Drone Warfare on Trial

by Robert C. Koehler, CommonDreams.org, Sep 30, 2010

Drone warfare — assassination by unmanned aircraft — is arguably one of the most hellish spawns of the modern military-industrial era, and its use is becoming routine in the Af-Pak war, yet (what else is new?) there’s no debate about it at the level of national policy, just a shrug and a void.

The nation’s future is itself on a sort of autopilot. It belongs to the market forces, in tandem with the reckless, short-term strategic interests of the Pentagon and the politics of empire. There’s no moral voice at the core of this system — not even, any longer, a voice of common sense. We live in a spectator democracy: Our role is to gape at the spectacle. The news cycle runs 24/7 and tells us nothing, if the act of “telling” includes in its meaning an invitation to participate.

Like the students who sat in at segregated lunch counters and otherwise disrupted the nation’s Jim Crow status quo nearly half a century ago, we have to find a way to interrupt the false consensus of military-industrial America at the level at which it wages war and engages with the rest of the planet. Doing so takes persistence and courage — and sometimes a breakthrough occurs.

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