Spotlight: America's murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror by Suemas Milne

"In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason." - Ernest Hemingway

Suemas Milne has given us a chilling look into the new brand of modern warfare, in his piece for the Guardian on Wednesday 29 May 2012.

Milne talks about the U.S. army's use of Hellfire drones and Predator missiles to target terrorists in the Middle East, typically Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. The campaign, which Barack Obama has called "overseas contingency operations", is brutal and relentless. The Bureau for Investigative Journalism estimates that 2,464 to 3,145 Pakistani people have been killed by drones since 2004. Of that number, up to 828 were civilians: 175 were children. Ironic in a week where the U.S. and other world nations have heavily condemned the massacre of 49 children in the Syrian town of Houla.

The Houla massacre and the U.S. drone killings should not be considered the same: one appears to be the work of a vicious civilian militia whilst the other is a campaign against extremist cells. But it does show the effects of two different types of war. Houla was door-to-door, slitting throats and executing people on the spot. The drone killings are intensely calculated and designed to eliminate targets with a minimum risk to innocents - sometimes not enough.

Warfare has become an exercise in risk management. The use of new technologies and unmanned drones are an effort to make precise killings, to destroy targets in urban centres with the minimum of fuss and to avoid innocent people dying like dogs. Has it worked? To a degree - yes. But if you asked that same question to the families of the 175 children, they would not speak kindly of the missiles raining down on them from a land across the other side of the globe.

This is the view that Milne suggests is growing in these areas. A Ministry of Defence study in 2011 called "The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems" found that:

"The ill-considered use of armed unmanned aircraft offers an adversary a potent propaganda weapon…[enabling] the insurgent to cast himself in the role of the underdog and the West as a cowardly bully - that is unwilling to risk his own troops, but is happy to kill remotely."

Suemas Milne believes that the drone war "is feeding hatred of the U.S. - fuelling terror, not fighting it" and it is a legitimate point. Extremism is often fuelled by a hatred of the state, through their own personal experience. A dead son or daughter or brother at the hands of drone operatives a thousand miles away could push these people further into the arms of extremist groups. Anti-American sentiment could be spreading and the threat grows larger, so Obama authorises the use of more drones to curb this threat - a never-ending cycle with increasingly large death tolls.

But what is the alternative? If unmanned drones are seen as the safest, most efficient method of conducting this campaign, surely the only way is backwards. Men on the ground to eliminate terrorist threats in the same way that Osama Bin Laden was. But this is costly, inaccurate and can be dangerous for both the troops and civilians, who could become caught in the crossfire.

It seems that the nature of war means the innocents will always perish. But the seemingly safe drone war is a dangerous one, that might be causing more problems than it solves.

Using pen knifes to carve smiles onto teddies

Coalition assemble: Cameron chillaxs with the Avengers in a battle-torn New York City.

A new book by Francis Elliott and James Hanning has painted a very personal picture of David Cameron. Entitled "Cameron: Practically a Conservative", it details Cameron's childhood, his rise through the Tory ranks and gives a rare insight into the personal life of Britain's most important man. However it is also given ammunition to both the Labour opposition and the media to accuse Cameron of too much "chillaxing", claiming that he is not as dedicated to the premiership as he should be. Couple this with the claim from Barack Obama that Cameron "sneaked off" from the recent NATO summit in Chicago for a spot of sight-seeing, and it does not look good for Dave.

For a while now, there has been an effort to make politicians look more human and more cuddly, like using a pen knife to carve a smile onto a battered teddy bear. This is something I picked up on during the London mayoral election and my views are the same now as they were then: stop criticising politicians for being normal human beings.

I hate the idea that politicians should be painted as some kind of saint because they are an elected representative. If they are acting unlawfully, this is ok: judge them and take them to the stocks. But mocking Cameron for his lazy Sundays? Or as Labour quipped today in the Commons, Cameron's three or four glasses of wine with Sunday lunch? The man is running the country so give him some breathing room. If I was running the country I would probably drink three or four bottles before breakfast.

My favourite quote has come from Labour backbencher, John Mann who said to the Guardian:

"The prime minister should be totally focused on a plan for jobs and growth rather than playing computer games on his iPad." 

Economic opinions aside, Mann seems to have this idea of an eight-year old boy being given the keys to Chequers and asked to be the prime minister. Sitting up in his lush countryside bedroom, furiously slashing his fingers across his iPad screen whilst shouting "I AM FRUIT NINJA".

