Fighter planes, Airstrikes, and Drone technology makes it easy for our armies to kill. So easy, that too often we’re not bothering to be certain about who we’re killing.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not one of those people who excuses terrorism such as what we’ve seen in France on the basis of the west’s actions in Iraq and the middle east. This is not a post that tries to use the west’s action to justify terrorist reprisals. Attacks on innocent people are always wrong, there’s no excuse.

I’m sure you agree with me thus far, but let me say that again: Attacks on innocent people are always wrong, and that means there’s no excuse for this horrific crime in which 85 Syrian innocent civilians including children were killed by an airstrike in a case of ‘mistaken identity’.

A US air strike killed more than 85 civilians, including children, in Syria on Tuesday after the coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters. Some eight families were hit as they tried to flee fighting in their area, in one of the single deadliest strikes on civilians by the alliance since the start of its operations in the war-torn country. Pictures of the aftermath of the dawn strikes on the Isil-controlled village of Tokhar near Manbij in northern Syria showed the bodies of children as young as three under piles of rubble.

The ‘Oops we didn’t know’ argument doesn’t cut it. If you have planes and drones with missiles and bombs in the area then you have cameras. If you have the technology to carry out an airstrike, you damn well better have the technology to verify your target first. If you can’t see clearly enough, get lower and take a better look, or bring in a drone with cameras that can zoom right in. If that means you miss the opportunity, so be it. Running the risk of your target spotting the drone or fighter plane and scattering is a far FAR lesser evil than pulling the trigger when you’re only mostly certain you’re killing bad guys.

Every one of these 85 innocent people killed in this attack is just as human, and just as important, as every person killed by that terrorists truck attack in France. If you were outraged by one, you should be outraged by the other. And in the case of this drone attack we should be doubly outraged because we’re supposed to know better. We’re supposed to be the good guys. We’re supposed to be fighting evil and protecting the innocent…

I get that it’s complicated. I know that intel can be hard to verify, that the pressure to act now, before they get away can be overwhelming. I recognise that ISIL have no morals whatsoever and will use civilians as human shields and hide their military hardware and command structure in civilian buildings. Yes it’s hard.

But we’re talking air strikes here, in a situation where there was time. There weren’t soldiers on the ground under fire needing life-saving air support. This wasn’t a ‘do it now or our soldiers will die’ moment, this was a strike which only had merit if the target was enemy, and they failed to verify that most important of details before they dropped death from above.

This can only happen one of two ways: 1. If they failed to follow the rules of engagement, and ended up firing on civilians as a result of that failure, in which case the individuals involved need to be held to account. 2. Even worse, if they did follow the rules of engagement, then we have a much bigger problem. If our ROE (I say ‘our’ in the sense of western forces fighting in the area, not Australian specifically) are so poor that we can end up with an ‘oops’ like this, then who are we really? Are we the good guys anymore if we’re waging war in such a lax manner?

Again, to be clear, I realise that civilian casualties are a horrible fact of war. And whilst I don’t believe we should be mixed up in the Middle East at all, as a former reservist I know from the soldiers I met, both regular and reserve, that they’re not the bloodthirsty or careless ‘Jocks’ that some people in the Libertarian (or particularly the Anarchist) movement believe them to be. No one involved in this decision to launch this airstrike wanted this outcome. But given that the person who gave the ‘go’ order, and the person who carried out that order, would never have wanted an outcome like this, then we must understand the failures that lead to this sort of thing. How did this happen if no one wanted it to? We must never ‘accept’ or be ok with the idea that every once in a while we’re going to commit a terrorist act on civilians as ‘par for the course’ or just the price of winning their ‘freedom’.

This is certainly not the first time that civilians have been killed by a western plane or drone. And it won’t be the last. But that’s exactly the problem.

The west rightly criticised Russia for targeting civilians in their invasion of Afghanistan late last century. We believed ourselves to be above such barbarism, such careless and callous acts.

Fast forward a few decades and this is who we are.

Drones and Airstrikes are a fact of war, and asymmetrical warfare means that regardless of the method, western forces often find themselves able to kill their enemies with minimal risk to themselves. But are we now getting lazy? Do we take the lives of others for granted so much that we’re fast becoming the thing we claim to hate?

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