We have considerable reason to be worried about the precedent set by unlimited drone strikes in ambiguously-defined war zones, particularly as it applies to future administrations that may not have this one's legal, diplomatic, and humanitarian scruples. There is every reason to worry that an average President would not understand the perils of using this technology as a general tool of statecraft, rather than limiting it to areas inaccessible to law enforcement and whose local authorities are strongly in collusion with our enemies. That being said, I can't excuse reactions to a perfectly legitimate, rational tactic of warfare that limits American casualties as if it were a crime against humanity to minimize risk in the course of self-defense - especially since it undermines the credibility of valid criticism, and distracts from addressing real concerns.
Far too often lately, we see even the fact of drone strikes occurring being cited as if there were something inherently wrong, illegal, or immoral in it, but rarely if ever is this position actually argued - it is simply assumed and allowed to pass unexamined and unchallenged. It has gotten to the surreal point where critics of the White House on the left think all they have to do is mention the word "drones," and this is supposed to be a universally-recognized totem of something horribly wrong or evil with President Obama and his administration's conduct of foreign policy. And there's only one problem with that: It's bullshit. Total, utter bullshit.
We almost never hear what it is these people think is supposed to happen: Maybe we're supposed to deploy American process servers to al Qaeda-heavy regions of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen to serve terrorists with court summonses and count on the enemy's sense of honor to not only refrain from shooting them, but work a US court appearance into their busy bomb-making schedules. And as hard to fathom as it is, that isn't snark in some cases - I've run into people who at least imply that this is the course of action they think both proper and reasonable. But I won't pretend they're the majority - rather, the consensus among this viewpoint seems to be two-fold: (1) American soldiers and pilots "owe" the enemy to put themselves in unnecessary danger if they're going to wage war, and (2) any number of civilian casualties from otherwise legitimate, defensive actions of war is criminal when the author of the engagement is the United States.
Frankly, there seems to be a far greater tolerance of the possibility of both American and foreign civilians being killed in terrorist attacks than when far fewer are killed in aerial strikes targeted at their perpetrators. I hate to use the word "anti-American" given how beloved the label is among right-wing commentators who truly are murderous cretins, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it is a real motivation out there. What is it about a drone strike that kills 4 civilians in the process of taking out the murderer of dozens that makes it somehow more provocative of outrage than when terrorists who haven't been gotten to set off a car bomb and kill 30 people in some random marketplace? News of the latter seems to cause little more than perfunctory acknowledgement in the same quarters that portray the former as the moral equivalent of blitzkrieg.
Principled pacifism I can respect, however impractical it is as foreign policy, and unlikely to lead anywhere we want to go. But some of the viewpoints I'm running into on this are just knee-jerk false equivalency, hypocrisy, and hate-based warping of reality to fit a bigoted and virulently anti-American narrative. Once again, it's unusual to find these full-throated condemnations accompanied by anything resembling an analysis of alternatives. They will not say, "Yes, I would rather more Americans die than currently are," or "I would rather see ten times the civilian casualties coming from terrorist attacks than are occurring from American drone strikes," or "It would be preferable to put Americans in danger for the sake of fairness to al Qaeda, because war is a game" but that is usually the subtext. Or, more benignly, that the US has no right to be militarily engaged at all abroad despite being attacked, and it would be preferable to make the US a fortress (while, of course, somehow still managing to be as open as possible to travel and immigration) and only deal with threats internally.
All of these positions I could at least respect as someone's principled opinions, however deluded, but despite at least one of them being the unavoidable conclusion of categorical denouncement of drone strikes, usually none of them will be openly advocated. In most cases, the people doing the condemning know they can't come up with self-consistent suggestions that would withstand any level of scrutiny. If they condemn drone strikes on the grounds of civilian death toll, they could not then advocate any course of action that would increase civilian deaths - neither on the part of foreigners who would die in more conventional military action, nor both foreigners and Americans who would die in terrorist attacks. They could not justify it on antiwar grounds and then advocate a course of action that increases the disruption, chaos, and military resources employed. They could not claim to be supporting international law and then advocate a course of action that undermines it by allowing terrorist havens to flourish, unreachable by US law enforcement, untouched by allied military power, and ungoverned by any kind of local civil authority other than terrorist-aligned militias.