There was even an attempt to point fingers at Cameron for having a weekly date night with his wife Samantha. God forbid that Dave is a human being in a relationship with a woman. Damn him for spending some time with the mother of his child. Kick him, kick him in the nads!

One day, I pray the world will wake up and stop being stupid. In a week where the G8 held important talks over the future of Afghanistan, the Eurozone crisis continues to rumble on and the Beecroft Report proposals to allow companies to "fire people at will", Cameron's love for singing My Way by Frank Sinatra is completely irrelevant. Criticise him for a genuine reason, please?

Fortune favours the brave for Di Matteo?

Held aloft: Di Matteo is lifted by the victorious Chelsea team - an honour Villa Boas would have killed for.

In terms of drama, last night's Champions League final might be high up the list, with the likes of Milan & Liverpool and ironically Bayern & Manchester United in 1999. But in terms of footballing quality, it was a bit tame.

The stats paint a pretty good picture of the final: Bayern with 55% of the possession compared to Chelsea's 45%. When it comes to shots, again it was Bayern who were superior, getting 34 shots to just 9 that came from Chelsea. Some have said that Chelsea were lucky; they spent most of their time on the back foot, withstanding a Munich offensive that could be likened to blitzskrieg. Yet when Bayern did break through in the 83rd minute, it took just five for Chelsea to equalise from their first and only corner of the game, whereas Bayern had 20. To me, that figure is perhaps the best way of describing the match. Munich failed to take their chances and Ribery, Robben and Gomez should be disappointed not to have finished it early when they were tearing the Chelsea back-line to shreds in the first 30 minutes.

Such is football though, where the strongest of teams cannot make it count and the heroes could have easily been the villains. Take Didier Drogba for example, who was awarded the man of the match (personally I would given it to Ashley Cole). His foul on Franck Ribery was clumsy and if it was not for Petr Cech, Drogba could have been leaving Stamford Bridge in flames not fanfare.

The biggest question now is that of Roberto Di Matteo's future. He has certainly brought together a team that was cracking down the seams in the wake of Andre Villas Boas' departure. When Di Matteo took charge, Chelsea were adrift in the Premier League, packing their bags for a early exit from the Champions League and lacked the confidence, losing the aura that Chelsea had made for themselves. They looked like men: tired, old men struggling to keep it together. A Champions League and a FA Cup win later, they are playing with energy and a passion that was lost in the fray.

Di Matteo's style is not a beautiful one. He focuses on defence, allowing the back-line to take a battering, shake it off and counter. For Chelsea, it has worked and he has a win record of 61.90%. But to judge Di Matteo on his time at Chelsea is not looking at the bigger picture. His managerial career has spanned 156 games at MK Dons and West Brom, where his overall win percentage is 51.28%. It is still a good record, beating that of the newest Chelsea candidate, Harry Redknapp (40.82% over 1,274 games). Di Matteo is still behind Jose Mourinho (69.49% over 567 games) and Pep Guardiola (72.65% over 246 games). The strongest choice looks like Guardiola, but he has since ruled himself out.

So it comes to Di Matteo, Redknapp or Mourinho. Redknapp is unlikely to move to Chelsea, despite his apparent yearning for a new challenge, a change of scenery (5 miles down the road). The head says a return for "the Special One" Jose Mourinho. He is a proven winner, having won trophies in the top four European countries: England, Spain, Italy and Portugal. But is it perhaps too late for Mourinho to make his spectacular return? Would he rather stay at Real Madrid and capture the Champions League? It is the one trophy that has eluded him at Madrid and he has built a solid team of modern-day Galacticos that could make that step.

The heart says Chelsea should take a risk and go with Di Matteo. In the Abramovich-era, they have always seeked out the big-name option to go into the dugout: Mourinho, Luis Scolari, Guus Hiddink, Carlo Ancelotti. Some had success, but most did not. Villas Boas was a step in the opposite direction, hiring someone with less credentials than those previous. But he could not manage the dressing room and it cost him, in my opinion, unfairly. Di Matteo has what Villas Boas did not: control. He has earnt the respect of the team and now has some of the credibility needed to take them forward. Fortune favoured Roberto in Munich and it could favour him again.   

