About those drones ...

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is the insider's insider. The man has more connections than the neurons in your average pundit's brain. He is especially plugged into the intelligence community. Though Ignatius can be ponderous at times, he's rarely wrong. His topic this week: drone effectiveness. These weapons are the scurge of every peacenik liberal. "Drone attacks continue to pile up the corpses of innocent human beings," Glenn Greenwald writes melodramatically. (As you can sense in my mockery, I think judicious use of drones is necessary, Obama hasn't gone Strangelovian on us, and war is hell.) Ignatius reports that the government's "SSE" (or Sensitive Site Exploitation) of the materials found in bin Laden's lair turned up an intriguing finding. He writes: "Bin Laden was suffering badly from drone attacks on al-Qaeda’s base in the tribal areas of Pakistan. He called this the 'intelligence war,' and said it was 'the only weapon that’s hurting us.' His cadres complained that they couldn’t train in the tribal areas, couldn’t communicate, couldn’t travel easily and couldn’t draw new recruits to what amounted to a free-fire zone." This strikes me as a pretty good return on investment. The critics of U.S. drone ops are well-meaning but naive. Their fear of "killer robots" and slippery slopes is overwrought. In a perfect world, in a fair fight, I too might avoid drone attacks to eliminate the possibility of collateral damage. But Obama operates in a wartime wilderness of mirrors dominated by one rule: kill or be killed. Yet no one more than he knows that war is a series of catastrophes that sometimes results in victory, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau. I'd cut the president some slack.