Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), aptly termed “drones,” appeal to my inner utilitarian. These pilotless planes, controlled by remote navigators, allow the U.S. military to strike anywhere in the world without losing a soldier. Drones can target weapons facilities and other enemy infrastructure without risking American lives, and for that I congratulate our engineers. But innovation doesn’t come with wisdom – in addition to its benefits, improved drone technology allows us to monger war like never before. For that reason, Obama has begun to draft a “rule book” for the next administration: it will contain guidelines for humane, appropriate use of drone strikes. For civilians’ sake, I hope Obama isn’t writing that “rule book” by his own example.

During the second half of the Bush administration (2004 to 2008), exactly 44 drone strikes caused approximately 50 civilian deaths. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tallied up some nauseating numbers in 2011: since Obama’s first election, he personally ordered 298 drone strikes. By March 2011, our commander-in-chief’s 350 total strikes claimed between 472 and 885 civilian lives, 176 of them children. According to Justin Elliot’s more recent article for Pro Publica, this year yielded an additional 43 strikes, one of which killed 40 people at a meeting of tribal elders. Obama claims to be striking at high-profile human targets from his CIA-provided list, but he fired a drone at an unarmed, 16-year-old American citizen. Additionally, according to The New York Times, Obama’s drone-target policy labels “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” Commander-in-chief, are all Arabs terrorists?

This is the president who, in 2008, ran on the promise to give everyone (including terrorists) “the right to ask, ‘Why was I grabbed? Maybe you have the wrong person.’” I may not think known terrorists deserve this right, but civilians and American citizens certainly do. Though Obama has not revealed much information about how human drone targets are chosen and whether those targets have the right to request a trial, he has commented that the decision to order a drone strike without warning is “an easy one,” as Becker and Shane reported in May for The New York Times.

Reading Obama’s human rights record, I must wonder why Americans, let alone other members of the international community, have kept silent in the face of these strikes. Although I suspect that a Republican president would have suffered political carnage (if not impeachment) for this kind of foreign policy, drone ethics is not a partisan discussion any more than it is an American one. Before Obama writes a list of dos and don’ts for pulling the drone trigger, he should think about the example that he, as the most powerful individual on earth, sets for the rest of the world.

In drafting the drone “rule book,” Obama has two options: he can write rules that permit his suspect tactics or he can write rules that don’t permit his tactics but will only apply to future administrations. If his rulebook allows these seemingly arbitrary strikes, then he must defend it against international law—killing civilians with drones is definitely a human rights violation. However, if his rulebook mandates discretion in the targeting and execution of drone attacks, he’ll have to answer for his own exception from the rules. I have a hard time imagining Obama passing the rule book to the next American president and saying, “Do as I say, not as I did.”