A day in the life of Mark Zuckerberg

Today has been a good day for Mark Zuckerberg. But I imagine everyday is a good day for Mark Zuckerberg. Imagine being him, imagine it for a second. Stop reading this and just think. You wake up next to your beautiful girlfriend, eat a bowl of cereal (probably Golden Nuggets) and head off to work. When you get to your HQ in Menlo Park, California, you sit at your desk for a bit, poke a few people then head off for a meeting. You walk into the board room and you notice everyone is looking at you a bit funny, presumably because you are still in your pyjamas. Yet no one stops the meeting, they just carry on and trot some numbers. They just do not care, because "you are the CEO bitch!"

That is a normal day for Zuckerberg. So imagine the bounce in his step today, as Facebook went through its IPO (initial public offering). An IPO is when a private company goes public, creating shares and selling them on the stock market, so anyone can own a bit of Facebook. Today those 421 million shares were valued at $34 to $38 each, giving Facebook a total value of $104 billion dollars. To put that into perspective, Facebook is now the highest valued company at the time of its IPO in U.S. history, beating Google and Amazon. But it could be somewhat of a poisoned chalice for the company, because there are now astronomically high expectations of Facebook to make big returns for its shareholders.  

For Facebook to be a successful public company, it must achieve three things. First of all, it must conquer China. Not by raising an army of similarly under-dressed Zuckerberg clones and marching into Beijing (although looking at its vast audience, it probably could). At the moment, China has nearly 500 million internet users and Facebook has a 0% share of that bulk. Facebook needs China, but it is a notoriously hard market to crack and some experts have said that the longer Facebook takes to enter China, the less successful it will be in terms of revenue.

The second is to increase revenue. The historical valuation of the company is going to put a lot of pressure on them to produce results, especially from its advertisers. Advertising is a main source of income for Facebook, and yet they are not doing that well. This is why: I assume you reading this has a Facebook. If so, be brutally honest and think how many times you click the links at the side of the page, telling you to visit so-and-so. No, I don't either. That is why Facebook makes just $5 a year off of each user and for a website with 900 million users, $5 is feeble. It needs to increase its revenue tenfold if it is to live up to expectations.

The third and final point is perhaps the most difficult: stay relevant. When I first dipped my toes into the somewhat tepid water of social networking, everyone was using a site called Piczo. Within a few years, everyone had upped sticks and moved to Bebo. Then it was MySpace and now it is Facebook and/or Twitter. This is the 104 billion dollar question: is Facebook a fad? Or will it stay forever? I am not even going to guess. Facebook is trying its hardest to stay fresh and engaging for its users, but it seems like the now cool thing to hate Facebook. Timeline, for example, is universally-panned for being a useless eyesore that reminds me of a "for sale" board in the window of the local newsagents.

Facebook has the potential to be a truly-historical company, a symbol of the Web 2.0 movement and a genuine rags-to-riches story. It must keep its momentum going though and that is perhaps easier said than done.

LOUD MOUTH: a new network of unique student bloggers

I would just like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to a new project, launching on the 1st June 2012.

It is called LOUD MOUTH, a network to combine the most unique student bloggers from university campuses in the UK and America. Oh and me. The subjects covered include politics, technology, business, food, drink, music, clothes and general university life, along with a healthy dosage of art, photography and comedy. It sounds too good to be true, perhaps it is, but we wait with baited breath to see what the Collective (the name us writers are given, sort of like a nerdier Avengers) can produce.

I hope you check it out, because the writers are some of the best around and they deserve a tiny bit of attention. If you do not, they will crawl away into a corner to wither and die. Links are below:

The LOUD MOUTH main site: http://theloudmouths.org/
The biographies of the Collective: http://theloudmouths.org/our-writers/
The Ethos (the Collective's Code): http://theloudmouths.org/the-loud-mouth-ethos/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/THE_LOUDMOUTHS
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loudmouthcollective

Will gay marriage cost Barack Obama the presidency?

Politics is a cynical trade. When the President of the United States makes a historic announcement that he is in favour of gay marriage, the first reaction is not one of celebration. Instead it is fear of what the polls will say. On Monday night, a New York Times/CBS poll gave Obama these hard numbers: 67% of those polled thought his endorsement of gay marriage was for "political reasons".

It shows the cynicism in politics when two thirds of the public believe Obama was only doing it for the sake of doing it. Twitter was an interesting place to be in the aftermath, the perfect place to gauge this reaction. All kinds of theories were flying about, ranging from the idea that senior Democrats pushed Obama into accepting gay marriage to the announcement being a vote-winning tactic before the general election. 

