Air & Space Predators

It was a strange site. It shouldn't have been. The Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., exhibits all sorts of hardware, a lot of it military. Moral judgments are either subdued, subtle or nonexistent.

It was strange all the same to see the replica of a Predator drone, those pilotless reconnaissance air machines that have been raining Hellfire missiles on Pakistan and mostly killing civilians and turning Pakistanis against Americans, hanging innocently alongside other shock-and-awe inducing aircraft as tourists gaped, pointed or, more often, passed on indifferently: Most people still don't know what Predators are or what they do (or confuse them with NBC's lurid Dateline series of a similar name).

I was on vacation with the family this past week. We drove around the country for a couple of thousand miles, stopping at friends and family along the way, and doing what we usually do when we're near the capital: perform the American equivalent of the hajj. We didn't quite circle the National Mall seven times, but walked and greeted the requisite number of sites and monuments for most of a day, ending where most families with children usually go: the Air & Space, Mecca of entertaining museums.

Most of the exhibits are familiar even to people who've never been there. There's something iconic about things like the Apollo capsule, the Saturn rocket, the Montgolfier or Wright brothers' contraptions, or even in the odd B-29 Flying Fortress or its more supersonic and lethal descendants, that are embedded in the collective consciousness (for good or bad).

But the Predator?

It had to be a matter of time. What was curious about the small bit of information that went with the exhibit was its lack of context. No mention of the Predator's uses, which have been exclusively devoted to (to put it kindly) questionable assassinations and mad massacres in a so-far mostly empty search for "high-value" al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Hellfires have killed their share of leaders, but only the sort that get replaced before the embers turn black. The Juky 4 week, that most American, most Air-and-Space-like of weeks, featured at least three missile strikes on Pakistan by Predators, netting close to 100 dead. Pakistani authorities claim the strikes have dealt a severe blow to the Taliban and Qaeda leadership. But the claim is scratchy with the sound of a broken record.

I'm not saying the Predator replica shouldn't have been hanging there. Hiding from history is as bad as inventing it. But displaying it without context neutralizes its meaning, sanitizees its reality. The B-29 can be said to have contributed to ending the last world war. The Predator is the symbol of a pilotless war against invisible enemies in an endless war that appears no closer to ending today than it did when it began almost a decade ago. For all that, the Predator's replica at the Air & Space looks like just another triumph, a done deal ready for the usual snapshots or yawns on the way to the next wow.

If only it were so for the civilians at the receiving end of the Predator's offerings.

See Also:

• Operation Enduring Folly: US Kills 60 More in Pakistan Air Strike
• Pakistan Fumes: Predators Among Them
• About Those US Missile Strikes in Pakistan...
• America's Expanding, Dangerous War in Pakistan's Tribal Areas
• Predator UAV Proves Its Worth
• Predator Missions Over Iraq Flown by Pilots in Fargo
• Why Pakistan Is Barack Obama's Biggest Middle East Challenge