Killing the little terrorists because killing the bigger ones is too dangerous.

Richard Fernandez writes a provocative essay on the expanded drone warfare we are waging against a "distributed" enemy.

This is the war the the Left does not wish to call war.  At's if warfare were still two lines of grenadiers facing each other with blunderbusses.   

The future of terrorism, according to John Robb, will be the story of individuals acting on their own initiative according to broadly shared narrative. That might include attacking artists in university lecture halls who’ve had the temerity to draw ‘Mohammed’ cartoons, encouraging piracy, sowing mines and IEDs at random, or using cell phone technology to stage flash events. Open Source Warfare is open season on everybody.

Our response: 

The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan’s border region, according to current and former counter-terrorism officials.

The frequency of strikes is up: 

Missile attacks have risen steeply since Obama took office. There were an estimated 53 drone strikes in 2009, up from just over 30 in Bush’s last year, according to a website run by the New America Foundation that tracks press reports of attacks in Pakistan. Through early this month, there had been 34 more strikes this year, an average of one every 3 1/2 days, according to the site’s figures

Fernandez comments that:  

The program has been criticized as a violation of human rights. But one criticism which is rarely heard is whether the program is moving the target list in the wrong direction. It is moving it down the chain. Suppose instead of moving down from the Taliban and al-Qaeda top leadership, it moved up? Suppose Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were not at the top of the terrorist food chain? Why not hit the guys above them? ...

But what would Washington do with a bigger fish if it found it with stratospheric UAVs and super databases? Would the President impose “very severe consequences”? Or on the contrary, would it find a reason to let the monster fish go in the name of maintaining “world peace”. Suppose Hillary actually found a smoking gun linking the leadership of Pakistan to al-Qaeda? Which incentive would prevail? Is saving 500 or 1,000 American lives worth war with Pakistan? There would arguably be a huge incentive to do nothing because of the risks of taking action against Islamabad would be so great.

So we go after the small fry while allowing the big fish to continue to incite their followers to wage war against us.  It's why we allow the Saudis to fund mosques and madrases in this country that become hotbeds of terrorism because to declare the Saudi money men the enemy is too big a risk.  We have the intellectually mind-boggling situation in which the Left in this country - the part of the population that produces the cultural detritus that the Islamists most hate - the biggest opponents of fighting the culture that most wants to kill them.

I would not mind the effects of Jihad so much if the Jihadis would just become a little more discriminating.  If, instead of murdering the casual passer-by with a car bomb, it placed those bombs in the center of the culture they hate.  Of course placing a bomb in Times Square could, in their view, be a step in that direction.  But could we not get a little more precise in our targeting, Jihadis?  Don't you know where Jon Stewart lives, where the movie moguls have their homes, where the ACLU has its headquarters?