Repost as OP: All this talk of "right to retaliate" and "insurgents" is just legalistic twaddle

[jeff47]

14. There's several problems with your arguments

Now, let me say up front this doesn't mean I'm thrilled by these drone strikes. I see it as the least-awful of only awful options.

Suppose the government sent drone strikes against American neighborhoods where Mafia figures or seditious right-wing militia leaders lived.

The Constitution applies within US jurisdiction. Thus they can't do the same drone strikes inside the US because all the due process rights that people are now complaining about actually apply.

The current strikes are legal because they're outside US jurisdiction, where the president has near-absolute power.

Noooo, they had to play cowboy and mount a siege and then an attack, and we were told that the children who were killed were just "collateral damage" and that their parents shouldn't have joined the cult.

Yeah, your timeline's missing several steps. Such as the initial attempt to arrest them at the compound, which was met with gunfire, and lead to the siege.

And let's get practical here. Killing (not "taking out"--let's be realistic about what we're saying) ONE or even a DOZEN alleged insurgents will make only a negative difference in the bogus War on Terror, because individuals aren't the problem.

Killing the individuals won't stop the movement. Nor will not killing the individuals. The movement is based on how we fucked up starting in the 1950s and continued fucking up for decades. Disengaging in the past has not weakened their movement, and there's little reason to believe it would today. The movement is based on history, and the need to blame someone else for the poor economic performance of their countries.

Killing the individuals reduces the danger to the US of the movement - they can't plan and prepare for a large-scale attack on the US because they keep having key people get blown up by drones.

First of all, the people killed have friends and extended families, and their cultural norms will require them to seek revenge.

Yep. Too bad we didn't think of this when we overthrew the Shah. If you happen to have a time machine, we might be able to undo that damage.

Such a deal for the military-industrial complex and so easy to have the mass media persuade the uninformed that anything and everything the MIC dreams up is essential for "national security."

Actually, the 'war on terror' isn't terribly good for the MIC. The MIC thrives on very large projects like the F-35 and missile defense. Those systems don't work well against terrorists. Instead, we're using drones and other cheap, small systems. The MIC would prefer we move on from this bargain-basement war and start worrying about China so that they can push for more large projects that are way more profitable.

Second, I'm sorry to break the news to all you "America's the greatest country in the world and we're always on the side of truth and justice" grade school patriots, but the REAL problem is and has always been the behavior of successive Republican and Democratic governments in the Middle East.

Yep. But unfortunately turning our back now has been shown to not be an effective way to stop the radicals motivated by our historical fuckups.

So in 1945, we could formally arrest, imprison, and hold trials for the top Nazis, the men who planned to conquer Europe and wipe out all "non-Aryans," and in 2013, we have to send drones to get ONE GUY who may be aiding Al Qaeda (or may not be--we never see the evidence.

You seem to be forgetting that the trials in 1945 were proceeded by the most destructive and deadly war that has ever been fought. The Nuremburg trials did not appear out of nowhere.

If you'd like us to invade Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, we could put these terrorists on trial too. But there could be just a few negative repercussions of those invasions.

But he IS Commander-in-Chief. He could say NO. He could say, "You know, about Iran, I bet if we didn't have them surrounded on all sides by U.S. military installations, they wouldn't be so belligerent.

Yeah, the'd immediately forget how we re-installed the Shah leading to 20 years of horrific repression. They'd also forget about us supplying Iraq with weapons to wipe out an entire generation of Iranians in the decade-long Iran-Iraq war. They're only upset because our troops at one time had them surrounded - remember, we pulled out of Iraq.

You know, there are a lot of people in the Middle East who hate us for very good reasons, and why are we always intervening when we only screw up every time we go in there?

Because disengaging has resulted in attacks in the US. And in the aftermath of those attacks, we have done truly terrible things as Republicans over-react to them. We almost got King George I after 9/11, and we fucked over the middle east AGAIN.

Drone strikes are terrible. But they are less terrible than our other options.