Fantastic. But Obama is gone in 2016. Finished. Put out to presidential pasture. Other Presidents will come to fill his place. For all we know, President Rick Santorum will be proudly sworn into office January 2017. And he’ll have the same powers that Obama did.
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your stance presumes we are actually doing some good in combating terror. the statistics do not support the conclusion we are actually doing anything to combat actual terrorism. if we were, or if the statistics reflected we were really disrupting terrorist activities, i think it would all be much easier to digest. the facts actually make it clear we are 1. not really doing anything to disrupt terror–or if we are, not much, and 2. weighing that against the civilian casualties.
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Well, your stance presumes we aren’t doing any good, and therefore there is no ‘redeeming’ qualities about the drone strikes…so, where does that leave us, exactly?
As to the statistic, what statistics are you referring too? Could you post a link? My thought is anyone claiming we are doing no good, and that they can conclusively prove this via statistics is trying to blow sunshine up your ass, since it would require them to be able to predict alternative realities. We simply can’t know if there would have been more terrorist attacks or less had we not been killing terrorists via drone strikes or any other way, since no one has an actual magical alternative reality machine to go look at what the world would be like if we hadn’t done this or that, or if Bush or Obama had eggs for breakfast instead of toast and jam.
My own stance, as I pointed out, is predicated on the assumption that we have to be over there and would be fighting. Given that this seems to be the actual reality in the, you know, real world, then you have a few choices. You could do nothing about terrorists in supposedly neutral countries. This doesn’t seem to be a realistic option, since neither the recent Republican nor the current Democrat in the White House has chose this option. So, given that, we would probably be Doing Something™…which means we’d be doing something militarily. So, assuming you are following this, that leaves either using traditional military options, or drone strikes. Traditional military options would be either air strikes, missile strikes with larger, more powerful (and expensive) missiles fired from longer distances, long range artillery or boots on the ground…probably some combination of the above, since a lot of times it takes boots on the ground to direct air, missile or artillery strikes. Since any of the options that don’t involve drones would actually cause more harm and also more risk to our own soldiers (something you seem to dismiss as not ‘redeeming’ as well), I’m merely pointing out that doing less harm as an alternative to doing more is somewhat ‘redeeming’. You can and have handwaved this away by trying to shift the goal posts, but the fact remains that if we are going to do something, which we seem bent on doing, that drone strikes actually cause less harm than the available alternatives. If you want to believe that if we didn’t have drones that would magically mean, at this point in history, that we’d be simply sitting on our hands (IN Afghanistan), well, that’s your fantasy…I’m merely trying to keep it real.
Well, what would you like me to elaborate on, exactly? Do you want to know why it’s a ‘strawman’? Well, because no one is claiming that only the deaths of the kids was a ‘tragedy’ (since you are putting things in quotes, it seemed like the fun thing to do :p)…thus, your argument is a strawman. See? It’s also an exaggeration, and basically a really, really bad analogy, but please note I didn’t comment on those things, merely that you were making a strawman argument by setting up your man of straw and then taking a poke at it, despite no one making that claim.
It’s not, and no one said it was. Those 26 kids died because we, as a society, have chosen to allow guns in the hands of private citizens and some nutter went off his rocker and decided to go on a killing spree. The kids and other civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and other places) died because some lunatics in their country decided to go to war with the US and fight to the death, and put those kids in harms way, while some lunatics in THIS country decided it would be a good idea to go over there and fight them. War basically sucks, and innocents die. They die in car crashes by drunk assholes, they die in plane crashes, they die in gun violence and by disease, and they die in war…and most of those deaths of the innocent are tragedies. C’est la vie.
Blaming drone strikes for the war over there is basically silly…the war happened, and the killing happened and continues to happen and WILL continue to happen whether we use drones or we use planes manned by human pilots or missiles fired from ships instead of drones. If we HAVE to be fighting over there, then drones cause the least harm of any of our conventional weapons. Thus, the reality is that this is one of the redeeming virtues of the things. The other is that it mitigates our own troops risk. Thus, your question has been answered. Now, if you want to debate the entire war and whether we should be there at all (which is what you are actually doing…plus trying to build strawman and do all that emotional appeal stuff), then feel free.
Hopefully I have, but I’m not very sanguine about the prospect. Guess we shall see…
everything Condescending Robot just said. yes.
