The Drone Wars

There is a violence that liberates, and a violence that enslaves; there is a violence that is moral and a violence that is immoral. ~ Benito Mussolini

There are countless reasons to be disturbed by America's reliance on armed drones to assassinate our enemies.

These drones are inhuman robots flown by nerds with joysticks thousands of miles from the actual carnage. To these nerds it is just another video game to enjoy and the targets are nothing more than pixels to be obliterated.

One group of horsemen resembled a budding rose as bombs fell in their midst. ~ Vittorio Mussolini describing bombing villagers in Ethiopia

It is dishonorable. These are not people being killed in battle but victims ambushed in their sleep. Assassination has been a weapon of war since the dawn of civilization and it all those thousands of years it has always been considered the vile action of cowards and brigands.

Supporters claim these drones strike with laser-like efficiency but they are still blunt cudgels not sharp spears. More innocent children have been killed in the drone attacks than bad guys.

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. ~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War

It is an act of war for a manned bombers to fly over sovereign airspace to drop bombs on people. It is, somehow, something less than war for the CIA to send unmanned drones to do precisely the same thing. Mostly this is because all sides, the US government and the foreign nations that have been violated, have a vested interest in pretending that acts of war are not acts of war.