The ultimate irony is that the same President who is seriously considering a military award for courageous restraint, shows no limitations with regard to his own conduct.  He has authorized wide spread use of drone attacks, far in excess of what Bush approved.  Ultimately this is going to result in some really embarrassing and deadly accidents.  There are already UN reports condemning this.  Normally one should ignore UN reports, but in this case, they seem to have a point:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/world/03drones.html

 There is a difference between using a drone in Iraq, Afghanistan and the disputed border region of Pakistan.  However, it appears that Obama does not understand that.  Suppose there was someone in the United States that Russia considered to be a terrorist.  Suppose that Russia launched a drone that destroyed this guy’s home also killing his wife and children along with some other people in the neighborhood.  How would we respond?   That is exactly the same way that people in other countries are responding.  This is why prior administrations have been extremely reluctant to cross this line.  There is no doubt that some of these targets are nasty people.  But we can’t expect people to respect our territorial integrity if we ignore theirs.

 In addition the Obama administration is allegedly sending out Special Forces teams to carry out attacks (think assassinations) in over 75 countries:

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7144445.ece

 This has even more potential for disaster.  While every President has probably done this, it has been rare and very discrete.  If this report is accurate, we are going to see one of these units captured, which will result in extreme embarrassment for the United States.  Again, suppose that France had a terrorist that they had wanted for some time.  They sent over a Special Forces element into the United States to capture this person.  These people get into a shoot out with the local police, resulting in casualties on both sides and some of the French operatives being captured.  The outrage would be thundering.

 While it is encouraging to see that Obama is doing “something” about stopping terrorism, he apparently has very little regard for the rule of law.  At the same time he is asking our troops to show courageous restraint by risking death in order to avoid killing civilians, he apparently is more than willing to show no restraints at all with regard to his own decisions.  Obama not only considers himself above the law in the United States (Think Sestak, Romanoff, Blagojevich, etc) he apparently is equally willing to ignore international law.