I've been hearing a lot about drones lately. You know when it makes it into the pages of Time magazine that it's beginning to sink into the national consciousness . . .
These are those drones killing people in Pakistan, but being piloted from just outside of Sin City, USA. And they aren't helping much in the battle for hearts and minds . . . did you hear the new one about the Pakistani woman who dumped her American boyfriend? She said, "He shoots his missle from 30,000 ft!" Ba-dum-dum-ching!
No, but seriously folks, what struck me is that the people are calling Americans cowards, and I think they are right. We now value (American) human life so much, we aren't willing to risk it. It goes back to the criticism Walzer had about the way that war in Israel gets fought - soldiers' lives are valued more than the enemy, uniform or civilian.
It's the flip-side of the argument that terrorists are cowardly for attacking "soft" targets instead of fighting it out mano-a-mano. The only difference is that on the one hand you've got the most technologically advanced and richest nation in the world attacking farmers with guns; and on the other hand you've got people with homemade bombs killing themselves along with their targets. I hate to say it, but it seems to me that we've got to rethink how we define what a coward is.
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