Following yesterday's explosive New York Times article on the Administration's secret "Kill List," today's paper has a lead editorial on "Too Much Power for a President."
The editorial, like the article, is critical in tone, but they both point out that Obama
has read the just-war theories of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
But Obama (sort of) gets only part of those teachings: he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. This is the first of three criteria for a "just war":
The natural order, which would have peace amongst men, requires that the decision and power to declare war should belong to princes.
--St. Thomas Aquinas (quoting St. Augustine, Contra Faustum, XXII, 75)
Even that criterion is iffy here because we are in an undeclared, indefinite war on terror, which makes it overbroad to declare the use of lethal force against anyone, anywhere, for any perceived threat. The second (the victim deserves to be attacked) and third (our motives must be pure) criteria required by "just war" theory are even more sketchy.
While I applaud Obama for accepting the moral burden of "dirty hands," I think it's inapt to wrap himself or the panel that advises him on targeted assassinations in just-war theory. Props for eschewing the exculpatory strategem of "necessity" (John Yoo's brainchild) that would enable the President to break the law and keep his hands clean at the same time. But Obama seems to think himself a deontologist who must do the right thing even if innocents die, when he is acting more like a utilitarian sans the moral guiltt.
The just war tradition is a rule-governed activity. Ideally, in traditional war, the United States military takes seriously ethical constraints on fighting war derived from the just or justified war philosophy and encoded in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and international treaties and conventions. Those restraints--most importantly noncombatant immunity--are central to the way we are supposed to conduct war. Part of the problem here, as Glenn Greenwald wrote about so eloquently yesterday, is that our "fuzzy math" method of counting civilian casualties (all military-age males in a strike zone are counted as "combatants") deliberately understate the number of civilian (or in the antiquated terms of Augustine and Aquinas, "innocent") deaths.
Soldiers, if following military law, abide by rules of engagement that limit what they can do, and to whom. Terrorists simply unleash violence.
100 unnamed, unaccountable members of the government's sprawling national security apparatus are a poor in-between.
War is ugly. I get that. I'm glad that Obama is willing to admit his "dirty hands." What disturbs me is that he does not seem willing to plumb the problem of "unintended harm to innocents" a.k.a. "collateral damage." What Obama needs to study is the intended harm to innocents because they are associating with the wrong people--e.g., Baitullah Mehsud's wife, or Anwar Awlaki's innocent teenage son.
That formulation is not part of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas' philosophies regarding just war, or any of the prudential reasoning about the rare instances when just-war rules ban be overridden.