My beef with drones is not the boogey-man "on US soil", it's Obama's Bush-Lite Doctrine

[alcibiades_mystery]

22. I disagree that this is a "Bush" Doctrine

I parse it this way. There are basically three positions that we've seen over the last twenty years. They go like this:

1) Full military intervention, with land forces and World War II type ground invasion (W. Bush, Cheney, neocons)
2) Limited military intervention, with cruise missiles or drones, or some other US casualty-reducing technique (Clinton, Obama)
3) No military intervention; critique of imperialism; police actions for dealing with "criminal" terrorism (Code Pink; DU leftists; etc.)

Only 1) is "Bush Doctrine." Obama's drone policy looks very much like Clinton's cruise missile policy - just "easier" and "quicker" to implement (you don't have to maneuver warships for missile launches, etc.).

Now, I recognize that your issue is pre-emption. I suppose the argument could be made that Clinton's cruise missile policy was largely responsive (or reactive) and punitive, rather than proactive and preventive, in theory. In this sense, Obama's policy can be seen as a mixture of 1) and 2), since we'd have to add another dimension of reactive/proactive and punitive/preventive, something like this:

1a) Full military intervention, with land forces and World War II type ground invasion (Proactive/Preventive)
(W. Bush, Cheney, neocons)
1b) Full military intervention, with land forces and World War II type ground invasion (Reactive/Punitive) (FDR, Truman)
2a) Limited military intervention, with cruise missiles or drones, or some other US casualty-reducing technique (Proactive/Preventive)(Obama)
2) Limited military intervention, with cruise missiles or drones, or some other US casualty-reducing technique (Reactive/Punitive) (Clinton)
3) No military intervention; critique of imperialism; police actions for dealing with "criminal" terrorism (Code Pink; DU leftists; etc.)

So, at best, the drone strikes are a departure from Clinton policy because they are positioned as proactive and preventive. At best. That's actually a very thin thread indeed, since Clinton himself suggested that he would "get" OBL and his people if he could in a proactive way, and it's not clear that Obama's policy departs from that basic position. So I simply disagree with you that what we're seeing is an extension of the Bush Doctrine, and you certainly haven't proved that in any substantial way. What we see is much closer to a Clinton Doctrine approach, within the context of post World War II American foreign policy. Needless to say, that context does not allow for option 3). That's the real cause for disappointment. Option 3) remains as distant a goal as ever. We've simply shifted to slightly modified version of Clinton's cruise missile policy, playing the same old foreign policy game of nudging between position 1) and position 2).