama administrations also pioneered the crossing of sovereign borders without permission for an ongoing killing process not defined as war and which, despite much bragging about ‘precision’, has regularly taken out ordinary civilians, including significant numbers of children. In the process, it has brought a sense of daily terror to peasant populations in the backlands of the planet.
Now, the US is preparing to ‘export’ the drone paradigm it has spent so much time building in this young century. China and Israel have already entered the armed drone market as well. Other countries will follow. Drones will be bought in quantity. Borders will be crossed, according to the latest Washington-pioneered rules, by ever more dronified states organizing their own assassination campaigns.
Though US have set four principles for the buyers but it is a lofty goal. After all, a weapons sale is still a weapons sale. And military drones, no matter how new the technology is behind them, aren’t really doing anything revolutionary. The most hilarious thing is that still no law is enacted on drone arms export policy and in the absence of such policy US is simply proliferating the killing machine.
pakistan.shafaqna.com
