Shoot or don’t shoot scenarios are always fun to ponder over. Here I will present two separate scenarios for you to consider. Your goal is to decide whether or not a scenario qualifies as a self-defense situation. After presenting the scenarios I will present Obama’s answers.
For the first scenario we will pretend you live in a small neighborhood where two of your neighbors are feuding. What started the feud happened so long ago nobody besides the two neighbors can remember the exact circumstance. Finally, after putting up with their shit for a long time, you decide to do something about it. You decide to form an alliance with the neighbor that lives closer to you. After your attempts to arm your closest neighbor fail to resolve the ongoing feud you decide to take matters into your own hands. One night you kick in the further neighbor’s door and shoot one of the family members in the face. At this point another family member returns fire. If you being shooting at that family member are you performing an act of self-defense?
For the second scenario we will continue to assume that you live in a small neighborhood but this time you don’t have to suffer feuding neighbors. After living in the neighborhood for a short while you get into an altercation with one of your neighbors. The cause of the altercation isn’t important but it was trivial. One night you catch the neighbor you’re fighting with setting your house on fire. Fortunately you caught the act in time to run inside, grab a fire extinguisher, and put the fire out before it spread too far. Would it be a valid case of self-defense if you then grabbed your gun, walked over to a different neighbor’s house, and shot members of his family?
According to Mr. Obama both of those scenarios are valid cases of self-defense:
Mr Obama also defended the use of drones to kill four US citizens.
“We are at war with an organisation that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first,” he said in Thursday’s address at the National Defense University in Washington DC.
“So this is a just war – a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defence.”
After causing grief for many nations through proxy wars with Russia and clandestine operations to topple existing governments the United States is now claiming self-defense as the justification for bombing children in the Middle East. The United States has allied itself with one side of various conflicts, armed those sides, and outright killed members of the other side when their allies failed to take out their opposition. In response to 9/11 the United States decided to invade Iraq as a retaliatory strike against al-Qaeda, who were chiefly operating inside of Afghanistan.
War is peace and initiating aggression is self-defense.