I spent all day yesterday in painful heels and a very sharp suit. The career fair would have been much more promising if I had majored in something sensible like, oh, economics, engineering, accounting, computer science, math, science-science… the few advertising and marketing positions available were flooded with applications.
Most of the day, I caught up with Saad and Marquis.
Last night, I rejoined my history seminar classmates for a debate on the use of unmanned drone strikes in Pakistan. It’s such a tricky subject. The way I see it
- Lack of oversight of the Predator drone program in the US makes me nervous.
- Lack of public debate over the Predator drone program in the US makes me nervous, since it represents a “radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force” (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker).
- Potential to destabilize the unpopular Zardari regime inside a politically fragmented, nuclear-armed country on the border with another nuclear-armed enemy country (India).
- Potential
- Drones destroy human intelligence on the ground.
- Some drone strike targets dictated by Pakistani government, whose interests (political and otherwise) are not always in line with our own.
- Predator drone strikes are a FRIGHTENINGLY sustainable way for the US to continue conflicts (low cost in terms of American blood, low oversight/accountability, low visibility to US population) around the world. I read somewhere that “drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on endless war” and—yes. That scares me. When war has a sufficiently high, sufficiently visible cost, we pick our battles more carefully.
