Posted on 03/08/2013 6:52:20 PM PST by neverdem
I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.
I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration — no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news — the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness...
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Ping
I suppose Mark is right about this but somehow I would
prefer killing at a distance rather than watching the
light go out of someones eyes because I plunged a
bayonet into their heart, and besides blood stains
are hard to remove from herringbone twill.
My problem is that it becomes too easy to accept collateral damage.
Obviously there is a role for drones but I think we need more restraint. For instance, I could have accepted killing Bin Laden with a drone strike even if it killed his whole family because they were at least intimately connected to him. However I have more trouble with using a drone strike that targets the car we want...and kills everyone around it stuck in traffic.
However, I don’t recall these drone strikes being so widely used when Bush was still president. Obama seems to have really ramped up the drone strikes.
For, surely, this is what Steyn warns of.
“...I would prefer killing at a distance..”
Flash back 45 years. How would bombing alone have worked in Vietnam? Would it have eradicated all the VC and NVN? The only way to eradicate the VC/NVN was to use a four-fold approach:
- Bombing
- Feet on the ground
- Pressure from local government
- Elimination of Democrats
Unfortunately, we never succeeded with the fourth approach but the other three were succeeding.
Killing from a distance is only a “piece” of a strategy.
Yes, because this is how the Democrats fight war. Think about Clinton. When fighting terrorists, or just distracting the press from his own legal problems, he would launch some tomahawk missles at Saddamm Hussien. Or the time he did the Serbian war entirely from bombing strikes, then claiming to be the first president to win a war entirely from the air, with no casualties. This is democrat war doctrine, they certainly don't mind war, but they are reluctant to admit it, so they do these things to pretend they are not in a war.
It is Obama that had gone farther than Bush in claiming the right to attack with no legal justification. It is also Obama that claims the right to declare war without congressional approval, something Bush never did.
“...I would prefer killing at a distance rather than watching the light go out of someones eyes because I plunged a bayonet into their heart,...” Don’t go soft on me marine.
Or has it always been happening, and now it just seems to be advancing so rapidly ?
Either way, sad and frightening. I fear for my children, but I wonder, will they know any difference when they are older ?
Steyn does.
What is the spirit of the bayonet?
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Bunch of P***ies, I CAN’T HEAR YOU!
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
That’s quite a montage! What’s the origin of the lower left pic?
Rand Paul, are your here?
What if some of the protesters are armed?
I think these are legitimate questions. (though I never thought I would be asking them ).
Nobody ever comments.
Pretty sure that lower-left pic is the result of photoshop. I don’t recall that there were any M88 engineer vehicles at the Waco siege.
That’s a long-range camera shot of Waco, with the tanks going in on attack day to ram the walls and pump in the CS. The press was kept miles back, so it’s hazy, and the zoom foreshortens and compresses, but that was Waco on the day of the massacre.
Now your talkin’ my brother!
I do remember M88s at that outrageous attack on innocent Americans. I was assigned to two units that had them in 1971.
I just didn't remember that pic from Waco.
I entered M88 Waco at Google Images.
Travis' pic is at the top left. That flag should have been upside down.
The tank recovery vehicles were used to ram the walls, and pump in massive quantities of CS gas. They were the “secret weapon” modified for that very purpose. In sufficient quantities, the CS gas not only will extinguish life, but it will become explosive, as in a grain elevator explosion.
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