National Security

On November 2, 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was bicycling to work in Amsterdam when he was shot eight times at close range. He died instantly, but in a fit of rage, his assailant, Dutch-Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri, also attempted to cut off his head with a machete.

Bouyeri killed van Gogh because of a short film he had recently produced with Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali that criticized Islam's treatment of women.

With the tragic killing of the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and several of his staff as a consequence of an attack on a US consulate in Benghazi (where the Libyan revolution, that we supported, began, I might add), and the nearly simultaneous storming of the US embassy in Cairo, maybe we’re now thinking: is it Iran all over again? Has the Arab Spring turned into an anti-American winter?

On August 15, Floyd Lee Corkins allegedly walked into the Family Research Council in Washington, a conservative think tank, and shot the building manager Leo Johnson in the arm, saying something along the lines of, "I don't like your politics," as he did so.

For many on the political left, and more than a few in the middle, drone strikes are the paradigmatic example of U.S. militarism run amok. I'm not crazy about the way the United States has been using drone strikes myself, but many of the most common objections to drones don't hold up well under scrutiny.

Let's review the case against the drones.

1. Drone strikes kill innocent civilians.

Michael Waltz explores the controversy surrounding the recently published ex-Navy SEAL book about the Osama Bin Laden raid, and Amy Laitinen explains how the credit hour – a ubiquitous metric never meant to measure learning – is threatening America's educational standing in the world. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

Covert drone strikes are one of Obama's key national security policies. He has already authorized 283 strikes in Pakistan, six times more than the number during President George W. Bush's eight years in office.

As a result, the number of estimated deaths from the Obama administration's drone strikes is more than four times what it was during the Bush administration -- somewhere between 1,494 and 2,618.

In August 2003, some colleagues and I were held up by armed bandits on the highway in Fallujah, Iraq. (Don't ask why I was dumb enough to be wandering around Fallujah.) My bandit -- there were quite a few of them, but I like to think of the guy who stuck a gun in my face as my bandit -- was straight out of central casting, complete with a red kerchief around his mouth and nose to disguise his facial features.

To watch Condoleezza Rice, the face of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, stand before a convention of cheering Republicans and condemn Barack Obama for diminishing America’s standing in the world—one can only gasp at the magnitude of chutzpah in one woman.

Even before the book went on sale, the announcement by the publisher Dutton that the pseudonymous Mark Owen, one of the SEALs on the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, would be publishing an account of his role in the raid quickly propelled “No Easy Day” to the No. 1 slot on Amazon, displacing “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Republicans like to talk about individual responsibility. In case you haven’t heard, it’s what makes America great.