One wonders what the anti-war crowd will think about Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column at National Review Online. It explores the president’s fascination with predator drones.
President Obama has exponentially expanded the program. After five years of use under George W. Bush, such drones had killed around 400 suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Under President Obama, in less than three years, Predators have taken out more than 2,200.
The program is uniquely suited to Obama’s “leading from behind” approach to warfare: killing far out of sight, and therefore out of mind — and out of the news. So comfortable is Obama with this new way of war that at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president joked about using Predators on would-be suitors of his daughters: “But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.”
For Pres. Barack Obama, the Predator drone avoids former candidate Obama’s past legal objections by simply blowing apart suspected terrorists without having to capture them — and then to ponder how and where they should be tried. With a dead, rather than a detained, terrorist, civil libertarians cannot demand that Obama honor his campaign pledge to treat suspects like American criminals, while conservatives cannot pounce on any perceived softness in extending Miranda rights to captured al-Qaeda killers.
Anti-war protestors demonstrate in response to American soldiers getting killed, but rarely about robotic aircraft quietly obliterating distant terrorists. American fatalities can make war unpopular; a crashed drone is a “who cares?” statistic.
