Written by John Turner   

David Ignatius of the Washington Post ranks No. 13 on Salon’s list of the thirty top hack columnists and commentators . He appears just below Roger Simon and slips in just above Mort Zuckermann ( we’re counting from the bottom, of course, with the worst being No. 1)

I read his column today titled “Our Default is Killing Terrorists By Drone Attack. Do You Care?” Since I do care, I gave it closer attention than I normally afford to Ignatius’s writings.

I should say here, near the beginning, that Ignatius stands for me as a 40/60 commentator. That is, about 40% of what he says has some worth and the rest is nonsense. But why it’s nonsense is the question on my mind at the moment.

The essay about killing terrorists by drone attack fits well into his basic mode. He makes a few reasonable points about the drawbacks of relying on drone attacks and he states fairly firmly that the American people don’t care very much about how its government conducts war in Afghanistan and over the border in Pakistan. These are both useful observations. He appears to imply, though he doesn’t say outright, that he would prefer to send small units to capture Al Qaeda leaders so that we could take them to hidden prisons and interrogate them. He says nothing about the certainty that using drone attacks launched from ten thousand feet is bound to kill quite a few non-targeted persons. I’m fairly confident that’s because he doesn’t regard the killing of noncombatants as enough of a disadvantage even to be noticed.

Anyway, at the end of his column, he asks this pointed question: “If you don't like the CIA tactics that led to the capture and interrogation of al-Qaeda operatives, do you think it's better to vaporize the militants from 10,000 feet? And if this bothers you, what's the alternative?”

He presents the question as though it were a genuine conundrum, as though it is very hard to think of anything outside these two options. And maybe for him it is.

An obvious answer is to discontinue U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have seen numerous analyses lately, from knowledgeable people, which argue that the war we’re waging in that region is doing us no good whatsoever, that it’s costing us billions of dollars which could be better spent elsewhere, that it continues to tarnish our standing with most of the rest of the world.

Still, it’s not mentioned as an option in a column about alternatives to drone attacks. Why not?

I now move into murky, speculative territory, that is into the mind of David Ignatius and those who think as he does. As far as I can tell, there is a substantial group of journalists and policy makers in Washington who cannot imagine moving to military intervention only as an actual last resort in our dealings with the rest of the world. For them, the military mode is one of the prime tactics to be considered, and considered early in deliberations.

Why should this be the case? How did they get that way? Does anything happen in their brains when they read a statement such as the one we had recently from Andrew Bacevich -- a West Point graduate who retired as an army colonel in the 1990s -- “This status quo -- which includes grotesque inequality at home and perpetual war abroad -- persists not because Americans are insufficiently alert to reality but because the powerful are determined to preserve arrangements that serve their own interests.”

I’m not asking here why Ignatius doesn’t agree with Bacevich. I just want to know why, in his writing at least, he behaves as though voices like Bacevich’s don’t even exist.

Might it be that he’s consciously a member of the powerful who seek only to promote their own interests? I don’t like to think that about Ignatius. He seems to want, through his journalism, to promote the general welfare. And, yet, he seems also to have locked his head in a box with no potential, ever, to pull it out.

Why is that? I have no confident answer. But, then, you see, I don’t know much about Ignatius. I don’t know what he has read; I don’t know who he talks to; I don’t know what he really cares about; I don’t know where his sympathies extend. He’s a mystery to me, and he’s a mystery who bothers me because he’s typical of a clot of influential thinkers who easily, even eagerly, turn to bloodletting

As for his Salon ranking: I would move him lower on the list, that is a little farther away from being a perfect hack. In my set, he might make it to twenty-four. I have no idea whether my shifting him that way would cause him to feel any gratitude towards me.