A man calls his wife. He speaks of the sea, of the coming storm, of a routine patrol. Hours later, a US missile silences him forever. Now the British government, with the gravity of a Victorian vicar discovering a brothel, demands ‘protocols’ for civilian protection. Where have we heard this before?
Let us be clear: the death of any innocent is a tragedy. But the sanctimonious hand-wringing from London, the calls for ‘international norms’ and ‘due diligence’, carry the faint, musty odour of a colonial administrator tut-tutting over ‘native unrest’. The United Kingdom, which perfected the art of bombing villages from the air in Mesopotamia and Malaya, now lectures the United States on precision? The hypocrisy would be laughable if it were not so lethal.
We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where the forms of morality are preserved long after their substance has evaporated. The British establishment, having long since surrendered its global role, now clings to the trappings of moral authority. It mistakes diplomatic notes for power, and press releases for justice. The sailor’s widow does not need a protocol. She needs her husband back.
Compare this to the Victorian era. Then, when a British gunboat shelled a Zulu village, the newspapers spoke of ‘civilising missions’ and ‘punitive expeditions’. There was no pretence of innocence. Today, we have the same violence, but cloaked in the language of humanitarianism. It is a kind of moral narcotic, numbing the public to the reality of endless war.
The real problem is not a lack of protocols. It is a lack of will. Western powers, including the UK, have outsourced their security to the United States while retaining the luxury of critique. They want the benefits of American military might—the sea lanes secured, the pirates deterred, the global order maintained—without the uncomfortable stain of blood. They want war without responsibility. It is the ultimate consumerist fantasy.
And what of India? A rising power, yet seemingly content to let its citizens serve as collateral in someone else’s conflict. The Indian government’s silence, its reluctance to demand more than a token investigation, speaks volumes. It suggests a recognition, however grudging, that in the hierarchy of nations, some lives are more expendable than others. This is the cold calculus of geopolitics, stripped of all sentiment.
Let us not pretend that protocols will change anything. After every such incident, committees are formed, reports are written, and the system absorbs the outrage. The machinery of war grinds on, indifferent to the tears of widows. The only honest response is to acknowledge that this is what empire looks like in the twenty-first century: a global archipelago of bases, drones, and special forces, where a sailor in the Indian Ocean can be vaporised by a mistake made in a control room in Florida. The rest is theatre.
So when you hear the UK call for civilian protection protocols, remember the history. Remember the opium wars, the bombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo. The West has never needed protocols to kill; it needs them only to feel good about itself afterward. The sailor’s last words deserve more than a diplomatic footnote. They deserve an end to the comfortable delusion that this is anything other than what it is: the brutal maintenance of a world order that treats non-Western lives as cheaper than Western ones.
But that would require a reckoning with empire. And none of the powers involved, least of all the United Kingdom, are prepared for that.
