“Would like to” is very slippery phrasing. Last I checked, these groups did not just want to hurt people. They successfully did so in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, London, and other cities.
Just curious, which part do you disagree with, “some people need killing” or “drones are better than carpet bombing”?
Lot or rhetoric but not a lot of facts in this “debate”.
Fact is, most of these drone operations occur in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the case of the latter, with the tacit knowledge and support of the Pakistani government, in spite of their public protests. (We aren’t launching these things from Virginia).
I hear a lot of complaints about the “War on Terror”. Do people think we shouldn’t be actively trying to dismantle the Talaban and Al Quaida’s terror network? Or do they not like the manner in which we are doing it?
Really, the justification for using drones in such a conflict is that they offer the greatest opportunity to take out targets with precision with minimal risk or political backlash.
There is no moral difference - these are all acts of aggressive war. That’s kind of my point.
I don’t think any of these acts are moral unless one is the defender.
Drone attacks are cheap. That’s why they’re so easy to pull off, and why I think they’re viewed by some with a rather cavalier attitude.
Sending in actual people has the potential to be messy and risky. I think that a level of risk is good when it comes to deciding if these targets are people we actually need to remove as threats.
The fact that lives aren’t cheap is kind of the point.
History, and human nature. If the Blitz wasn’t enough to break people, then screwing around with drones bombing bystanders won’t either. And 9-11 didn’t exactly make America lose interest in killing people, either. This idea that we can bomb people into submission is in violation of human nature, and is based on the premise that foreigners are weak, cowardly creatures who won’t react like real humans aka Americans would. We kill random, innocent people, and their friends and families will want revenge. That’s very basic human nature.
I was speaking in the general sense and included your families as well. Please inform them that you don’t care about their safety. But reassure them that I still do.
The Taliban doesn’t have a ‘terror network’. They’re a loose organization of tribes in the region.
The only reason the Taliban is fighting us is because we are standing in their valleys being targets. If we weren’t there, we wouldn’t have a problem with them.
We’re using our very presence in Afghanistan as justification for fighting the Taliban, who is fighting us because we’re there.
Neat huh? Send in the drones!
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me it is the heavy-handed, brutal manner in which it is done, not the goal itself.
Minimal risk or political backlash - to the perpetrators.
Why do you think that sending in a special forces squad to arrest or kill the terrorists is going to result in less “collateral damage” than the drone strike? Do you think the special forces use magic weapons that do not hurt civilians?
No, it’s not: there have been plenty of instances where nations surrendered after bombing and wars ended. And drones strikes are not “bombing people into submission,” they’re intended to stop a terrorist group from functioning (and have apparently been effective).
Which is why the terrorism situation has gotten so much worse since the drone strikes began in 2004 and particularly since Obama began escalating them in 2009. For example there were enormous terrorist attacks in the Western cities of _____ and ______ and of course _________.
That also goes for Yemen.
So we agree?
There was that September 11th kerfluffle. A little bit of a to-do, as I recall.
That’s sweet, really. Thanks.
I’m not sure what part you don’t understand about ‘Your family is not going to be killed by terrorists.’
They aren’t. They simply…aren’t.
They’re more likely to drown. Or get hit by lightning. Or suffer an aortic dissection.
The sense I get is that you’re not saying that we should be continuing the WoT because you’re family might die…you’re saying your family might die, so we must continue the WoT.
There’s a difference; it’s a fine distinction, but important.
And I’m sure that by this time, we’ve exchanged dead folks at at least a 1:1 ratio. We’ve had our revenge. And it wasn’t the Taliban that attacked us; sure, they provided support for AQ, but that’s not a problem any more.
Are you defending your position by citing a madman? That is a moral equivalency argument and I reject it. There was no intent to protect innocents by bin Laden, his intent was to cause the deaths of innocents all over the world as a means of obtaining power.
You are saying pre-emptive action is never justified. I disagree.
Again, I’m not arguing the pre-emptive actions in the actual drone strikes would all be justifiable pre-emptive actions, but some of them could be.
There is a point where the positive side of the act (killing bad guys with drones) is outweighed by the negative side (killing children and innocents). I think this administration has done an outstanding job of telling people that they’ve never crossed that line, that every strike is undeniably necessary and the civilian casualties are minimal. I’m just not sure I believe them.
I cited to this in the other thread, but here it is again. A study by Stanford Law and NYU into drone attacks in Pakistan. It makes it pretty clear that the drone program may not be the necessary evil with minimal civilian casualties that we are told it is.
You can tell that to the average Pakistani/Afghani family as well. ‘You family is not going to be killed by drones.’ They aren’t. They simply…aren’t. They’re more likely to drown. Or get hit by lightning. Or suffer an aortic dissection.
No, war is not preferable. Though I’m not a pacifist, I’d say war has been our greatest blight as a species and is to be avoided unless there is absolutely no other reasonable alternative.
If I may channel Bill Maher for a moment - who has bigger balls, the guy in Colorado using a joystick to kill people 8000 miles away, or the guy who flies a plane into a building at 500 miles per hour?
Al Qaeda may be evil, but they’re not cowardly.
You tell them:
[QUOTE=US drone attacks are no laughing matter, Mr Obama | Mehdi Hasan | The Guardian]
Take Faisal Shahzad, the so-called Times Square bomber. One of the first things the Pakistani-born US citizen said upon his arrest was: “How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan.” Asked by the judge at his trial as to how he could justify planting a bomb near innocent women and children, Shahzad responded by saying that US drone strikes “don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody.”
[/quote]
Or does a terrorist stating outright that he did it because the US bombed Pakistani civilians first not count?
And if you don’t have the security apparatus to prevent a couple of your civilian airliners from being flown into skyscrapers, tough.
And that post has more hyperbole than most I’ve seen on this site and that’s saying quite a bit.
It’s a tab flippant perhaps but offensive?
There are some evil people in this world, and in a war, some of those evil men should be killed to prevent them from killing innocents. If possible, no innocent people should be killed in that attack. What is so offensive there?