Tom Engelhardt - Sex and the single drone

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

We're no longer seen as the Good Guys defending freedom and democracy. Thanks to the new wet-dream toys of the CIA and Pentagon, we're now seen as Terminators destroying freedom and democracy. Not that we've been the Good Guys for a very long time except in the minds of the flag-wavers.

http://www.nationofchange.org/sex-and-single-drone-1317310771

The appeal is obvious: the cost (in U.S. lives) is low; in the case of the drones, nonexistent. 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.

Just think about the last time you went to a Terminator film: Who did you identify with? John and Sarah Connor, or the implacable Terminators chasing them? And you don’t need artificial intelligence to grasp why in a nanosecond.

[gratuitous]

1. Touchy-feely mumbo jumbo

Real he-men exceptional American fightin' men and women don't have to think about what they're doing. They can blast people to Kingdom Come by remote control all day long and never feel a thing.

[Shandris]

2. Bring back swords and armor.

When the fighting is done face to face, blow to blow...it's not quite so easy to send a million men to war. And it makes (or SHOULD make) any real war one worth actually fighting in...which would cut down on MOST of them.

Shock and Awe would have been a lot different if it had referred to the trebuchet siege of Baghdad.

(Obviously, it's a pipe dream, I know :) )