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The new weapon is “ubiquitous”; it allows us to “keep a whole country under more or less constant surveillance.” So spoke officials at Britain’s new Air Ministry after World War I as they boldly designed an aerial scheme to rule Iraq after “liberating” it from Ottoman rule.

But these words about the awesome powers of yesterday’s rudimentary bombers might just as easily have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates as he urges use of unmanned surveillance aircraft in Iraq today. He is convinced that around-the-clock aerial intelligence, constant air cover and airstrikes triggered remotely from the United States will solve our tactical problems in Iraq and permit a drawdown of troops. In recent months, his determined efforts succeeded in doubling the number of remotely piloted, armed Predators and Reapers flying over Iraq, and a special task force is charged with surmounting the Air Force’s apparent creative paralysis.

But before committing hastily to an aerial solution, Gates should heed the lesson of Britain’s original experiment, which ultimately wrecked both peace in Iraq and democracy at home.

Then, as now, the allegedly “peculiar conditions” of warfare in Iraq inspired an attempt to discipline Iraqis from the sky, as cheaply and discreetly as possible, given the rising temperature of global anti-colonial sentiment. The controversial new Royal Air Force (RAF) found a raison d’être in constantly patrolling the country and using bombardment as the equivalent of a police truncheon to quell rebellion and allow exhausted ground troops to go home.

But, contrary to myth, this system did not work. It never foiled insurgency; periodic bombardment continued until the country was reoccupied during World War II. Indeed, bombardment only stiffened resistance, and insurgents found ways to evade the theoretically “all-seeing” eyes in the sky. Meanwhile, the aerial assets in the country quickly morphed from the instrument to the reason for the continued British presence, and the very thinness of that presence stoked wise Iraqi suspicions of a hidden hand guiding their country’s fortunes, severely compromising the Iraqi monarchy until the 1958 revolution overthrew it and finally sent the RAF home (only to trigger CIA machinations a mere two years later).

The quick technical fix was neither quick nor a fix, largely because the regime’s much-lauded cheapness in terms of both cost and British lives had the effect of insulating it from the salutary check of British public opinion. Public disengagement ensured that military and political failure also came at enormous human cost. Errors abounded—in identifying and striking the right places and persons. Imprecision multiplied the thousands of civilian casualties. (Greater sophistication does not free today’s technologies from such technical liabilities: Military skeptics already warn of the impossibility of sharing drone data across the services’ diverse communications systems and of usefully analyzing the enormous amount of data they produce.)

The imprecision was as much political as technical: Identifying “bad guys” was hopeless amongst a people engaged in various degrees of protest against occupation. Casualty counts unceremoniously lumped women, children and “insurgents” together, and the theory behind the regime shifted gamely to embrace “terror” as its central principle: It mattered less what the aircraft saw or hit, more that they were seen and known to be destructive.

Generalized terror, rather than precise strikes against insurgents, remains the unspoken tactical foundation of today’s aerial surveillance plan. Enthusiasts praise not only the data but the uneasiness produced by the hunter-killer machines’ “persistent stare capability.”  They bizarrely believe this imprisoning gaze will help win Iraqi hearts and minds, as if “bad guys” can be surgically removed and are not every day produced by precisely such impositions. Recent reports already testify to Iraqi civilians’ fear of the drones—thanks largely to their inevitable imprecision.

In a battle for hearts and minds, there is no such thing as a “smart bomb” (leaving aside altogether the ethical hazards of remote-control killing). Even if the Predators and Reapers enable some of our troops to come home, the “unblinking eye” in the sky will only worsen the political problem of reconciling Iraqis to occupation—not least because of the memory of the British experience.

It also will remove our affairs in Iraq from our critical view. Let us not give up the little purchase our democracy has on this war. The attempt to sanitize it into an armchair-and-joystick affair is based on the sad assumption that once our sentiment about American deaths is assuaged, our humanitarian objections to the war will have been satisfied and we will readily condemn Iraqis to whatever fate our government metes out. One hopes we can be both more vigilant and more empathetic than such a narrowly nationalist vision allows. But until that hope is proven, Gates should reconsider his commitment to a strategy that will backfire in Iraq, not least by undermining our democratic check on what goes on there in our name.