As Emma points out, the USE of drones does not guarantee that there will not be other casualties. It is even a fact that some terrorists have made it a practice to locate their base within non-combatant areas in hopes of deterring attacks....and it often has. A couple of early opportunities to get bin Laden were called off because of probable civilian casualties.

This leads to quite a moral dilemma when we KNOW a terrorist leader is in some specific location, such as a house. I suppose the rationale is that any others in that house 'ought' to know that certain people ARE dangerous to be around. A secondary rationale would be to make it harder for terrorist leaders to to find anyone WILLING to harbor them.

The drones themselves are fairly accurate, and can hit small targets....they just can't tell possible innocents who may be around from the bad guys.

It is also true that ANY deaths of civilians tends to cause hardened attitudes among their friends & relatives....but it is likely that those harboring terrorists were not exactly charitable in their attitudes toward US even before an attack. It is a calculated risk that using them will accomplish the overall objective....I am just glad *I* don't have to do those calculations.

It is WAR....or whatever you want to call this stupid game. There are NO easy answers, no matter how we 'spin' our reasoning. It is a nasty, dirty, sad business. Hiroshima was horrible, Dresden was horrible, the London blitz was horrible....but my guess is, that if we'd had drones in 1945 and could have hit a few 'selected' targets in Tokyo, we might have avoided Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1945, we fought well-defined enemies, with regular armies, representing specific countries. Now we are struggling to redesign the very PROCESS of combat against an enemy with no specific location and often shadowy leadership. We have evidence that IF we were just to go home and stop all our operations 'over there', they would not stop their attacks on US. Their 'reasoning' for attacking us is very different than that of Germany & Japan in the 1940s, and is being fueled partly by religious leaders with THEIR own objectives.

   It feels like we are playing this huge, serious game of "Whack-a-mole", where the moles are whacking back and opening new boards in the process.