Comments about ‘Letter: Drone attacks cowardly and devoid of honor’

These drones are a scary business. The technologies we implement now will shape our futures. I'm guessing we were hoping for an Orwellian 1984 by how things are going.

Re: Carolyn Barrani

Sorry to be the one to inform you but the nature of War is " indecent and inglorious". As a military combatant, one is taught that you eliminate the enemy before he has a chance to eliminate you, and it doesn't matter how you do it, just do it, because if you fail the alternatifve will definitely be "Inglorious".

Like it or not we are at war! As long as there is a faction of people who are dedicated to our elimination we will be in one state of war or another, some may call it self defence, others survival, but it is war non the less! It might be well to save the drama for you mama, and realize that because we are willing to fight the present war and past wars, guaranttees you the right to write letters to the editor and my right to respond. I find those rights Glorious.

I don't think anyone wants to go after innocent civillians. IN fact Germany, Japan, and Iraq we largly freed innocent civillians from bad governments. Would of in Vietnam if it were not for the likes of Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson and several protesters in the states. Thanks to them More Vietnamese live under communism now.

I have a great great uncle that could of dropped the a bomb on Japan, He was always glad he didn't. Drone attacks if it is solely to attack civillians than we shouldn't do it. To free someone from an oppressor protect our interests that is the reason to go to war.

The moral implications must be considered. But there is no moral warfare. Is it better to be more tactical than repeat what we did in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it not better to take out targets, even with collateral harm, rather than mete out the destruction of a country and the impact on thousands of our own? I wish the answers were simple and easy. They're not.

Huh? Implict here is that wars are ok as long as you don't try and win, and you stand face to face with your enemy and shoot them so they can see you. And in urban modern wars..just how do you know who the enemy is? Just one question, was all of Japan guilty in world war ll or just those who bore arms? I'm sure you get the point of the question.

Carolyn

It's hard to know where to start with a letter so poorly constructed.

"Drone attacks are cowardly and devoid of honor."

I assume you've done your homework and know that this is one of the main arguments of al Qaeda and the Taliban. They would much rather engage in face to face combat so that they can inflict casualties on our troops. They know that we are reluctant to send large scale forces into Afghanistan and Somalia and so stopping drone attacks would grant them safety.

"So much of our warfare is conducted so that the only object is to win.."

And your purpose for conducting warfare would be to do what, lose?

"...let alone hundreds of innocent, unsuspecting victims."

Again, do your homework. During WWI there were massive civilian casualties due to the imprecision of aerial attacks. Today's smart weapons are orders of magnitude more precise and so can use much less explosive power. Our warriors have what can only be described as a fetish about trying to avoid civilian casualties. Still, war is a nasty, ugly, and dangerous business. Militaries are designed to break things and kill people.

(continued)

"We prove ourselves ... mere butchers and inglorious warriors."

The famous quote attributed to General George S. Patton is relevant here. Paraphrasing for the sake of more delicate language: the object of war is not to (gloriously) die for your country, rather to make your enemy die for his country.

Finally, "I must demand that the mass-murder drone attacks stop immediately"

Wow, if you going to use radical left wing jargon to make your case, try using less arrogant and loaded language. Next thing you know you will be calling the rest of us "Capitalist Running Dogs".

Carolyn, rather than write a letter demanding more sacrifice of American lives, how about a letter demanding that the children of our political leaders be required to stand as members of our military? If the children of the powerful were in a position in which they had to serve, would our leaders be so eager to push the children of less fortunate or wealthy American to the front lines?

Carolyn,

So, "drone attacks are cowardly and devoid of honor." Really?

Try and sell that line to the relatives who lost over 3,000 plus loved ones on 9/11 in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.

I think this letter is trying to make a valuable point. My concern is that drone attacks infringe on the sovereignty of other nations, nations with whom we are not at war. That strikes me as a legitimate concern--our violations of international law, and our violation of our own constitution.