I am not naive, I know how politics works. The upcoming election was likely a factor in Obama's decision to make the announcement, in order to try and win back those on the Left who were still feeling "short-Changed". But accepting gay marriage as a vote-winner? In America? Those who believe this should look at the numbers. 57% of those polled feel no different about Obama than they did before his announcement, but 26% said they were now less likely to vote for Obama. If it was intended a vote-winner, they royally screwed that one up, didn't they?

I am inclined to think that the announcement was a genuine change of opinion from Obama - albeit quite sudden and rushed. It was certainly a risky move from him and one that could cost him the presidency. As the polls show, Obama just lost 26% of votes. But to be fair to him, there is no data to suggest who that 26% of people are. They could be Republican voters, who see the announcement as further evidence that he is not their man. However in what is proving to be an already tightly-contested election, it is possible that even the slightest swing away from Obama to Romney could hurt the incumbent's chances. 

The good news for Obama is only 7% of those polled view gay marriage as the most important issue. The majority are still regarding this election as an economic one. Jobs and unemployment levels are what Obama and Romney will be jousting over in the coming months. But it was a bold move for Obama to say what he did. He is playing Russian Roulette with his electoral chances, a game that I personally respect him for.

The Lib Dems will always be "traitors" to this generation

As Bruce would have said: "didn't they do well?" No, no, they did not Bruce. The Lib Dems took one hell of a beating in the local elections, waving goodbye to over 300 councillors and falling to their lowest level since the party formed in 1988.

It seems like forever ago when orange-and-white "Cleggmania" swept the country. Everyone agreed with Nick, including then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who seemed to nod along with everything Clegg said, perhaps forgetting who it was he was fighting an election against. Maybe the combination of bright lights, Cameron's forehead glistening and Alistair Stewart's bark confused Brown and threw him off his game - a game he did not really have to begin with. Cut forward two years and the scene is very different. Cleggmania is a lot like Fenton the dog. It has run quickly into the distance whilst the party chases after it, desperate to have back in its grasp, screaming its name in the hope it will come sprinting back.

There is one difference: Fenton came back, Cleggmania will not. Lots of reasons have been thrown about for the Lib Dem-olition. The main one from the party is "mid-term blues". And to be fair, this is a factor. Mid-term elections act as a referendum on a party's performance in government, a reminder that the electorate is still here and watching (made awkward with a 30% turnout). Another argument is the "we are an austerity government and people won't like us". Again, there is some truth here. The harsh economic climate has resulted in a higher cost of living, unemployment and cuts which people tend not to enjoy, so they make their feelings known at the ballot box. But these two arguments have a flaw: we have a Coalition. The Conservatives also got a kicking, but it was the Lib Dems who bore the brunt of our boot up their ass.

One Lib Dem spoke to the BBC and defended this, saying where the Conservatives were not standing; it was the Lib Dems who were beaten. But this is not true. The Lib Dems were beaten everywhere. They gained just 16% of the national share of the vote, light-years away from the 34% the Lib Dems were polling after the first television debate of the 2010 general election. This raises a question. Yes, it is normal for the polls to turn against a government but why the Lib Dems? And why so much?

To quote my own dad, it is "that bastard Clegg who sold the students out". Tuition fees are the Lib Dem's kryptonite and something the public has not forgotten. It looked so promising when Clegg appeared in a video, pledging to battle against any increase in fees before abandoning that pledge.

Now it is fair to say that not all of the public disagreed with Nick. But if you throw shit at a wall hard enough, it will stick and the label of the "traitor" Lib Dems has not disappeared. In fact it has stuck so well that when it does eventually peel off the wall, a lovely brown mark will be visible. The good work of the Lib Dems in government, such as the increase on the rate of income tax, cannot paint over the sticky mark on the wallpaper until it gets a good painting over.

Ridiculous analogy aside, it will take some time for the Lib Dems to shake off their tag as the "traitorous bastards". But heir main problem is who they decided to alienate. Whilst it is typically known that students do not turn out in their droves to vote, when they grow up, marry, have children and start to take a bigger interest in who they pay their taxes to, they will look at the Lib Dems with an air of distrust. Like the older generation of today, who still see Conservatives not for their green policies but for Thatcherism and privatisation, the Lib Dems will be seen as the party who traded ideology for power. For a party that wishes to brush off their time in Coalition and fight independently in 2015, it is not a good sign. It is hard to imagine the Lib Dems play the role of an honest, genuine third party like they did in 2010. When this generation turn out to vote, they will look down the ballot, see Liberal Democrat and think just one word: "bastards".