Collateral damage is war’s core logic, not its side effect

Evidence

Collateral damage, as Mahmood Mamdani remarks, is not an unfortunate by-product of war but its very elaboration. One-time concerns about spheres of influence and area studies in geostrategic competition have now given way to narrow concerns about control of strategic global resources and fitting “our” (US, British, Israeli, or begrudgingly European) geostrategic and security interests. The register of race has shifted from the broadly institutional, from which it is at least explicitly excised, to the micro-relational of everyday interactions, on the one hand, and the macro-political strategizing of geo-global interests, on the other. The two in the end go hand in glove, to extend that bloody metaphor I invoked earlier. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 139

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that collateral damage is war’s elaboration rather than by-product reframes violence’s relation to its cost — hard to summarize, sits with the reader.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 139