i’m kind of livid with this whole drone strike thing.
…and i can’t find any liberals who care.
so what am i missing? what exactly is the redeeming aspect of our current clandestine drone war?
what aspect of this makes it so the left can just ethically side-step the moral/cognitive dissonance so easily?
i cannot help but think if McCain or Romney or Bush has the same (lack of clear) policy and attitude and human rights records with drone strikes, the left would whip this into a media frenzy. as it stands, i can’t get any of my liberal friends to even discuss it with me. i’ve never seen such an ethical shut-down before–
i consider myself left. but i legitimately care about due process and the right of life. i cannot understand why it’s a tragedy when 26 kids die in america but we can go kill some 176 “oops drone fuck-up,” and it’s “oh well.”
so am i the one who is wrong to be livid over this stuff? …and everyone who doesn’t care sees some ethical good-guy-jingoism i’m missing?
I got kind of resigned to the idea that our government was going to be sending soldiers to other countries to kill people who didn’t need to be killed a couple administrations ago. I’m kind of disappointed that Obama’s still following that path, but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it at this point. If he’s figured out a way to kill those people without putting our soldiers at as much of a risk, I guess that’s kind of an improvement, but I’m not going to be cheering about it.
You’re far from alone. Many liberals care, and care very deeply.
Others take a slightly more abstract view, and consider drone strikes a weapons system much like missiles from manned aircraft, or like artillery in general.
that seems to be the lack of policy involved–that somehow this falls outside the scope of warstrike. like it’s just a faceless missile or something without any tangible tethers. sounds a lot like clandestine assassinations more than acts of full scale war. we want to come in, quite, kill whoever, and get out. we don’t intend to invade; we are not calling it war. we just want to come kill people. and Holder seems uncertain if it would be ok for the CIA to do this on american soil as well…
he’s frighteningly…fungible on the subject, at least.
but i ask you this: if some foreign country had reaper drones, and they were running sorties on, say, Nebraska, and scattered reports come in that for every 1 actual badguy they kill, 10 innocent people die—do you think Americans would call that an act of war? would we let it slide? would we retaliate?
…would we call these actions ‘evil?’
i get it–we can come drone strike you and you can’t IED us. you can’t suicide bomb our drone. i get the initial concept. but now we are adjudicating…what i cannot displace from full out assassination…of sometimes even Americans…sometimes American MINORS…who haven’t necessarily committed any crime nor necessarily will.
the whole strike dilemma isn’t just anchored by “if we kill innocent people, is that an act of malice”–but even when we are killing who we intended–do we have that right?
all i can do is reverse it. and if someone else was doing this on american soil, we would declare it an act of war. and i can’t help but think that the citizens of these places, and the families of the dead civilians will look upon us as the bad guy.
…and i can’t really figure out how we’re NOT the bad guy…
i have a very left leaning friend who i stood side by side with and argued for Obama during the election. now that this is all coming into my sphere of awareness, i am honestly appalled. and i brought it up to her tonight, in several threads, just asking if she knew about it. she deleted them all and refused to even acknowledge the issue. she is eager to bash the Reps from our state who voted against the liberal Women’s Abuse laws, because hey–the Reps just suck! but when i point out something kind of terrible the Dems are doing, she literally refuses to be confronted by the issue, to the point she deleted three whole threads just so she wouldn’t have to reply to or acknowledge the conflict.
i think i see that a lot. i think it’s an ethical problem that the left simply doesn’t want to deal with. meanwhile, i feel entirely let down. by my president and by my peers. i am politically atheist from here on out. i am sick of dogmatic partisanship. a spade is a spade, on both sides of the aisle.
i feel like bush and his hawkish cabinet, at least, held war above board and had the decent courtesy to lie.
obama seems hawkish in a way the republicans could have never hoped for in romney–and he wants to keep it under the table like i don’t even deserve the lie.
it’s depressing.
and yeah–the Reps who hate everything about the guy are just as “deer in the spotlight” as the left over this–no one knows how to proceed or what emotion to even feel.
and that, again, is why i am going atheist over this. Beghanzi was such a tragedy–holy smokes, 4 people died. let’s make committees and have hearings and raze the democratic landscape. but no one cares about actual loss of life, not unless it can be leveraged against a political rival.
so how do you build off that? how do i look at this guy and think “well at least he care about imagrants”…or my healthcare…or anything else?
is this drone nonsense an actual-factual necessary component to America’s well-being?
