One man’s hammer of the gods is another man’s fire of the Great Satan.

Drones are the perfect way to fight a war, so long as you are not a child of some prehistoric tribe scuttling for a hiding place on a lunar-pocked piece of scorched earth as Hellfire missiles rain down from a flying death tube thousands of feet above. Even if you are a sworn militant, fighting America with the latest AK-47 or rocket-launcher technology, the unmanned aircraft spewing preemptive strikes upon you, and upon your neighbor’s wedding party, is only a proxy for your enemy. If by some unlikely trick shot, the attacking aerial vehicle is brought to ground, no foreign combatant dies. The drone’s pilot, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while seated in an ergonomic chair, might miss a bite in the pastrami sandwich that conceivably distracted him while his Predator or Reaper or Sky Warrior drone plummeted. The pilot will suffer nothing beyond a lackluster peer review.

If the typical U.S. drone strike were a scene out of Star Wars, there would be no question about which side of the conflict represented the villainous overlords.

Not to be counter-patriotic, but it seems counter-intuitive to celebrate a military device that allows freedom’s defenders to cruise above hostile terrain half a globe distant, and kill people all along the way, while entailing no more personal risk than a teenage girl takes on while playing Avatar: The Last Airbender. If the typical U.S. drone strike were a scene out of Star Wars, there would be no question about which side of the conflict represented the villainous overlords. In reality, at the very least, America’s ideals of fair play and good sportsmanship appear to be compromised.

John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, claimed back in June 2011 that the CIA drone program inherited from President Bush hadn’t caused “a single collateral death” in the past year “because of the exceptional proficiency that we’ve been able to develop.”

Unquestionably, the 230-plus airstrikes conducted inside Pakistan since President Obama took office have incinerated more than a dozen senior militant leaders, including key al Qaeda members. As ABC news points out, thousands of other people have been killed too. U.S. officials dismiss Pakistani human rights groups, and their reports of civilians killed by drone-fired Hellfire missiles, as propaganda “sponsored by Pakistani intelligence.”

Even best case estimates by the New America Foundation—80 percent of people killed by U.S. drones are militants—mock Brennan’s claim of no collateral deaths. Worse, Washington, D.C.’s Brookings Institution, in 2009, estimated that for every militant vaporized by a drone, 10 civilians were inadvertently killed.

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