I certainly am.

GWB -2.0 ???

1. You play a video game. You get to level 21. You were told at the beginning that when you shock the cartoonish guy on screen the player behind the avatar gets a shock. You don't shock the guy, you don't advance in the rankings. The only thing you know about the guy is that he's 8 time zones away from you, but you don't know if that's during daylight savings time or standard time.

2. You are given controls. You're told to push the button when you see the command on screen. You're told that it'll shock some guy you'll never meet.

3. You're given wires and a battery. You're told to go in and find somebody that you know has killed your colleagues. You're told to hook the wires up to the guy's nuts and fry them.

4. You're given wires and a battery. You're told that the guy in there holds a view that you were told is wrong. You take the battery and wires and go and fry the guy's nuts, having to hit him when he tries to remove the electrodes and telling him to shut up in the name of righteousness.

The drone controllers are somewhere in the first three categories. It's not hard to do this: #3 gives you revenge, the first two are fairly abstract. It's easy to forget that the guy is real. You can't hear his screams. You don't know him.

You want to equate #1 or #2 and #4, but they're not the same.

Unhuman and uncaring, a warped kind of disinterest, are not the same as cruelty and barbarism. We can argue about "uncivilized," but I personally suspect that I'd find wiping the blood and sweat of my victim off my face to require a bit more "uncilivization" than just logging out and going home to play Wii.

or perhaps less barbaric if there was a pilot actually in the cockpit, or if it was done from lower altitude. I don't agree.

Didn't terrorists patent the strike them and then hit them again when others arrive?

My, my how proud of themselves they should be.