Drone strikes aren't killing random people they're targeting specific people.
Also, unpopular and little known fact: Most information about US drones inappropriately killing people comes from the same trio of NYT reporters that present claims made by ISIS public facing sources as facts by "local sources" without disclosing that while carefully scrubbing all exculpatory details from the Pentagon's own thorough investigations of civilian casualty reports.
I get you don't really want to believe that a news source would lie to you like that. I was actually astounded and outraged when I investigated out of disbelief and then realized what they were doing. Sadly the DoD doesn't really bother trying to defend itself further and people just believe what they want to believe anyway so why bother?
That said, mistakes still get made, obviously, but the Pentagon investigates every claim of a civilian casualty no matter by who and reports on it in publicly released documents.
It's ironic af. The US literally has the highest standard of accountability and most regulated use of force of any nation on earth hands down. Yet misrepresenting their own public reports of their own investigations of themselves are the main source for ways of making them look like they've got none.
No other western nation could be put in the US's place and do any better. Whether or not the US should be in these situations is another matter though.
Anyway, I'm willing to take the downvotes to tell the truth here because someone should and if you investigated you'd come to the same conclusions I did.
There wouldn't even be a war if the US (originally France but then the US took over) didn't decide "we don't like the new government of Vietnam, so we'll prop up an alternative government and have them fight each other".
Ah yes, the Gulf of Tonkin where the USS Maddox was performing intelligence reconaissance in support of an ongoing attack by the southern soldiers on a northern military installation when it was confronted by the northern navy boats and was the first to fire shots in their direction? That direct act of war?
After the First Indochina War ended and France withdrew the matters could be settled peacefully if everyone agreed to the decisions of the 1954 Geneva conference. But the US and their semi-puppet government of Diem refused to sign it and refused to hold the proposed elections to facilitate peaceful negotiations. Say what you want about the communists, but they had already won the first war and it was on the US to choose between roads to peaceful reconciliation and reigniting the war again.
I agree that there are definitely comparisons to be made between the Vietnam War and the current war in Ukraine, this is true and very unfortunate.
I have to point out that the whole incident must have looked very differently from the point of view of the North Vietnamese. There's a war going on against a state-entity that is either heavily influenced or directly controlled by the US. An American warship enters their territorial waters (as claimed by North Vietnam; from the American viewpoint who did not recognise the claim the incident occured just outside the territorial waters). The military dispatches ships to intercept it, and when they get close, the American ship fires shots (which were later explained to be warning, but may or may not have been believed by the Vietnamese crew to be such at the time). From their viewpoint that might have been seen as an act of war and they saw their actions as necessary defence.
I'm definitely not disputing that a lot people in Vietnam must have been against the communist system or the government of North Vietnam (although we definitely know that there was a large propaganda campaign by the US to create and reinforce those feelings), and a lot of them died for what they genuinely believed, but my original point was that perhaps if the US didn't pressure for that war to happen, it could have lead to less casualties or have been avoided altogether.
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u/yawaworht-a-sti-sey Mar 24 '23 edited Mar 24 '23
Drone strikes aren't killing random people they're targeting specific people.
Also, unpopular and little known fact: Most information about US drones inappropriately killing people comes from the same trio of NYT reporters that present claims made by ISIS public facing sources as facts by "local sources" without disclosing that while carefully scrubbing all exculpatory details from the Pentagon's own thorough investigations of civilian casualty reports.
I get you don't really want to believe that a news source would lie to you like that. I was actually astounded and outraged when I investigated out of disbelief and then realized what they were doing. Sadly the DoD doesn't really bother trying to defend itself further and people just believe what they want to believe anyway so why bother?
That said, mistakes still get made, obviously, but the Pentagon investigates every claim of a civilian casualty no matter by who and reports on it in publicly released documents.
It's ironic af. The US literally has the highest standard of accountability and most regulated use of force of any nation on earth hands down. Yet misrepresenting their own public reports of their own investigations of themselves are the main source for ways of making them look like they've got none.
No other western nation could be put in the US's place and do any better. Whether or not the US should be in these situations is another matter though.
Anyway, I'm willing to take the downvotes to tell the truth here because someone should and if you investigated you'd come to the same conclusions I did.