I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
I'm reading a terrific book by David Maraniss, "They Marched into Sunlight," which traces two different-but-not-so-different events which occurred at the same time in October 1967: The historic anti-Dow demonstration in Madison and a horrific ambush of American troops in Vietnam. I arrived in Madison the next year, and "Dow" was already legendary, the first real police riot which targeted anti-war white college kids, in the Midwest anyway. Just the one word was enough to define the time and place where the anti-war movement changed forever.
All the arguments used to rationalize the use of drones by the American military were once used to justify the use of napalm as well... in a different Democratic war.
After all the rationalizations have been mouthed, this is what the supporters of drones are defending:
"There were pieces of my family all over the road..." From his pocket, Jan... produced a color photo... It showed the girl's disfigured face, her mouth and lower jaw blown away. Jan said the girl was horribly burned and blinded in both eyes, lost her left arm and needed reconstructive facial surgery.
Haisha is 4 years old. She's a lucky survivor of our Democratic drones... the sister of other little girls who survived Lyndon Johnson's napalm.
Neither drones nor napalm are simply weapons like any other. They are instruments of terror. Once upon a time, we seemed to have learned the lesson of napalm. It's unfathomable to me how many Americans, even on "liberal" DKos, are unable to remember at all.