Hundreds of drone strikes so far this year, from Syria to Pakistan. Hundreds of dead terrorists, many of high rank. Thousands of lives saved. And what makes headlines?
Two Western hostages killed in an otherwise successful drone attack.
Sorry, folks. That’s war. And warfare will never be dainty or fully precise. We should be awed by the accuracy of our weaponry and the unprecedented reduction in the loss of innocent lives.
Instead, we bitch because military operations — humanity’s most complex and fraught endeavor — aren’t perfect.
We may regret the loss of an American and an Italian aid worker, but they’d voluntarily placed themselves in danger. And actions have consequences.
We cannot cripple our counter-terror campaign on the bare chance that a hostage might be co-located with a master terrorist. The war fanatics have forced upon us a zero-sum game: We kill them, or they kill us. And delay is defeat.
Questions about the “morality” of drone use are hogwash. All weapons are inherently immoral. But weapons in civilized hands are also essential, if humans hope to live in some semblance of peace. Would those decrying drones prefer old-fashioned carpet bombing?
Drones aren’t the silver-bullet solution to terror. But as long as we refuse to bring to bear our full military resources, drones form a high-tech line barely holding against impassioned evil.
Want to ban or drastically limit drone use? Provide an alternative. Shall we grant our enemies freedom of action?
Negotiations — that quack cure beloved of intellectuals everywhere — haven’t a chance. We are besieged by human beasts who believe their god wants us to suffer, then die horribly.
They’re not interested in debating fine points of theology or discussing development programs. They want to kill us. And their madness has no reverse gear.
Yet, from the anomalous safety of our American lives, too many of us deny that evil exists, insisting that we, ourselves, must somehow share in the blame and that our enemies have legitimate grievances.
We decry the use of drones as “dehumanizing” those who’ve made the choice to secede from humanity. And no one on the left seems to care that drones spare the lives of Americans in uniform.
We’ve also been told that it’s somehow “unlawful” to use drones to kill American citizens waging violent jihad against America.
But just as an NYPD officer has the duty to shoot a known murderer (and American citizen) about to kill again, so our government has the duty to kill anyone who’s joined a foreign militant movement whose avowed and demonstrated purpose is killing Americans.
The routine problem with those who’d deny us the use of drones is that they don’t offer practical alternatives. Contrary to the blather from the left that “there’s no military solution” to global jihad, the cold fact is that there’s only a military solution — and it will take a great deal of time and bloodshed.
Two millennia of apocalyptic and messianic insurgencies around the world demonstrate — without exception — that killing faith-addled fanatics is the only approach that works.
We’re also victims of Hollywood Syndrome. Action films lead those who’ve never served in uniform to believe in intelligence and technology so perfect that there’s no excuse for collateral damage.
But intelligence remains imperfect, while often-brilliant enemies seek innovations to thwart it. And even with superb intelligence, weaponry still goes awry.
War remains as brutal and sloppy as it’s seductive to the lawless. It will remain so long after every reader of this paper’s gone to the grave.
Instead of wringing our hands and deploring our “failures,” we should be proud of the startling progress we’ve made.
A bare generation ago, we would have had to bomb a village flat to get at a suspected terrorist leader. Today, we can kill him by striking not just a single house, but, often, a single room.
The shouting match will continue, with inconvenient evidence ignored. But we’re engaged in a war forced on us by monsters in human shapes. We agonize over the use of drones, while our opponents would gladly nuke our cities.
The true immorality would be for us to lose.
Ralph Peters is Fox News’ strategic analyst.