And they’d presumably see us as the bad guys if our soldiers were killing people over there in person. So long as we’re not going to win hearts and minds either way, why not kill them from a safe distance? It’s as you say:
The thing is, that’s pretty much the entire concept: we’re going to obliterate these people either way; we’ll be despised either way; we may as well live.
The redeeming factor is that they are attacks on military targets in locations where traditional law enforcement is either unwilling to unable to intervene.
There is a very real moral difference between the willful and deliberate murder of children in a domestic school, and the unintentional killing of civilians during a war. If you are unwilling to recognize the difference between state-sanctioned military action and individual (non-state) criminality, then no further arguments will sway you.
And as for the arguments that drone strikes should be considered an act of war: Of course they are an act of war. Nobody argues that. That is the entire point of calling it the “War on Terror.” We are at the war with the people we are bombing, and any attempt to say otherwise is an act of political theatre trying to disguise the reality of the situation.
But, I’ve made my views on this topic very clear in other threads.
The drone strikes bother me. But every time I think about it, I picture the congressional hearings after a known target makes a successful attack after the president decides to end the drone strikes.
I don’t think we can say that we’d be doing anything substantively differently in Pakistan, Yemen and now North Africa if Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq. Maybe, maybe not. Blaming the current “drone war” on the invasion of Iraq is really a non sequitur.
I’m also fuzzy on the relationship between Iraq and airstrikes. Drones became a go-to weapon in these wars because the technology was finally mature. The Bush administration began the policy of airstrikes. Then when America elected a leader who was held up as the opposite of Bush, the airstrikes actually accelerated. This tells me that the airstrikes are being driven by necessity rather than party or ideology, especially since Obama appears to be a level-headed guy in every other respect.
Also, I insist on using the word “airstrike” because I do not perceive a fundamental difference between attacks conducted by drones and those conducted by manned aircraft or guided missiles, except for the matter of efficiency.
The redeeming factor is that drones are very helpful in wartime. I hope that one day all our wars are fought with robots, and people on both sides stay out of the equation.
The problem is with this “war”. Drones or not, you can’t fight a war against a nebulous, vague, worldwide network of criminals. That just isn’t what wars are for. The Unabomer got arrested and tried. Timothy McVeigh was arrested and tried. That’s exactly how we should have treated Bin Laden and his goons. Instead we validated their “Jihad” and made them all martyrs. Now that we’ve treated Al Qaeda like respectable foes instead of criminal scum, we apparently have to live with the consequences, which includes bombing entire neighborhoods in the hopes of killing “the enemy”.
We need to repeal the AUMF and treat these people like the criminals they are, by trying them and putting them in jail for a long time. Taking out their neighborhood in a fiery blast is too good for them, in addition to being terrible for the innocents and the US reputation alike.
I agree with this. I remember similar questions and concerns about bombing in Vietnam in the 60’s. A major difference is a drones ability to pinpoint targets so that instead of bombing a whole village to get one bad guy we can presumably just get him and a few neighbors. The problem of who gets to decide on the targets is no different, as far as I can see.
The difference with drones strikes, in my view, is that they are easier to do in secret, which seems to be going on, and that increased efficiency leads to increased usage. I’d like to see more oversight, just like I think there should have been more questions asked during the bombing in Vietnam. When we achieve the technology to secretly destroy anyone who gives us the stink-eye I don’t think we will be able to resist using it and nobody is going to ask me whether to go ahead.
