"Drones: Seeing Ourselves for What We Really Are"

The recent publicity and controversy over the Obama administration's drone strikes in the Middle East forces a critical conversation on US foreign policy that before was far less pronounced or mainstream.  We have quietly transitioned into a constant state of war, because our war is a containment of terrorists, or "terrorism", spread across the world.  Our remote preemptive approach to perceived threats that has been cultivated in the past years, proceeds the US's interventionist nation building, and "containment policy" of the past decades.  This policy of "proactive" "safeguarding of our interests" has been publicly reaffirmed in the recent hearings concerning the nomination of Brennan to head the CIA.  But it is this very military perspective that our drone policy is simply the logical conclusion of.  Attempts to sugar coat a policy of globally murderous American exceptionalism, in calls for transparency and judicial oversight neglect the very core of the crime we commit.  This is the crime of the devaluation of human life, and the trauma we subject entire generations to, in the name of a war, whose enemies are whoever ends up dead at the end of the day.
The fact that remote killings from the sky are extra psychologically disturbing has brought our policy of preemptive attack to a philosophical trial that before might have been dismissed as pacifist idealism and lefty contrariness.
The obvious defense of the drone program is that they eliminate terrorist threats while keeping troops off the ground and so protect the American public and its armed services.  The clear criticism of this policy is that we are causing substantial civilian casualties, while terrorizing entire populations that live in fear and whose children are dying or surviving, to grow up in trauma.  To say nothing of the outrageous moral aberration  that these policies pose, it would seem strategically counterproductive to fight terrorism, not only in a endless campaign of acute covert raids and assassinations, but also in the inevitably indiscriminate bombings that will serve to cement not only present antiquated religious prejudices but also create new terror and justifiable rage in multiple generations in more countries across a region that is already the most volatile part of the globe.
To take a clear stance against our drone warfare policy is to indite our policy of preemptive warfare.
Our population has grown increasingly detached from our state of war.  We are isolated from the monetary burden (temporarily) via tax cuts that coincided with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  We are isolated from information by a media castrated and lobotomized by chasing ratings and pleasing sponsors.  And we are governed by inert legislative bodies muted by revolving door politics and powerful lobbies.  In short, we do not experience the fact that our country is at war.  Together with our presumed moral infallibility, the pervading fear inherent in a war on an enemy as amorphous as"terror" assures our population's complicity.  Now with a darker, louder, more sinister symbol of our military foreign policy, we may be able to engage its strategic failings and moral  horrors in a viable conversation with stronger political momentum.