Your links don’t say what you claim they say. The percentage of “militants” killed in the strikes is, even according to blatantly biased anti-drone sources is (this link is from your post) 70% to 80%. Not 10% as you claim. Substituting “leaders” for “militants” obviously gives you a much lower percentage, but so what?
Pretty sure you’re wrong here.
Last I heard, the weapon used by the “drone” was an anti-tank rocket, 2 per flight.
A tank is a small target.
the WWII technology was storm the town with infantry - small arms and grenades.
Vietnam: Napalm it
Now - blow up the specific house.
If you really don’t thing that there is an organized group actively waging jihad against the West in general, and the US in particular, you are not living in the same world as I.
How do you account for 4 simultaneous hijacking of B-757/767 aircraft by people capable of operating them? Those specific planes are identical in flight deck arrangement and operation - they even “feel” identical (fly by wire does that).
But no, there was no organization.
When a group claims to have pulled that off, I’d say they exist.
There was a charming pic of a sand sculpture in India or Pakistan, surrounded by admiring on-lookers: an airliner tail sticking out of something that looked a whole lot like one of the WTC towers. That pic is going to cost a whole bunch of innocent people their lives.
Let me guess: this is the first time you’ve found out that war is messy and innocents get killed.
Grow up and deal with it
everything Trinopus just said. yes. 
To, er, paraphrase…
it is fairly obvious you have not been reading the posts in this thread. i will still address this all directly again, but FYI everything i’m about to answer here i have already said two or three times already.
as for the stats, i already posted them:
you should really take the time to read the NYT article posted by Kinthalis.
what evidence is there that we would have occupational fighting forces in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan or other non-current war nations? the whole point of the drone war is because we would not be taking actual military action against these places. i have not yet seen a single shred of any evidence indicating we would be using alternative “typical” war methods in place of these drone strikes. that is the whole point: it’s a CIA (NOT MILITARY) program that circumvents typical military hangups (again, read what i posted above. the CIA can drone strike a kill list target unilaterally without that nation’s approval. Military drone strikes require full cooperation with the nation in question). this is the whole reason people have a problem with this drone stuff. the drone war is a CIA thing, not a Pentagon thing. you pretend it’s part of war in afghanistan. it is not. it is not being controlled by the military. it is all directly overseen by Brenner and other CIA ops. the ex general has way huge issues with it, which is why he keeps suggesting military oversight and letting the pentagon run this drone stuff like the rest of the war stuff. but the drone thing is special. it’s a loophole.
weird. i keep flipping through the news and i haven’t even once heard anyone discuss directly how tragic it is these kids and women and innocent people are dying. Newtown was front page headline everything for weeks. Dead Yemenese or Pakistani kids don’t get any air time. none. there are no Pakistani dead kid commemorative services, or ribbons, or dedication webpages, or facebook posts, or anything else. so the only amount of “tragic” anyone around here is willing to grant it is “yeah that sucks but it’s kind of part of the whole deal.”
you have it entirely wrong. an honest analogy would be something along the lines of: NO one was shot in Newtown. The government had been monitoring Landa for a long time, drones hovering his hometown for weeks leading up to it. he never actually did the shooting, but we confirmed he was planning it, so we drone-strike him. he dies, but so do all the kids in the newtown elementary school, because they just were collateral exploded humans caught in the necessary method of blowing the fuck out of Landa.
now. do you think we’d all just lump that into “c’est la vie?” just part of the deal? necessary evil of war?
“the war happened?” pray, tell: what war happened in Somalia? what war is in Yemen? do you think “every brown-people country not near me” gets to be lumped into the Iraq or Afghanistan war? if we are at war with one of those two place, we have carte blanche to “be at war” with any islamic nation?
again, read the article above. we killed a civilian governor–a very pro american and well-liked innocent person in Yemen drone striking a medium level A Q guy who wasn’t in hiding. he was on government payroll and working with officials in Yemen at the time. we knew his address and he actually slept there and everything. and the Yemen Elite tactical anti-terror WHO WE TRAINED TO DEAL WITH BAD GUYS LIKE HIM all stand around scratching their head as to why we felt it necessary to drone strike him and kill bystanders when they are dead-ready to go nab people like him. it’s their whole job.