On a related note, there is no more egregious example of hypocritical doublethink than the characterization of these strikes as "assassinations." An assassination is a politically-motivated killing, not a defensive combat action in a war zone. Maybe if an al Qaeda leader were killed by his own comrades because they don't like the direction of his leadership, that would qualify as an assassination. Their avowed enemy in a war blowing them up in an active combat zone is just warfare, and the fact that a name is attached to the target doesn't change that. If you could see the nametag on a conventional enemy soldier's uniform before shooting them, does that make pulling the trigger an assassination? If there was a locally infamous sniper responsible for taking out a number of troops in the area, is it an "assassination" to kill them? Obviously not - it's warfare.
Only if this tactic is used to kill someone in an area with a reasonable possibility of apprehending and trying them without endangering significant numbers of both American troops and local civilians could it possibly come under that heading. I.e., only if there is a realistic alternative that doesn't either involve just conceding to the enemy or pretending not to know who they are and causing unnecessary destruction. The military used to do this in order to address just this kind of irrational, morally dubious reasoning - used to launch widely-destructive attacks against known enemy leaders in war to avoid the accusation of trying to "assassinate" them personally. And it was ludicrous even then, even when the maximum precision of an aerial strike could be hundreds to thousands of feet wide. But having the technology to be precise, it would be an atrocity not to use information to narrow the limits of destruction as much as possible. It would also be crazy to refrain from attacking a legitimate target because you have precision information about it. Who will honestly endorse the following sequence of reasoning:
1. Intelligence strongly indicates X is a terrorist leader responding for recent bombings that have killed dozens.
2. X has openly bragged of his intention to kill Americans and various local minority groups.
3. X lives and operates in a region inaccessible to allied law enforcement.
4. The official authorities in X's area collaborate with terrorism, and it is highly likely from experience that attempting to engage them in apprehending him would simply result in his escape and continued terrorist activity.
5. Intelligence strongly indicates X is holed up in the northeast corner of building Y at grid coordinates ####, right this moment.
6. We have an armed drone in the sky above those coordinates right now with a small-yield missile capable of destroying the northeast corner of that building with minimum damage to the surrounding area.
7. Are we going to launch? NOPE! We're going to hope he comes to his senses, or decides to go somewhere we have a decent chance of arresting him. After all, we don't want blood on our hands - there's no need to be violent in a war! The scores of people he kills after today are not our responsibility.
It just gets so nuts, the way a concern can escalate into a fear, a fear into a bigoted assumption, and from there to a surreal statement like this, recently posted in my diary examining President Obama's record (bold added by me):
Allow me to suggest another caveat: (4+ / 0-)
Best President Ever!
except for:
raining death down on innocents with drone strikes in the name of eternal "war on terrorism", far far more than his predecessor George W. Bush ever dared.
Unless we're just lumping all those innocents murdered by remote controlled bombs as "pragmatically and/or 11th-dimensional-chess strategically" necessary.
Then it's the smart play! Wewt! We're back to Bestest President Evah! (just ignore the innocent blood and gore)
"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy." Sun Tzu
by gila on Fri Jan 06, 2012 at 07:18:27 PM PST
[ Reply to This ]
I don't know which of the loony scenarios outlined above this user thinks is the preferable alternative to the "murder" of self-defense, but it's not lost on me that they didn't bother to say. Anyway, I've said enough on this aspect of the issue, and have addressed the housekeeping side sufficiently to have given it due airing, but how do we deal with the legitimate concerns surrounding drone strikes? As far as I can identify, those issues are the following:
1. The ambiguity of defining war-zone boundaries.
Clearly it is insufficient that a President have absolute discretion to define the boundaries of war zones, since it leads to the valid concern that a future administration would simply define every square inch of the world as a battlefield. Unfortunately, it would be pointless to demand that a President lead the way in limiting presidential power on this issue, because any self-limiting measure they undertake through the Executive branch could just be reversed by an administration that wants more power.