Drone strikes are a lot more precise than that, and do not carry neighborhood leveling payloads. There is a good deal of intelligence associated with drone targets before a decision is made to give the go ahead to launch a hellfire missile. They don’t just fly around up there looking for brown skinned people to shoot at. Unfortunately, as in all things war and otherwise, nothing is perfect and civilian casualties are a consequence.
It raises the level of violent video games to that of reality. If you are a gamer, you can get paid on the taxpayer’s dime to kill bad guys and never have to experience your own pain or possible death fighting the enemy.
Simple. They do less harm than would otherwise be done if you used heavier, more conventional means to achieve the same goals. Assuming you believe we should be going after terrorists who are hiding in supposedly neutral countries and shielding themselves from attack using the local populace, then your options are to either use air strikes, long range missile attacks or send in troops…all of which would cause a lot more harm and death than these drone strikes do, and also be a lot less precise.
The rub is, you’d need to accept the baseline assumption that we DO need to be doing these things first…and I think that’s where the disconnect you are having is. If you don’t accept that we SHOULD be trying to interdict terrorist activity and disrupt their plans and C&C, make them keep their heads down and worry about their own physical security, then ANY use of force, be it drone strikes or anything more conventional is going to be a major point of contention. Drone strikes are simply a tool…what it sounds like to me is your (and others) major problem is that we are doing ANYTHING, not just drone strikes. Drone strikes seem to be the hot button issue, but it’s the underlying root baseline that’s the real problem from what I can tell…i.e. do we do anything at all, or do we simply wait and react when terrorists attack us?
There are plenty on this board. Do a search on drones and you’ll see a lot of threads on this subject.
Probably because your strawman doesn’t reflect reality, and the situations aren’t remotely similar would be my guess. You are trying to compare apples to orangutans and then scratching your head in feigned puzzlement when the analogy is a major fail.
the problem i have with a lot of these (obvious) answers about how this is a good thing is that you’re being presumptive.
yes, if we were singling out legitimate bad guys (terrorists) and killing them (precisely) without putting any american lives in harms way–totally great stuff.
but that doesn’t appear to be the case:
according to some statistics, we are killing 10 civilians for every 1 “maybe” bad guy.
they are only “maybe” bad guys because we don’t have a lot of high-level targets to go after. so we are going over people who are not terrorists but may at some point become terrorists.
drones are NOT as precise as people think. i watched a documentary with the companies who develop and make these things. they actually maneuver more radically than satellite uplinks can keep up with. so sometimes they literally have no camera. another major flaw is they have myopic viewpoints of the theater of combat, limiting awareness of what is going on outside the target. so in one actual case, we hunted and killed a target (someone in an SUV on a road with other traffic). the drone eyes didn’t know who the others rushing to scene were, but they were presumed hostile and obliterated as well–which brings me to
“signature strikes,” where we hit a target, wait for people to come help, then kill the helpers. there is significant reports that not only are we killing rescuers, but have made it such a common tactic that in Pakistan, people know that you do NOT go help a bombed out house for several hours to be sure the second run doesn’t come.
“of course these are acts of war.” only they aren’t. this is all controlled by the CIA, not the Pentagon.
i think calling it a war of attrition is accurate. it kind of stopped being about striking direct targets and now has sort of become killing you for even thinking about it. and bear in mind we killed the american minor son of a NOT A TERRORIST BUT MAYBE WAS THINKING ABOUT IT…killed his kid simply for being…his kid. so wrap your mind around that.
from a nice huff post article:
“According to data collected by the New America Foundation, of the total number of people killed by drone strikes there (between 1,900 and 3,200), less than 3 percent of them (51) were “militant leaders.” Furthermore, only 30 of these leaders were members of al Qaeda.”
the BIJ reports hundreds of civilian deaths, and at least 160 kids have died. other reports are around 176 for children. CMC says 2000 Pakistanis are dead, nearly all civilians.