To kill or not to kill? Seems to be the question for a post cold war America that struggles to find a useful venue and vehicle for its newly found monolithic world power status and the ways in which that lonely status make it an irresistible target for any group looking to be taken seriously and seeking a megaphone for its cause.
No one is raising the important issue of how simple and relatively inexpensive it might be to deploy this drone technology against the US and its allies. It seems logical that drone technology would be simpler and cheaper to create and deploy than a nuclear weapon, or a so called “dirty bomb.” So, what is really at stake here might be who is angry at the US and why? How can the US justify unilaterally searching out its defined enemies and taking them out gangster style no matter national sovereignty or international law.
The London Economist tackles this issue in a straightforward way yet with a focus and a lens that seems a bit ideologically myopic and perhaps a bit nostalgic for the cowboy days of George W.
You be the judge:
“T WAS so much simpler when George W. Bush was president. Outlining America’s plans for Osama bin Laden a few days after the September 11th attacks in 2001, Mr Bush declared: “there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.” For all those at home and abroad made uncomfortable by sweeping assertions of American power it was a moment of predictable provocation. Without surprise, they heard a swaggering Republican president vowing to make his country’s attackers pay, and seeming to pay no more heed to legal niceties than a cowboy bent on a lynching.
Yet 12 and a half years later, the cautious, lawyerly Barack Obama—a Democratic president with nothing of the…”
MORE via John Brennan: The debate over drones | The Economist.
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