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by Jtsummers
3527 days ago
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I was irked that you were downvoted, hopefully my upvote bring you out of the gray. === You make solid points, I don't disagree with you entirely. I do want to clarify: my point of view is not based on a sense of moral fairness. War is probably always going to be unfair, otherwise it's an even match and even more pointless. If I were for fairness I'd want the war to be local and not just in other countries, but I don't want that. What I want is for it to end. The ability to cover up the human costs by distance from the front, distance from the people fighting (on either side), means it's too easy for us to allow it to continue. I don't want US men and women in harm's way. I want them out of harm's way, and for us to stop killing people who (mostly) just want to live their lives. Some level of military action will probably be necessary somewhere in the world, as entangled as we are, at any given time. But going to more automated and unmanned systems allows us to continue to be far more violent than circumstances actually require, with little cost to the elected and appointed officials directing this violence in our name. |
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I basically agree entirely with you. However, I think almost everyone would. If you asked Obama or any of the generals running these drone ops to sign off on what you just said, I think they'd gladly do so. They'd then likely go on to say that the war they're waging is one of these unfortunate necessities. Further, that the civilian casualties horrify them, but they're doing what they can do stop them while still accomplishing the (in their minds) paramount goal of eliminating terrorist threats.
What it seems to me to come down to ultimately is that it's ok to use drones when you come down on the right side of that moral calculation and not when you don't. Which, of course makes the drones an irrelevant part of the equation in the first place, since that is the fundamental moral question of all use of force.
Maybe the answer is to un-depersonalize the nature of drone strikes. Maybe their video feeds should be publicly available after X amount of time when they've used their weapons?