Send in the Drones

Drone attacks have one pair of primary justifications:

1. They avoid sending manned flights into non-combatant countries to bomb targets we want (for whatever reason) to bomb, which flights might embarrass the local regime.

2. They avoid the potential embarrassment and cost and brouhaha of an American fighter/bomber being shot down or inadvertently crashing on foreign soil during such a mission.

That's pretty much it.  They aren't more accurate. They aren't based on better intel. They aren't necessarily cheaper. And to the extent that the conditions 1 and 2 above are true, they actually encourage strikes in other countries by making it easier and less potentially bothersome.

I once saw a morality play about a person being given the opportunity to sit on God's throne while the Almighty was off doing something else.  He was so outraged by things he saw and it was so easy for him to lob thunderbolts down that he quickly did so.  The message being that ease of exercising power makes exercising power easy and, thus, abusing power the same way.  

I have no doubt that there are fine reasons behind some drone strikes, but it seems to me that their relative ease and lack of human (American human) cost have made them also an easy weapon to overuse with no disincentive to do so. It's sort of the reverse of Pascal's Wager — if there's no significant cost (politically) to do something that might be of some value in some cases, then the safe thing is to do it, even in no-value or costly-for-other-folks cases.