OMG, This is Why I Can't Stand "Centrist" Media

This appeared in the Daily Beast today, and is egregious enough to be worthy of a full-blown fisking.  It's written by Mark McKinnon, who is a past Republican operative I've never heard of. Article is in plain type, my comments in italics.

War is often about making the least-worst decision. The same could be said about politics. But the stakes are higher in war, when the commander in chief is called upon to defend the nation. And make no mistake, al Qaeda is at war with us still. That is why I support the Obama administration’s policy on the use of unmanned drones to kill terrorists—even if those terrorists are U.S. citizens—even as I, like many Americans, find myself conflicted about its morality.

Al Qaeda will always be at war with us- there are tons of tiny groups that see themselves as being at war with the US.  The question is: are they a threat?  But this argument, that it's morally OK to kill "terrorists" with unmanned drones, elides the real issue, which is: how do we know that they're terrorists?

I will not argue about the hypocrisy of an administration that supports drone attacks on American citizens at war with us while calling for trials in the U.S. court system of captured foreign enemy combatants. And I will not dwell on the shocking silence of the media who would be “up in arms” if the Bush administration took a similar position. Nor will I linger on the likelihood that a presidential candidate Obama would not have supported the policy.

 

Actually, the Leftist media is quite up in arms about this issue.  The problem, of course, is that nobody in the mainstream Center Left or anywhere on the Right has any interest at all, because they all agree with the policy.

Instead I will argue that there is a rational and a moral case for the use of drone strikes—in general.

From a totally American perspective, I can think of three justifications. Drone strikes are less costly in terms of dollars. And budgets, we are told, are moral documents. So less money spent on war can go toward human needs, in education, in health care, even in foreign aid.

Well, I admire his honesty here.  Morality is complicated, and of course we always need to balance different moral pluses and minuses to make policy in a complicated world.  Mark McKinnon apparently puts lots of moral emphasis on our use of funds that could go to other purposes.  I think that's got some merit, but it's pretty far down the list in comparison to the much more important issues here, like whether or not we should be killing people without due process.
 

Second, drone strikes are less costly in terms of lives lost. In a drone warfare world, there is no GI returning with posttraumatic stress, none back with limbs missing. It means less of the kind of knocks on the door that every mother or father or husband or wife who has someone serving overseas dreads. And the technology of precision strikes means that fewer innocent lives are lost among foreign populations living near the field of battle.

True enough.  Drone strikes on foreign nationals doesn't subject us here to any danger at all, psychic or physical.  Obviously the danger to foreigners doesn't matter.  Hey, that gives me an idea!  If we just killed everyone else in the world, we could take all their stuff!  And if we can do it with drones, we won't be harmed at all!  We'd be rich, and we could go to lots of tropical islands for vacations for cheap money!
 

Which leads me to my third justification—that drone strikes are less costly in terms of objections in the court of public opinion. Insulated by technology, the strikes appear to us—and more important, to those around the world—on our TV screens as little more than a scene from 24.

That's right- it makes killing foreigners just like a video game to us.  I see that as a bug, not a feature- we're inured to the damage we're causing other people around the world, when we should be feeling tremendous guilt about it.
 

And I believe there is also a moral case for the use of drone strikes in many of the specific cases we have heard about, including that of American-born terrorists like Anwar al-Awlaki. By declaring himself an enemy of the state, calling for a violent jihad against the United States, I believe he ceded his rights to the protections of our legal system.

OK, how about al-Awlaki's 16 year old son, whom we killed two weeks later?  When exactly did he cede his rights as a US citizen?

While drone attacks fit within the view that America has a role to play in making the world a safer place for democracy, I believe there is also a moral case against the use of drone strikes. Drone attacks subvert the rule of law—we become judge, jury, and executioner—at the push of a button.

RIGHT! That's kind of a big deal, though.  Not a toss-off line at all.  Well, maybe you're going to now change your mind based on the obvious moral problems with this, particularly the fact that every non-authoritarian government in history asserts that people can't be punished by the state without due process....

This seems an acceptable risk right now, when the technology for drone strikes is ours, not the enemy’s. And when those strikes have not occurred on American soil. When that changes, so too do the arguments.

WOW. So drone strikes are totally moral, as long as we're the ones doing the killing and not the dying.  If anyone starts killing us, well then I guess it becomes less moral.  Does McKinnon have any empathetic synapse in his brain anywhere?  Are foreigners just bugs to him?  This is the most morally reprehensible statement I've ever read.
 

I would not wish this authority on a moral man—or an immoral man, for different reasons. But terror in the guise of nonstate actors creates terrifying new realities. And so we should have this debate as a nation.

What really steams me is the total inability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes.  Torture is fine when we waterboard Al Qaeda guys, but when they do it to us they're just barbarians.  And if we target terrorists, but happen to kill or maim dozens of Afghani villagers who have the bad fortune to be in the area, hey that's just the war we're in.  But when Muslims fly planes into buildings in New York, that's morally sickening.  What is wrong with these people?