Consider Conor Friedersdorf’s remark at Atlantic:
The notion that the Obama Administration has carried out drone strikes only when there is “near-certainty of no collateral damage†is easily disproved propaganda. America hasn’t killed a handful of innocents or a few dozen in the last 8 years. Credible, independent attempts to determine how many civilians the Obama administration has killed arrived at numbers in the hundreds or low thousands. And there is good reason to believe that they undercount the civilians killed.
Drone warfare isn’t the clean, sanitary, nearly foolproof strategy its advocates claim. The strikes frequently rely on intelligence provided by other countries and all too often we’re striking against enemies of the present regime rather than our own enemies. It contributes to our disrepute in the regions in which we’re using them. Drone operators suffer the same rate of PTSD as pilots flying combat missions.
Well, it’s not exactly Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nagasaki. . . When the RAF created a firestorm in Hamburg the people who jumped into the canals hoping to escape were boiled alive. Those were deliberate attacks on civilian targets.
Of course what’s changed for the drone pilots is that they watch the results in real time. That cannot possibly be a good job. Necessary, not good.