Do Drones Equal Terrorism

Now that the election is over it is clear that the President will never be that comfortable with the liberal wing of the Democratic party. This is interesting for many reasons, first and foremost the Republican right believes him to be just to the left of Lenin and yet he does not support unions the way he should and he sends drones across the world to kill terrorists.


Last night I had a conversation with my kids about if the United States was correct to be using drones to kill suspected Al Queda targets around the world, primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan. My children did not believe it to be the case. There answers were straightforward, of course it was acceptable, these were bad people. I re-framed the question, who says there bad people? What right did we have to fire weapons into a sovereign country to kill a private citizen, not convicted in any court..

While they agreed this was concerning they felt that in the end that the United States was doing what was right to protect themselves. Except my daughter. She said that for us to proclaim ourselves as the bastion of equal rights, fair trials and as a shining light on the hill that what we were doing was hypocritical.


Let me be clear, I shed no tears for any people killed before they can strap a bomb on something and blow up Americans. The question is more theoretical. It illustrates however that nothing is as simple as a one sided argument. If you are in a country other than the United States and some other country sends a bomb into your country to kill a person they proclaim to be a terrorist you are not going to think that is a good thing. Your sovereignty is at risk.

I personally do not think anyone should be comfortable with a President of the United States going over a list of potential drone targets and certifying certain targets for removal. Do you want a President to have this power. I do not believe the executive order against assassination has ever been rescinded.

I think it is assumable that every time we kill a target in a Muslim nation we radicalize ten men to replace him. I know and realize that we are being proactive, we are attempting to take these people out before they harm us or our friends. Still when one considers what would happen were an Islamist group send a drone into the United States to take out, say, for example, that kook who made the Mohammad video. By their opinion he is a bad man and should be sentenced to death. Why is this different.

Of course it is not. Of course it is. We are the United States, they are just some third world country that does not even have a real government with a real justice system. It is not hard to see why other countries hate us.

Perhaps it is a cost of being who we are. Still President Obama who is hated by the right for his apology tour, who proclaims to have improved relations with most countries, still has Guantanamo open, still has us in Afghanistan, and still sends armed drones into foreign countries to kill foreign citizens. As the most liberal President in our history as some say, this is more than slightly ironic.

I want my children to think for themselves. This is a complex question, this question of drones, but one is never too young to remember to consider things from both sides. We talked further about if the Boston Tea Party was a terrorist act. While we have a knee jerk reaction that it was not let us consider how the United States would act, for example, if in Guam a group of separatists started protesting and one night went into the harbor and sabotaged loads of food, fruit, and oil, creating losses in the millions.

Remember history is written by the winners. Barack Obama is doing what he thinks he must, this is not always what he should. I do not know how to combat terrorism. I do have a strong sense that what we are doing however is nothing more than holding back the tide of American hate by punching elementary students in the nose. Sooner or later those kids grow up and they remember. They never forget.

Stop the Drones. They go against American principles.