U.S. President Barack Obama holds a news conference at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. August 4, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Colby Cosh, National Post: Barack Obama, the Drone President, is stuck with his troubling legacy. We all are.
If you dislike Barack Obama, the most convenient stick with which to whack his foreign policy has always been his use of military drones to kill American enemies in chronically anarchic parts of the Mideast and Somalia. A president who came into office hoping to put a friendlier face on American empire has made significant use of a global assassination technology that seems disturbingly uncircumscribed, not only by domestic laws and democratic oversight, but even by cost or inconvenience.
Drones are to the 21st century what the atomic bomb was to the 20th and the crossbow was to the 12th: a new class of weapon that inspires an emotional nightmare of indiscriminate and rising bloodshed. It is an idea that seems to demand the creation of new taboos. It almost seems to place us in that Twilight Zone episode where Billy Mumy acquires the ability to “wish” people “into the cornfield”.
From the standpoint of innocent non-combatants who might be killed in a drone attack, the horror of the drone is just the same as the horror of ordinary bombing, whether perpetrated by planes or ships or wearers of suicide vests. It can really be of no comfort to the dead to know that their destruction was endorsed by an independent committee, or followed some sort of secret adversarial trial.
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WNU Editor: In all fairness it was President Bush who opened this Pandora's Box .... but President Obama has definitely raised it to a level that he will be always be remembered as the one who solidified it as a part of U.S. war policy and strategy.
