We're Good At Being Bad At Drone Strikes

And Congress seems fine with that

I hate the dialogue around drone strikes. It’s become a litmus test issue, like Israel/Palestine, where you’re supposed to take an un-nuanced position in order to affirm your good standing within your political group. Progressives treat drone strikes as an obvious moral abomination, but they almost never talk about the likely consequences if we stopped using them entirely. Conservatives use the dialogue as yet another opportunity to prove their “toughness”, because they approach every foreign policy issue with the mentality of a scrawny teenager trying to make the high school football team. And the anti-statist crowd treat drone strikes as more proof that the Soros-funded military industrial complex is helping the Lizard Illuminati control our brains through chemicals in Crest white strips, AS IF ANY MORE PROOF WAS NEEDED!!!

On Saturday, the New York Times published a large-scale review of the military’s use of air strikes over the last several years. The takeaway was something that’s been clear for some time: The official Pentagon count of civilian deaths is far too low, and the process for identifying and reducing mistakes is, to use a military term, a pile of shit. This is a problem if you think that killing innocent people is bad. And if you don’t think that — if you’ve adopted a Machiavellian mindset in which human lives are the grist for grand achievements and therefore may be burnt through like logs being tossed onto a fire — you still have to admit that killing innocent people in places where we’re trying to win hearts and minds is not good strategy.