Jul 31, 2013 3 min read

“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” – Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Letter to Atlanta, 1864

Sherman also was well known for the phrase, “War is hell,” which has been repeated ad infinitum through the decades, as the Civil War gave way to the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, the wars in the Middle East and countless other conflicts around the globe.

One who lived through his own version of that hell was President Harry Truman, who made the decision in August 1945 to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman’s call ultimately came down to saving American lives. The U.S. Joint War Plans Committee had provided a study suggesting that just an initial ground invasion of Japan would result in at least 200,000 U.S. casualties, including 25,000 to 46,000 dead. That figure, of course, would rise significantly if the first thrust did not lead to capitulation by the Japanese. So, Truman gave the order to bomb, first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. American lives were saved, but an estimated 200,000 Japanese lost their lives in those attacks.

The debate over the morality of the bombings in Japan continues nearly 70 years later. Today, we have a similar debate, albeit on a smaller scale, about the U.S.’s use of drones to wage war on suspected terrorists overseas, primarily in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

During the Vietnam era, the popular euphemism for the killing of nonsoldiers was “collateral damage.” Today, these civilians who often find themselves in the wrong place at the time of a drone attack are referred to as “noncombatants.” The real question is how many of these innocents are being maimed or killed by our drone program.

Salon.com reported the other day that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism obtained an internal Pakistani assessment of U.S. drone strikes in that country, which indicated that the number of noncombatants who have died over nine years of drone attacks is much higher than the United States admits. According to the Salon report, military officials in the Obama administration continue to assert that the number is no more than 60, but the Pakistani report claims that 147 civilians, including close to 100 children, were among the total of about 750 people killed over the nearly decadelong drone program.

Rauf Khan Khattak, a former government official in Pakistan, told Salon, “There was no benefit in officials ‘cooking the books’ here, since this document was clearly never intended to be seen outside the civilian administration.”

There’s another reason we tend to believe the Pakistani report, rather than the U.S. figures: The American government has a long and rich history of lying to the American people, especially when it comes to military and “national security” issues.

The drone program, like the atomic bomb attacks on Japan, no doubt saves American lives. No pilots are put at risk, and no ground troops have to be sent in to find and kill suspected terrorists in a very inhospitable land. Such operations don’t always go as well as the one that produced the death of Osama bin Laden.

But an indiscriminate use of drones, without proper review and approval in advance, and without the greatest of care being applied by those carrying out the attacks so that women and children are not frequent victims, is simply unacceptable. It’s also the sort of thing that breeds new generations of terrorists.