All the world's a war zone

With a swift stroke of his pen Donald J Trump is turning more parts of the globe into official war zones. That's because it's easier for the military  boys to go in hard into certain areas without worrying too much about civilian deaths. So, while Iraq and Afghanistan have been deemed to be war zones for as long as one can remember, there are other countries where designated terrorist organisations are operating but are not described as war zones, according to the White House manual that deals with such things. But Trump has been persuaded, not without much pause for thought apparently, to designate parts of Yemen and Somalia as war zones. This means the "Oh my God there could be civilians there" clause in the WH manual can be ignored. Thus, for example, the area  of Yemen where the US Navy Seal Team 6 went into all guns blazing in January, soon after Trump took office, was just such a newly designated war zone. Between 15 and 25 civilians were killed, including children. Now this is not a criticism of the military. They had their orders and none of the commandos who participated would have wanted to see any civilians die, let alone children. But when a region is officially a war zone, there's a different mindset. Civilians then become unfortunate collateral damage. In the Iraq war there was so much collateral damage that the number of civilians killed could never be accurately recorded. In the last eight years, we had all become accustomed to President Obama's policy of approving airstrikes and, in particular, armed drone strikes on known or suspected terrorists, Islamic militants and other nasty people on White House hit lists, but only on the condition that there was an infinitesimal risk of a civilian or two being killed in the process. It was absolutely not full proof. Civilians did die, wives sleeping with their terrorist husbands, children running into the aim of the Hellfire missile at the last moment, passengers in a car carrying the local al-Qaeda chief, or sometimes, when the target was the wrong one. But Obama tried to be scrupulous about avoiding civilian deaths where possible. He even drew up an Obama edict which stipulated that military or CIA strikes could only go ahead if there was almost no possibility of civilian casualties and where the target was known to present a real and imminent security threat to the United States. The Pentagon has been pushing for some time to lift the Obama restrictions for certain areas of the world to allow for a greater concentration of airstrikes, drone strikes and special forces raids. It didn't take long. Trump's pen did the necessary. So it's definitely bad news for terrorists - which is good - but potentially bad news for innocent civilians - which is not good.