Obviously, then, the solution is that it has to be pursued through Congress, which in practical terms means the Legislative branch has to be under strong progressive control and have a Supreme Court with a liberal majority. That means we need President Obama to have a second term, and that second term should ideally have a filibuster-proof liberal Democratic Senate. With these in place, we would have the best chance of statutorily implementing a constitutionally rigorous oversight authority over the designated boundaries of warfare. As hard as this is to achieve, it is achievable and we should strive for it.
2. Authority to designate named targets.
In a conventional war, it is sufficient that individual soldiers and battlefield commanders have near-absolute discretion to kill people they decide are the enemy, but that cannot be sustained in an anti-terrorism operation where the details of individuals' lives and activities are part of the determination. There is simply too much room for error, reckless suspicion, and misinformation on the part of local "allies" who might simply be trying to get rid of their personal enemies. Having satisfactorily limited the geographic scope of the battlefield, the next priority is to ensure that the targeting process is rational, ethically defensible, and accountable. Hopefully it's clear that this can never be anywhere near as thorough as a criminal justice process, so any objection on that basis is moot: War is a default condition when all else fails, and it can never be optimized to the point of meeting the standards of civil society. However, harm can be limited.
This too will require at least some level of Congressional involvement in setting standards, although constitutionally it would be more difficult on separation of powers grounds. To be frank, the American Presidency will always have considerable discretion in exercising military power, and that power has not increased with time - it is at most comparable, if not considerably reduced, from its WW2 and Cold War peak. If authorities in the US military/intelligence chain of command in the '40s, '50s, and '60s decided that someone in a foreign country should die, there wouldn't have been a military strike - there would have been a phone call to a handler who would then call a local operative, who would then have contacted some street hoodlum, and that guy would then shoot or stab the target. That was an assassination, and that occurred all over the world - the streets of Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, etc. etc. So while there are indeed perils to open use of military strikes to target individuals in war zones, it carries its own set of limitations that previous eras never bothered with.
3. Ensuring arrest and capture always have priority.
Even with a sufficiently limited zone of activity and accountable process of target-selection, there has to be some impetus to make sure that drone strikes don't become the first option - they have to be what occurs when a reasonably diligent determination is made that a specific target, in a specific area, would incur too many American and/or civilian casualties to attempt to capture, and that no suitably reliable local process exists for bringing them to justice. I won't bother trying to prescribe specific mechanisms for ensuring this, but if you can hold the target-selection process reasonable and accountable, then you can also do so with respect to making sure drone strikes remain a late option rather than the go-to tactic.
4. Minimizing civilian casualties from drone strikes.
First, it's important to recognize that drone strikes themselves are an important and positive development in the minimization of civilian casualties in warfare: Because drones are expendable, they can be flown at much riskier, lower altitudes, fly closer to targets, and linger longer over combat zones than manned aircraft, allowing a fuller picture of the situation to emerge, which in turn increases opportunities to ensure that targeting decisions are the right ones. An on-scene pilot would often have to make the decision more quickly, based on less information, more ambiguous assessments of the situation, and might not be able to stick around long enough to find out clearly what the consequences were.
Of course, one could argue that the decrease in risk might also provide a countervailing increase in casualties due to a greater likelihood of using the drones, but I suspect it doesn't come anywhere close: While I could be wrong, it just seems on its face unlikely that an AC-130 gunship attack or high-altitude fighter jet missile strike on an apparent enemy would be less or comparably destructive to a low-yield missile from a low-flying, slow-speed, lingering drone based on specific intelligence. This is one instance where my own sense of reason and probability jibes with at least a major part of the military's justification for a tactic. The fact is, it's no more rational to trust the military to always be wrong than it is to trust them to always be right. I think, in general, drones are a positive development - at least in the immediate future.
