There’s been a lot of noise made lately about drones, and how they are an immoral weapon in our war against terrorism, but in attacking drones, I really think that we are wasting our ammunition and shooting at the wrong target. A drone is just a tool. It’s like saying that the hammer you used to bash in someone’s head, has somehow, done something wrong.
The reality is that it is just a substitute for a manned airplane and it bears about as much responsibility for what it does as would the plane that bombs the same village.
It does have the advantage of not endangering one of our airmen and it has better capabilities than the average plane, but what should be addressed in any argument about whether or not to use drones is the goal and the goal, much the same as the goal of manned bombers, is to kill people. So maybe the question should be, is it right to be blowing up people around the world with such impunity, regardless of the weapon?
The anti-drone forces claim that the collateral damage is so great that it creates enemies faster than we can kill them. This is understandable. How would you feel if someone bombed your house and killed your kid? Probably not too understanding, no matter what their motivation.
The only real problem is whether or not we should be killing people in foreign lands without proper supervision. Right now all it takes is a presidential order and there are a lot of people who think that’s not enough. President Obama, who thinks of himself as a moral man, assumes that his judgment should prevail but I wonder if he would think the same way if the Dicks, Cheney and Nixon or Donald Rumsfeld had their fingers on the button, and that’s the sticking point.
In fact, throughout our warlike history people have been making that decision over and over and over. It’s just that it usually wasn’t the president and it certainly wasn’t as well publicized as it is now. A functional part of WWII intelligence strategy was the identification and assassination of enemy targets, both military and civilian. True, it was usually accomplished by infiltration rather than our current methods and to be brutally blunt the program had far less success and was exponentially more dangerous. This was true before WWII and has been true ever since, whenever it was deemed feasible. The heads of our various intelligence agencies usually ordered such missions. During WWII the OSS was famous for this kind of activity.
There is no reason why this kind of activity should fall to the president other than because he finds it so morally perilous that he has taken it on.
The most famous victim of current government policy is arguably Anwar Al-Awlaki an American citizen and Muslim cleric who first preached against the US policies, and then assisted in implementing Al-Qaeda operations against he US. The fact that this traitor who was trying to kill Americans has become something of an icon to those fighting this policy is disgraceful. If anyone in this senseless war deserved to die, it was Al-Awlaki. This guy was actually trying to kill Americans so to try to deify him or make him a martyr is a betrayal of every American kid who has died defending his country.
The fact of the matter is that there are people all over the world who want to kill Americans, many with good reason. Another fact is that we have the capability, many capabilities, to kill them before they can act. The question is, should we use those capabilities, based on the supposition that they will act if they are allowed to live, and if we do, what about collateral damage?
The most powerful argument against targeted bomb attacks is the fact of collateral damage, a term governments use to sweeten the reality of the murder of innocents. I don’t know if there is any way to deny the injustice of this but it has been a fact of war ever since the barbarians attacked the first castle.
Unfortunately terrorists never seem to think about retaliation when they decide to set off a bomb in a village square and since they are usually killing their own people or a group from the next village no one seems to take offense at that kind of collateral damage. No one seems to take into account the over three thousand civilians, women and children included that died in the World Trade center attack when they complain about collateral damage done to a hut full of family and friends when we kill some terrorist leader who is determined to kill a many Americans as he can possibly find.
To people who have been at war for a thousand years with themselves and all those around them, there are no rules except survive. We have tried to impose our slightly more sophisticated outlook on them, just as we have imposed our blundering foreign policy upon the entiure world. It doesn’t work and for some inconceivable reason we don’t understand why.
So what can we do about it? A war starts, even a terrorists war and we are obliged to defend our people from the terrorists. The best way to do that is to kill them before they kill us. That’s the nature of war. The best way to stop collateral death is not to indulge in war. It would be nice if we could just call fins but after the way we have conducted our foreign policy for the last 150 years it would be impossible for us to crawl out from under what we have wrought. Obama’s foreign policy, like Eisenhower’s seems to be aimed at that goal but it faces a long hard struggle. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, all seem to have done their bits to screw up the world. If by some chance Obama could pull it off, allow a period of real peace to settle in, it would indeed be the shining achievement of his Presidency.