I've never been against the drone program, so I don't care.
Yeah, I’ve never understood why any of my fellow liberals argue against drones. They are far better than any previous ordinance we’ve ever deployed in regard to “smart” weaponry and their collateral damage and exponentially less harmful than sending in troops, let alone invading armies.
The Afghanistan and Iraq “wars” have killed, maimed and otherwise destroyed the lives of countless
millions of completely innocent men, women and children. Ask any Iraqi if they would have rather had invasion forces or one strategic “regime change” drone attack.
Now, of course, the larger question of “should we ever be involved/who do we think we are/we’re not the world’s police” is a different matter, but compared to the kind of hell from above we
used to deploy, Obama’s strategic use of drones was unquestionably more humane than Bush’s use of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and unknown millions of bullets and grenades and bunker busters and cruise missiles, etc., etc., etc.
And
Trump?
Judging from Trump’s embrace of the use of air power — the signature tactic of U.S. military intervention — he is the most hawkish president in modern history. Under Trump, the United States has dropped about 20,650 bombs through July 31, or 80 percent the number dropped under Obama for the entirety of 2016. At this rate, Trump will exceed Obama’s last-year total by Labor Day.
As for the OP, Chomsky always sings this song. It was a revelation when I was a freshman in college thirty five years ago, but it’s getting awfully tiresome these days. It’s also low hanging fruit. Who can ever prove him wrong? It’s the intellectual equivalent of whataboutism. All anyone can ever do is go, “Well, yeah, probably, but that doesn’t really mean we should stop looking at Trump or try to do something about Trump” and as you point out, we are actually all capable of multi-tasking.
It’s a way for Chomsky to still remain relevant without ever actually saying anything relevant; to sound better informed than you are, without necessarily being better informed than you are.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Chomsky is one of our greatest living intellectuals and used to read his opinions all the time, but after a while it does tend to all bleed together into the same white noise narrative over and over. He’s not wrong, but he’s also not right, but it’s always qualified in such a way as to self-aggrandize without it seeming like that’s what he’s doing.
