Droning On 0
Tom Engelhardt worries that unrestricted use of drone warfare, with the accompanying certainty of killing innocent persons, is nearing. A nugget:
As they definitionally twitch and turn, we can just begin to glimpse – like an old-fashioned photo developing in a tray of chemicals – the outlines of a new form of American imperial war emerging before our eyes. It involves guarding the empire on the cheap, as well as on the sly, via the CIA, which has, in recent years, developed into a full-scale, drone-heavy paramilitary outfit, via a growing secret army of special operations forces that has been incubating inside the military these last years, and of course, via those missile- and bomb-armed robotic assassins of the sky. The appeal is obvious: the cost (in US lives) is low; in the case of the drones, non-existent. There is no need for large counterinsurgency armies of occupation of the sort that have bogged down on the mainland of the Greater Middle East these last years.
In an increasingly cash-strapped and anxious Washington, it must look like a literal godsend. How could it go wrong?
Of course, that’s a thought you can only hang onto as long as you’re looking down on a planet filled with potential targets scurrying below you. The minute you look up, the minute you leave your joystick and screen behind and begin to imagine yourself on the ground, it’s obvious how things could go so very, very wrong – how, in fact, in Pakistan, to take but one example, they are going so very, very wrong.
