Drone attacks and the battle of ideas

These last two weeks there has been increased blog discussion about unmanned drone bombers (summary: we're using more and more of them; we can't figure out what percentage of the people killed by them are civilians, but it's a percentage), and in this very good post by Dominic Tierney about the broader stylistic opposition in the "war on terror" between more impersonalized warfare on our side (robots controlled by off-battlefield joystick wielders) and more super-personalized warfare on the other side (a suicide vest brings a killer closer to his victims than a gun), Tierney provides the following quote which I found interesting:

Rami Khouri, a scholar and editor based in Beirut, described how the Lebanese viewed the Israeli drones in the 2006 war in Lebanon: "the enemy is using machines to fight from afar. Your [Lebanon's] defiance in the face of it shows your heroism, your humanity...The average person [in Lebanon] sees it as just another sign of coldhearted, cruel Israelis and Americans, who are also cowards because they send out machines to fight us."

I find it very easy to sympathize with the conditional attitude expressed here: that, in the face of an enemy (the US) that is so well-off and insulated from death not just as an effect of war but as a property of human existence that it devotes unimaginable resources and innovative power toward staying even more insulated from war (when our human army is already really willing and capable of accomplishing these goals), death is a strength. Which is to say, I can't imagine not having this reaction in my value system if a remote and prosperous enemy were bombing my land with robots. What else would I do? Leave a bitchy blog post and then go order trades of comics about punk-rock zombies? No, I am going to venerate death as strength. And it is precisely that attitude which informs the idea for a potential recruit into extremism that large-scale civilian death attacks ("terrorism") are a legitimate tactic of battling the enemy (the US), on not so much a strategic but a metaphysical level.

At the same time, it is very easy to sympathize with the insulated society's response: their absolute existential antagonism toward the idea that death is an ok thing to make them experience (that one's a no-brainer). The insulated enemy is going to perceive the embrace of the idea of death, that embrace itself, as an act of war, even if that embrace doesn't really lead to significantly different tactical threats compared to the broader, older definition of terrorism as 'angry fucker with moderate resources gets bombs, drives truck to building.'

My point being, that while we generally cast these stylistic or philosophical distinctions in warfare methods as being elements in an ideological conflict -- either modern versus pre-modern, or Western versus fundamentalist-extremist, or the recently revived demagogic fantasy struggle in the mind of the American right of Christianity versus Islam -- and while some of those ideas are definitely factors and valid perspectives on the motives behind individual actions in this war, on the other hand there is a way to just see the difference broadly as a factor of who has the fucking robots, and who just has the vacuum of fear.