@Eric Samuelson,

If those other sovereign nations (willingly or unwillingly) harbor our terrorist enemies without taking action on their own, then those terrorists will be attacked and killed on their sovereign soil. This is a war - there is no sanctuary granted simply in the name of national sovereignty.

I share many of your sentiments Carolyn. Whether we use drones or send in an army, we as Americans had better prepare for the consequences, something we have rarily done in the past 70 years. By the way, when will we forgive the billion Muslims that weren't involved in 9/11 and when are we going to be the beacon of light that was once written about so elequently?

>VST
I'm not unsympathetic to your views. I hope you'll agree that the fight against international terrorism puts us in a challenging new place, constitutionally and legally. I happen to think that killing bin Laden was unconstitutional and illegal. I was also cheering out loud, high fiving my sons, fist-bumping my TV set when it happened. This writer, I think, speaks to the discomfort we all feel the more we think about basic issues of constitutionality.

"So much of our warfare is conducted so that the only object is to win..."

Yes. That is the objective of war. To win as soon as possible with the fewest casualties (on our side) as possible.

There is no honor in standing straight and tall and allowing the people who attacked us on 9 11 to kill our troops with their roadside bombs. The whole idea is to not get involved in a war we don't intend on winning. The terrorists object to our killing them with our drones. Apparently it keeps them up at night.

The solution: We need to conduct more drone attacks.

I have found only one tiny manner in which to agree with this short rant: I do think the drone attacks should end. But my reasons are completely different. The attacks are NOT cowardly. The attacks are NOT dishonorable. My problem is that the attacks are half-hearted. When a country determines to invest men and treasure in self-defense, it has GOT to be an all-in decision.

We ARE threatened by a serious enemy: Islamic Totalitarianism. To remove the threat requires annihilation of the Iranian regime and installation of a rights-respecting republic. If Saudi Arabia doesn't follow suit afterward, then the same treatment must follow soon upon Riyadh.

Pot shots with drones is not making us measurably safer. We must remove the source of the threat which is the governments who actively finance, and cultivate plots against us. And we must do so with overwhelming might and ferocity.

The objective of war is to avoid it if at all possible. These acts are totally unnecessary, to put it nicely. The very things we do to others may one day be returned upon us.

@Eric Samuelson,

I'm sorry but I do not agree with your premise that the "...fight against international terrorism puts us in a challenging new place, constitutionally and legally" for the following two reasons:

1. Constitutionally, the Congress, which makes the rules for the military, has the power under the Constitution to declare war. However neither the Constitution nor the law stipulates what format any Declaration of War must take. There have been only five formal Congressional Declarations of War in our history, of which, the Civil War was not one of them. The last time, Congress passed joint resolutions saying that a "state of war" existed was on 05 June 1942 (declared against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania). Since then, the U.S. has used the term "Authorization to Use Military Force."

2. On 11 September 2001, the United States Congress passed Public Law 107-40, which granted the President the "Authority to Use Military Force" to fight the "War on Terror" against those individuals involved in any terrorist attacks against the United States and its Armed Forces.

The War on Terror by the President, as authorized by the Congress, is on firm ground, not only legally but constitutionally.

In war you kill the enemy. You destroy and ruin their infrastructure. There is no "honor" in getting woulded or killed yourself.
General Sherman showed how to win. We did this in Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is no intelligent reason to put any of our troops at risk. Use all technical means to wipe out our enemies without losing one of our soldiers.

Statements like "there is no moral warfare" as an excuse to use drones are missing the mark. As a country, we have long espoused the notion that some warfare is less moral than others. I doubt many Americans disagree with the basic foundation of the Geneva Convention. A major clamor for invading Iraq was over Sadaam's use of chemical weapons against separatist Kurds with the implication that it was a horribly immoral tactic.

The ethics of using remote control robo-soldiers has not been addressed in any systematic way. My gut feeling is that if another country were using drone attacks on the U.S. soil most Americans would find those actions not only a very immoral form of combat, but cowardly as well.