The poison seeps slowly into the future. No one notices.
“The Obama administration,” the Wall Street Journal informs us, “plans to arm Italy’s fleet of Reaper drone aircraft, a move that could open the door for sales of advanced hunter-killer drone technology to other allies . . .”
I can’t quite get beyond the name: Reaper drones?
“The Predator’s manufacturer, General Atomics, later developed the larger Reaper,” John Sifton wrote last February in The Nation, “a moniker implying that the United States was fate itself, cutting down enemies who were destined to die. That the drones’ payloads were called Hellfire missiles, invoking the punishment of the afterlife, added to a sense of righteousness.”
Early on, George Bush called his invasion of the Middle East “a crusade” and declared that “God is not neutral” in the war on terror. The rightist spin was that we had engaged “a clash of civilizations”; and Ann Coulter, articulating the unrestrained righteousness that 9/11 had unleashed in America, declared: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”