The democratic system works very well. Indoctrinate kids when they are young and naive. Tell them conservatives want them to fend for themselves and liberals want to share the wealth and give them free things and make everyone equal! Don't give them any background in economics or sociology to think this through for themselves. Accentuate Republican warmongering over mid-east oil of the last 2 decades, and just touch briefly on Vietnam and focus mostly on the social issues of the 60s. Voila, Democrats are the peace party. Rinse and repeat.
I could barely believe my ears a few months ago when one of my best buddies that I grew up with in this system, devoutly anti-war in 2003 like myself and our other indoctrinated friends, started JUSTIFYING drone warfare & private militarization as an acceptable alternative to US military boots on the ground. Once you have someone caught in the dichotomy of us vs. them in the battle of lesser evil, it's amazing how volatile deeply held beliefs can be with a little rhetorical manipulation.
Well if you had to choose between occupying yemen, oman, libya, and a few other places just for good measure and choosing to accomplish the same objective with drones, which would you choose?
Of course, both choices are two sides of the same coin, which of course means your friend is asking the wrong types of questions.
The first question is, does this even tangibly help us? Is this the only way to go after people who, presumably, are very very bad? Is it really worth spending millions of dollars just to kill a handful of militants? I mean we're dealing with people that consider themselves to be winning if the US had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and incur the hate of the locals against the US just to kill them. I mean you think the fanatics on the "Religious Right" in the US is bad, they got nothing on the fanatics of the Muslim version of the religious right.
ON THE OTHER HAND!! The American people are allowing the creation of a super national security apparatus to fight these bozos, never realizing that this may one day be used on the American people themselves. No one supporting this thinks they'll ever be labeled a "terrorist" until they find themselves on a watch list they cannot get off of.
What is happening is that the American people are letting themselves be dragged into a nationalized witch hunt just like the era of McCarthyism. The national security freaks know that someone, maybe themselves, will be ruined for life if another epic attack like 9/11 occurs on their watch, so they do whatever they can to keep it from happening.
So they adopt policies and propose changes using logic that tries to eliminate ALL the risk from high risk people at the EXPENSE of people who pose little to no risk to national security. If accepted, that logic very quickly converts any representative form of government into a police state like Syria or Egypt.