The irony, of course, is the Left would have doing backflips over this if Dubya had done the same. The news media wouldn't have been able to shut up about the topic. Now, meh, not much, if any, mention.
The reports clearly indicate that both Bush and Obama were both involved in the same capacity, so your point doesn't really hold water.
Yep, and every President for the next 100 years will use the same tactics. We are always going to want to kill enemies. We are always going to try to kill enemies. So which is better, Sending in troops and risking US lives, Sending in a tomahawk missle and blowing a big hole and leaving evidence, or using a stealth drone and deny it as much as possible and risk no US lives. This is the natural evolution of warfare. Won´t it be great when all wars are fought with robots who do nothing except try to kill enemy leaders with as little collateral damage as possible. Drones and assassinations are just one step in that direction, and I welcome the day when any country can use a drone to kill any president of any other country, because then all the idiots will learn to behave and stop risking civilian lives with their stupidity.
Such a "natural" evolution is exactly what Eisenhower tried to warn us about. I see nothing natural about disregarding the rule of law so one country can indiscriminately murder people at a whim. It's one thing to have a standing army to protect your sovereignty, to have a strong foreign policy, to response to threats accordingly. It's another to operate clandestine assassinations with little regards to innocent people. How long until the military runs out of targets, and turns this technology onto it's own citizens? Studies clearly show when you disassociate a soldier from the battlefield by putting them in front of a computer and having a drone kill someone, that soldier will have an easier time doing it (although they seem to have the same level of PTSD afterwards.) A US serviceperson might say no to killing a US citizens if they feel it's not morally justified, but a robot will not. We are sowing the seeds of our own destruction. The risking of lives is a cost of war, it makes it more difficult to engage in war. Modern war is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the more we bomb and the more we arm the more it comes back to bite us. The last 15 years of global conflicts are mostly a direct result of the 15 years (and more) of global conflict before that. How many times are we going to arm and train people only to have to fight them ten years later? Unless that's what you are going for, endless perpetual war for no reason other then profits. There is a lot of non-sense that is going on in the world today, non-sense that does require firm action to put a stop to. But you also have to look at WHY this non-sense is happening, it isn't just idiots misbehaving. That's a glib interpretation of complex geopolitical events that have roots as far back as colonialism. You can't bomb that stuff away.
Drones are a perfect sweet spot in military engagements. Conventional higher altitude airstrikes and cruise missiles lack the precision in time and space to properly target narrow windows. Lower altitude, slower aircraft can afford to loiter around a target for a better opportunity to strike (fewer civilians, confirmation that the intended target is inside a particular building or wing), and the time between "pressing the button" and the actual kill occurring is much smaller than the analogous period of time for something like a cruise missile coming in from some Navy vessel in the ocean. Meanwhile, drones are very low risk for the United States. There really aren't U.S. lives at stake in drone operations. They're much cheaper than cruise missiles or air strikes from manned aircraft, and they're definitely much cheaper and low risk than ground operations. Taken together, these are good things for reducing unnecessary or unintended deaths, on a per strike basis. But making things easier also makes it more affordable. So as a result, with these relatively new technologies and techniques available, the CIA and the U.S. military have really stepped up the number of operations, so there are more strikes total, and the aggregate number of innocent deaths might very well be up. For people who don't like the idea of military operations in the first place, making them easier and more efficient is bad. Imagine the moralizing that happens when you tell older social conservatives about how Tinder works and how it really facilitates hooking up - to them, the efficiency is a problem, not a solution. There's also a heavy dose of inherent skepticism among many in the anti-war left that the military and intelligence agencies don't do a good job of determining who to kill in the first place. Drone strikes that make it easier to kill a target without collateral damage won't placate critics who think that the person shouldn't have been a target in the first place. It's kinda the whole accuracy vs precision issue - a discerning method of killing a target means nothing when your target selection criteria doesn't properly discern between good guys and bad guys. And the military and intelligence community doesn't feel the need to justify their process to the public (or the need to submit the process to the public as a measure of transparency), so a lot of people just assume the worst.
Well it's not so much a secret, is it? He has been openly confronted about it though and he couldn't care less, go figure. He just tells the people he'll let the CIA deal with it.
