John Kozy: Mistaking Killing and Revenge for Justice!

Much is being written both for and against America's use of drones to assassinate those whom Americans consider to be anti American combatants. Although there is no doubt on which side the moral arguments lie, what's being written strikes me as nugatory. Pious platitudes, legalistic niceties, and sophistical rationalizations appear to be written by the guilty to convince themselves that they are not the people evil to the marrow that they are, and the dying and the dead couldn't care less. To them, being killed by a bullet or a bomb, fired from an AK 47 or a drone makes no difference whatsoever. Dead is dead. Death cannot be sanitized by pronouncements. The so called advantages of using drones to kill are undeniable, so are the disadvantages. Arguing about these is futile. The fundamental question is not about the advantages or disadvantages of the means, it is about the rightness or wrongness of the end. In the end, what good does killing do? Although no one seems to have noted it, I find it interesting that so many of Al Qaeda's "senior commanders" were killed by drones, while Osama bin Laden, once located and identified, was not. Why? Was it because killing by drone is too unreliable to be trusted for the task? In fact, killing from the air is always unreliable. During World War II, American pilots often mistakenly attacked American instead of German positions. In Paths of death and glory, Charles Whiting quoted people as having said, "American pilots are idiots." This has happened so often that maybe the US should rethink the whole flying thing. Obviously they can't do it worth a damn," and the American Ninth Air Force, which flew out of England, was nicknamed the "American Luftwaffe", because it regularly mistakenly bombed American troops in Normandy. Just imagine the propaganda catastrophe that would have resulted if a drone had been used and missed or killed bin Laden's wives and children, but not him.