Drones Are Ethical And Effective | David Aaronovitch | Oxford Union
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- čas přidán 2. 05. 2013
- David Aaronovitch gives his argument for the use of drone warfare.
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David Aaronovitch begins by saying that for everything the opposition says on the detrimental nature of drone warfare and the ineffectiveness it has on counteracting terrorism they have put forward no argument on any alternatives to drone warfare by way of which they are ultimately saying the solution is to do nothing. He proceeds to list a number of high-ranking Al Qaeda members that have been killed by drone strikes since 2005.
He says that high numbers of the organisation Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, who are responsible for the bombing of shia mosques, have been successfully taken out by drone strikes.
He raises the point that the Pakistani government took less resistance with the Pakistani Taliban over the issue of the Pakistani province of Swat. When taking the province back along with Islamabad and Karachi the government made 900K people homeless with dozens killed in the process and is a perfect example of how the Pakistani government looks one way and speaks another. He ends by saying that what this argument boils down to is whether the world would be better or worse without drones and he conclude that it would be worse.
Filmed on Thursday 25th April 2013
MOTION: THIS HOUSE BELIEVES DRONE WARFARE IS ETHICAL AND EFFECTIVE
ABOUT DAVID AARONOVITCH:
David Aaronovitch is a British author, broadcaster, and journalist. He is a regular columnist for The Times, and author of Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country (2000) and Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History (2009). He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2001, and the What the Papers Say "Columnist of the Year" award for 2003.
ABOUT THE OXFORD UNION SOCIETY:
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why doesn't he mention children and women and innocent men and old people who were "taken out" by drones?
More of those would have died if the army were sent in or if the terrorists were allowed to operate freely.
Do you think it's ethical for Iraq or Iran to start bombing targets in your local neighbourhood? their might be some bad people around the corner, your property could get damaged or even your children might get inured or killed, but the main thing is the terrorists were taken out
Aaranovic is a blairite warmonger would expect nothing better
Which is worse? A) Use drones B) Use troops or C) Do nothing. And why do you think that?
David Aaronovitch is a great journalist. Keep up the good work.
The is where act utilitarianism comes into play, is the collateral of the civilians worth the decreased activity of the terrorists? And would there be less collateral if it was dealt with on foot? Some how I doubt it.
Was previously opposed to drone strikes. Aaronovitch has changed my mind.
Exceptional speech.
The issue is collateral damage. Why don't you arm drones with a lighter caliber?
Brilliant as usual.
Ifantry can anything a drone strike can do with less collateral damge and we are happy to do it. Fight with honor or stay out of war 03 for life semper fi
when choosing the lesser evil, we often forget that we are still choosing evil
as a us cictxen i will always agree with usa droning strike wat usa drone is righteous
Interesting argument, this one.
Once a tankie, always a tankie.
I wonder is David would still hold these same views on the effectiveness of drones given the expansion of terrorist groups like ISIS in the last couple of years
We used drones to target ISIS. Guess what? There are less terrorists because of Drones.
Great performance.
He is brilliant.
what are you 10?
This guy always leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.He,s horrible.
That desi asian lady is very attractive. If only Desi girls dressed like that.
I am a Pakistani and I am for drones !!
..looking for a nice cosy into the house of lords for services to journalism -like Joan Bakewell...:) £400 a day without having to stand for election...
Superb stuff from Aaronovitch here.
Very emotional defense of the proposal as oppose to academic. I believe drones could be ethical if it obeys the ethics of war. However the US do not use it in that way.
What matters are the points not whether there was any emotion or not. Secondly the 'ethics of war' would mean allowing terrorists to operate freely. Aaronovitch is saying difficult stuff, I'll admit that. But his logic and morals are solid. Doing nothing equals greater deaths.
I dont agree, his points are short term. Completely emotional, with no regard for the future or long term consequences. If the US does not follow the ethics of war, they submit themselves to being an openly terrorist state. And they have done so already. The US kill a lot of innocent people as well... how do you measure which deaths are more significant?
More innocent people would have died if we did nothing. Did you note pay any attention to those points?