drone striking has become such an overly used method that we just won’t do junk like subdue and process people.
you want to talk about strawmen–you have spun this fictional narrative where we are at war with nations we entirely are not at war with. you have falsely created this scenario where it’s either we are at actual war with men on the ground in these places, and they are REALLY BAD PEOPLE who are shooting at us first. read the articles, read the stats. that is not the case. we are blowing up low level nobodies in places where we have spend gobs of time and resources and money on training the locals to apprehend and deal with such “bad guys.” rather than allow that to happen, we’re not just bombing everyone out of existence. and their families, and friends and nearby or errant strangers.
so the actual reality is we have tons of better solutions than drone strikes–and most of these people are low enough nobodies who aren’t really capable of causing harm–so much so that if we didn’t have drones, we probably wouldn’t deal with them at all.
The page you posted shows that 70% to 80% of the people killed by drones are militants. Are you sure that’s the point you were trying to make?
I’ll attempt to address your post in the morning, but you should go back and reread what I actually wrote, which is different than what you seem to think I wrote. For instance, an even casual reader will note I didn’t say (nor is it true) that we are at war with any nations. We are at war, if that’s even the right word, with terrorists. Also note, that I made no mention of brown people…that’s a strawman that I’ve noticed a lot of white people love to toss out. I guess they figure it scores some points…or something. Really, it’s pretty amusing to see it pulled out so often, especially when someone pulling it out doesn’t want to actually address the things being discussed…it’s like the get out of jail strawman to try and win the dicussion by diverting it. Or something.
from the wikipedia article on pakistan’s drone strikes:
but according to NY times, it’s more like 50 dead to each one:
Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly “precision.”
is 30% civilian casualties acceptable to you?
also, please enlighten us all to how “militants” is defined by the CIA, what actions these militants need to have done to be considered militants, and what criteria is being used to label them as such and the criteria involved in granting their unilateral execution.
the whole problem is the CIA has no set policy in place they are willing to divulge, and it has become clear some of our targets haven’t actually ever done anything, yet we point and call them “militants.”
for all you know, by definition you’re a militant as well, since planning and conjecture is all that is necessary to declare guilt.
i quoted you, guy.
“the war happened,” you said, referring to the dead kids in pakistan.
…where no war happened…
and you just said “nor is it true we are at war with any nation..” we aren’t?
how did you get from saying “the drone strikes are because the war happened” to "…is war even the right word for what we’re doing…?’
asking why our kids are treated more tragic than theirs isn’t even an actual strawman.
pretending we would be involved in some kind of military action when we currently aren’t and never were, so it’s ok we’re militarily drone striking them (when it’s not even a military program) is entirely a strawman.
Why are you switching to wikipedia? I gave you the percentages from the anti-drone web site that you provided. Do you dispute that web site’s numbers?
Leaders. Does that mean that non-“leader” militants are not a worthy target? Or maybe that you consider those “civilians”?
In this kind of warfare, where the militants hide among civilian population, that’s an amazingly low rate, yes.
terr, the problem is there’s no oversight so all data is hodgepodge.
bear in mind the CIA claims zero-to-single-digit collateral deaths. that’s absurd.
i gave you the BIJ as the statistic aggregator. they grant a range, from 10-to-1 to a broader range of potential numbers.
nitpicking them doesn’t make the whole thing much better.
and, since you are ok with that, then i suppose that you would consider my analogy about killing Landa for nothing more than PLANNING the shooting, never having carried it out, and we bomb him and all those kids died collaterally–you’d consider that acceptable? after all, he too lived in a civilian populace. literally no aspect of that would be different than what is happening over there. rather than going in and arresting such people and adjudicating through due process, you advocate blowing them up where they stand with little attention to who is standing around? we could have arrested and apprehended the guy in Yemen without blowing anyone else up around him. we just decided not to. this is literally the exact same as if we burned down the neighboring houses around Dorner’s last stand, trapping the occupants to die simply for being in a bad location at the wrong time. do you consider that justifiable because these bad guys live in cities and towns as well? should that policy be the rule of all law?
would you be ok with a loved one being unilaterally executed without a trial or even an investigation?
are you comfortable with these actions happening on planet YOU or is it only ok because it’s half the world away? why is skipping due process and killing “bad guys” and anyone unlucky enough to be nearby or stupid enough to rescue them ok in that case…and if it’s good then, is it ok to carry out law without trial here as well?
keep in mind we have home-grown terror cells. should we drone strike our local militants as well? …and everyone around them, too?
