You know, if we hadn't invaded Iraq, we wouldn't be facing all these IED's. And the best way to avoid being the target of so much terror in the future is by not insisting that we impose our will by force on so many regions of the world.

Indeed, the techological innovations Saletan trumpets could in fact be quite awful, if they make the US even more likely to go to war because our robots can do all our killing for us. (And you can rest assured, the Pentagon is working on those robots as well as the ones that blow up IED's. We already have the Predator Drones with Hellfire missiles.)

To treat the issue of the ethics of this sort of warmaking without considering that maybe we could cultivate a foreign policy that results in less death and destruction is absolutely myopic. Hawkish foreign policy is not something to be simply taken as a given.

"Hawkish foreign policy is not something to be simply taken as a given."

Sure it is, if you're a neocon like Saletan.