The army points? Allowing the Taliban control of regions? Sending in the army kills way more civilians. Allowing the terrorists to operate can't happen for obvious reasons. Drones are an unfortunate but practical partial solution to a beyond fucked up situation.
its not about what is better... its about the ethics and effectiveness of the drones themselves. One of the speakers made very good counter arguments to this emotional defence of the motion. You cannot measure whether more innocent people would have died. I agree something must be done, and drones should be used in some cases. However certain NON-Combatants were assassinated using drones. Like Anwar Al-Awlaki (who was metioned later in the debate), he and his son were both killed. Anwar and his son were not combatants and they were both killed by drone strikes that MISSED the first time and had more collateral damage then effective precision.
Pardon my poor grammar, I am not paying too much attention.
It is your misfortune if you hope to engage a fascist in moral reasoning. Wasn't Donald Rumsfeld quoted as saying; "We are an empire now and we make our own reality." I did some work on cults & learned that social reality as we understand it is embedded in the realationship between the spoken word and an image network dispersed across the nervous system. Techniques like thought reform programming can apparently break into this network and displace memory effectively shutting down the mind.
i like this guy aaronovtich. i don't agree with drone warfare, cluster bombs or anything that is most likely to create more problems than solutions to this war.
Yeah that is very good, but go and answer the question, oh and your not funny
Sick human being. Disgrace on the face of humanity.
SO WHAT WOULD YOU DO???
What happened to this guy his sick in the head.He done a hitchens and sold himself out.
This guy reminds me of a 4yr old not getting to play with his favourite toy.
He loves to talk about terrorists killed, but how about the amount of terrorists created with these drones. They are neither effective nor ethical, it's the sum of the amount of care our government has for everyone.
+Piccolo Dragneel How can someone with an avatar of the Hitch be so dense? We do not create terrorism by resisting it. If we can use non-man power, like drones, to take out terrorists, then we should. They ARE both ethical and effective.
+VampirePraemium We do not create terrorism, by resisting it. That is true, but let's take a minute to consider what happens if these drones malfunction or we mess up on the location or simply don't even know where the terrorist group is and this drone explodes. There is collateral and a lot of times this causes terrorism- at home. You're view of drones is really to optimistic, a lot of things can go wrong and I'm sorry, I'm too "dense" to be focused on that. Terrorists spawning in the u.s aren't doing it for no reason, you should ask why some of them hate the government so much.
+Piccolo Dragneel The terrorists spawning in the US are doing it for a reason; a politicized, self-victimization, emotion-based version of Islam. These terrorists( a poorly chosen word, if you ask me) would exist even if the West had isolationist policies. Yes, indeed listen to these people. Time and time again the Sharia-less and egalitarian West is the source of their hatred.
Drones are not human and do not suffer from carnal inaccuracies. A drone cannot receive wrong orders and by definition incapable of another My Lai failure. If you're going to make an argument of technological insecurity and vulnerablity, then governments should stop using computers altogether. Drones are more technologically impenetrable than the best computers on the market.
Drones allow us not to commit slow tropp actions on terrorists hiding in rural, well-hidden areas, thusly being both ethical and effective, on a massive scale.
VampirePraemium Ahh... ok, makes sense, I never really thought about it that way. My worry of the drones was not particularly if they received wrong orders( I was just listing a hypothetical), but my worry is exactly that they are unmanned. Do they have a way of differentiating target terrorists from civilians, or how about the terrorists hold civilians hostage? It'd be fine, in my eyes if these drones could selectively target certain people, but from my understanding or lackthereof, it seems hard to find a practical use of them without the risk of killing innocents.
I just don't like the idea of anything that's unmanned that can dispatch personnel, even though there are also a slew of possible problems with these things being manned or humans going there, but people can asses the situation in the present and react accordingly. I haven't checked up on the tactics of the prominent terrorist groups, but sooner or later they will adjust to these drones, and most likely move their base of operations to a place where we can't get them without casualties. The proposition of it being both ethical and effective is something I find sort of contradicting, from what I can see it seems that, in the future, we will probably have to give up the ethical view for being effective.
Aaronovitch needs to move away from this blustering angry persona to a more swaggering, confident approach.
This guy is a joke