That jihad was being waged against India a long time before it was being waged against the west.
So if you’re trying to claim some sort of equivalence between India and Pakistan in the matter of fomenting terrorism in other countries, I take exception. There was indeed a sand sculpture in India of 9/11, but it was paying tribute to the VICTIMS of 9/11.
p.s - Some Indians do look at 9/11 as having one positive outcome. It took the issue of Pakistan based jihadi terrorism, which had previously been a matter of concern only for India, brought it to the world stage, and got something to happen about it. Today Pakistan is itself engulfed by terrorist acts, instead of merely exporting them. That is a positive (in the limited sense that it may inspire Pakistan to stop using terrorism as an instrument of policy). But there is no support for jihad, and indeed, India is amongst the worst affected by it.
The 70-80% is on their front page. Can you show me where they claim militant-to-civilian ratio of 10-to-1? Either show it or admit you fibbed.
I am fairly comfortable with these actions happening on the planet in places where the authorities, whatever they are, for decades showed that they have no control over the militants, cannot or would not arrest them or do anything to stop them, and sometimes actively help them. Yes, I am comfortable with it.
If the same situation was not in Pakistan, but somewhere else, closer to home, where the legal authorities would be, for years and years, after being given complete information on their activities, doing nothing or helping the terrorists, allowing them to proliferate and base themselves among civilian populations, I’d be supporting drone strikes there as well.
The idea of “Al-Qaeda” as a worldwide hierarchy of terrorism foot soldiers with all sorts of “cells” in various places is pure fiction. It never existed. It’s something out of a GI Joe comic book for people whose worldviews haven’t advanced beyond “killing the bad guys” to accept because they so desperately want to. “Al Qaeda” was 20 rich Saudi dissidents and three dipshits in a cave who occasionally wired disgruntled Indonesians the money to buy bomb supplies. That’s it. That’s the only thing your “terror network” ever was. That’s what’s justified turning the U.S. into a flying death machine for civilians. And now it’s about 10 of those dissidents and the dudes in the cave are long dead, but we have to keep bombing brown people in Asia because we can’t admit that the U.S. played right into bin Laden’s strategy for asymmetric warfare. And every tribesman in Mali or Jordan or the Philippines with a turban and a grudge now gets labeled “Al Qaeda” the moment they make the news cycle, to perpetuate the fiction of this real-life SPECTRE being a serious thing that actually exists.
Bin Laden and the Taliban guys could never do any direct damage to the U.S. on a meaningful scale. They could barely figure out how to keep their goddamn goats alive. He was as surprised as anyone when the planes actually brought the towers down. He hoped they would kill a few hundred on impact, and that was it. He knew about as much about structural engineering as the 9/11 truthers do. The goal was to provoke the U.S. to lose its mind in response, overreact, get bogged down in multiple unwinnable wars with no defined conditions of victory and end up pissing off the entire Muslim world with occupations and war crimes to the point that Islamist fundamentalist politics would be handed a million supporters on a silver platter by America for every American it could possibly kill directly. And boy did you yokels fall for it. Thanks to the drone program, the recruitment drive will go on indefinitely, and thanks to the U.S. doing everything bin Laden wanted it to do, the entire Muslim world is falling to fundamentalist regimes one country at a time (Obama trying to play off the ongoing dominoes of military coups and subsequent theocracies as some sort of positive “Arab Spring” is just patching the wound that the Bush-Obama foreign policy, which is as seamless and indistinguishable as it is disastrous, has opened).
As for anyone quoting the statistics on “militants” killed when Obama has openly admitted that he defines every adult male in Pakistan as a “militant,” you’re basically endorsing genocide, so stop.
I assume you mean Lanza, the recent spree killer. If so, the reality is that law enforcement can reach someone like Lanza, and they have the physical capability of arresting people like him. We can’t just arrest the militants we’re fighting in Pakistan and Afghanistan. If we could, I’d prefer it over drone strikes.
So you’re comparing two totally different scenarios. Trying to arrest militants in Pakistan is a failing strategy, but arresting murderers in America is a good strategy.
cite?