Trump and Cruz are openly talking about indiscriminate killing of civilians abroad. Which is illegal. You’re not supposed to talk about it. There are really no perfect options when it comes to terrorism. Option 1 would be to only collect information abroad, then play defense at the border and within our own borders. You could argue that is sort of what the U.S. was doing before 9/11. It’s not hard for people to point to pictures of a smoking hole in Manhattan and make a case that is not good enough. Option 2 is scorched earth attacks against entire civilian populations anywhere we think a few enemies may be hiding. This is clearly illegal, although it has happened on a large scale in most wars. That is what Trump and Cruz are advocating. In the middle is pursuing “targeted” attacks abroad, destroying a few houses or groups of people that we think may contain our targets, usually with permission of the government of the host country. This (let’s call it Option 1.5) is the path Obama has chosen. How targeted is it really? Here’s a Guardian article from 2014 arguing that the United States has killed about 27 innocent people for every enemy killed. Most disturbingly, this includes many children. I personally like the idea of doing a really good job with #1. But I think Obama has made some tough choices and I respect that. Let’s not pretend that the more violent options are ever for the benefit of the people in the countries where they are carried out, though. They are about sacrificing the lives of a certain number of (mostly non-white, non-Christian, non-English speaking) civilians abroad, whose lives our government implicitly decides are worth less than the lives of civilians at home (although let’s remember that civilians at home are subject to mass death from gun violence, suicide, motor vehicle violence and lack of health care, which we don’t factor into this equation). I’ll give Trump and Cruz some small credit for saying what they mean and meaning what they say on this one. Listen carefully to what they say, and vote accordingly.