Drone Strikes, Hypothetically Speaking

I’d like you to picture a scenario in your head for me.  As I describe the situation in my hypothetical, I want you to try really hard to truly imagine the scenario and what it would be like to live under those conditions. 

Imagine that a group of hyper-religious Montana Freemen types decide that they want to bomb some tyrannical, atheist statists in Russia, and do so.  They take out a bunch of innocent Russian civilians in the process as unintentional collateral damage.  The United States government either doesn’t have enough proof of their guilt, or is too shiftless and lazy, or even worse, too much in support of their actions to actually do something about it.  It doesn’t matter why, the fact is that the Freemen types get away with it scot-free. 

Russia is righteously pissed off about this (rightfully so, I believe) and decides to do something about it.  They choose to begin flying unmanned drones over US airspace, and at the first sign of Freemen activity, they launch the Russian equivalent of Hellfire missiles at the area and level it. It is not uncommon, and in fact, it happens more often than not, that American civilians get caught up and killed in the crossfire.  In some unfortunate instances, Freemen weren’t even in the area and no legitimate target is killed – every person killed was an innocent.  In one particularly egregious example, a young man and woman are killed at their wedding, along with a not-unsubstantial portion of their families, when the Russian intelligence is faulty and a wedding party is mistaken for a Freemen rally.  It is an honest mistake on the part of the Russians, and they apologize for it afterward.

As an American citizen, you begin to take to looking to the sky no matter where you go, even though you know that this is a futile gesture – the drones are invisible, silent, and have a reach long enough that you’ll never see the missile coming that kills you.  You never know when the missile will drop.  Is there a Freemen boss in the house next to your’s as you eat dinner with your family? If so, you are mere seconds away from dying with him.  Is a Hellfire missile on its way to kill you right now?  When you send your kids off to school, do you fear that they will never return because of a Russian strike that wasn’t meant for them but got them anyway?  Do you fear that you’ll never return to see them grow up for the same reason?

Does it make your blood boil when a Russian official goes on record as saying that it is the fault of any innocents killed in their raids for being too close to a Freemen, not the Russian’s fault for killing them?  How about when the number of innocent American civilians killed in these unmanned airstrikes exceeds the number of innocent Russians that the original Freemen bomb killed?  Does that piss you off more than you can possibly put into words?

Does all of this make you more or less sympathetic to the Russian cause?  Would you support Russia in their efforts?  Or would you be more apt to take part in actions that harm Russia as a result?  If a group of those same Freemen came to you and told you that they were going to fight back against these Russian assholes, would you join them?  How about if it was a different, unaffiliated militia group that formed as a result of the Russian actions? 

Finally, do you think that Russia’s actions would lead to an increase or a decrease in the likelihood that Russia would be attacked by an American group in the future? 

What if I told you that America is doing everything that I described above to countries in the middle east?  Follow the links that I've placed throughout to get your proof. 

Do you think that these drone strikes are making us more or less secure?  Are we more or less likely to be attacked as a result of these strikes?  If your answer here isn't the same as your answer when I asked the same about the hypothetical Russians, then you are lying to yourself. 

President Obama is making us all less safe by using these drone strikes.  They are wrong.  They are unethical.  They are fucking evil, folks.  How this isn't murder, I’ll never understand.  These drone strikes are the best recruitment tool that the terrorist organizations could possibly ever have.  While I’m certain that they fear the strikes, they also have to sort of love them in a perverse way, for exactly that reason.