Further reducing civilian casualties would largely depend on the above steps - limiting the zone of battle, ensuring a rational and accountable target-selection process, and ensuring that employing strikes against known, specifically targeted individuals is a next-to-last resort (the very last being a full-on conventional assault) rather than a default option. But as much as technology has enabled the existing improvements in precision and accuracy, we can expect it would offer further improvements in the future. It will, of course, also enable abuses, so we have to be informed about both the perils and the promise.
The North Star objective should indeed be a world thriving in peace, but I think many of us totally overlook the fact that we are closer to peace today than we've ever been before, especially since the atrocity of the Iraq War has finally been ended and so many Middle Eastern dictators have been overthrown. We overlook the fact that not every paving stone on the road to world peace is made out of knee-jerk anti-war ideology in a contextual vacuum. Planet Earth would not be a safer place with an isolationist, pacifist United States - I think we've tried that enough in our history to know better. And it certainly would not be a more peaceful, humane, just place allowing violent, parasitic, religious extremist terrorist networks to take over entire regions with impunity.
However you feel about the rhetorical expression "War on Terror" - and I certainly never supported that steaming pile of Rovean horseshit - I also recognize as a simple fact that there are parts of the world with no government to speak of, ruled only by the petty tyranny and random violence of murderous militias and terrorist networks, and positively brimming with bombs and weapons. I recognize that the cruelty, blood lust, and chaos of these regions doesn't stay contained to them, and that we know this for a painfully-demonstrated fact of history. Now, there are some asymmetric, "soft-power" approaches we can take to helping address that, but they don't mean anything if not backed up with actual power: You can't defeat the bullets and bombs of a mob with moral authority alone - that much was obvious when it took the National Guard to enforce desegregation, and the Klan were mostly pretty tame compared to what the taliban and al Qaeda does to people who stand up for themselves.
Basically, there are no easy answers. I don't know if there is any magic recipe for nation-building that could ever make Afghanistan into a country where human beings can live in a state short of abject terror and deprivation; that can cure Pakistan of its endemic disease of Islamist militancy and government collaboration with terrorism; and that can allow Yemen to become something other than an al Qaeda resort. But I know it doesn't work to just ignore the problem. I can say reasonably that reverting to pre-9/11 policies with respect to anti-terrorism military actions would probably just recreate the conditions that produced 9/11. And it's clear that spewing hate at the United States, mindlessly condemning justified drone strikes as immoral acts of criminality, offering no alternatives other than isolationist or pacifist fantasies, and acting as pro bono PR apologists for people actively waging war against Western civilization is not a service to the protection of civilian lives, the defense of international law, or the moral progress of our nation.
We're not going to address the real problems of drone technology by pissing away reason and credibility in service to an ideological narrative with no merit. The price of being consequential in shaping how decisions are made is that criticism has to be limited to reality, and show some considered appreciation of history, present circumstances, and the logical consequences of options. Short of that, there is no moral authority to an opinion, no matter how much outrage (real or feigned) is stuffed into it.
Mon Jan 09, 2012 at 12:42 AM PT: I must admit I'm deeply disappointed in the level of debate that has gone on in the comments to this diary, at least among its critics. It seems to be a pattern that there is a clique of commenters who take pride in totally ignoring the actual content of someone's arguments if they disagree with their conclusions, and the result is kind of intellectual abortion consisting of nothing more substantive than their total, categorical rejection of everything said without even trying to address any of it intelligently. Frankly, of the multiple specific proposals I've made here, not one of them has been commented on by critics of the main conclusions of the diary.
And I think a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves, because they're treating a very serious issue like an argument between preadolescents about comic book characters. A lot of "Nuh-uh" and "yuh-huh." Seriously, it's a bad joke, and the amount of sanctimoniousness they show at the same time as they completely ignore every rational point just makes me feel like I've stumbled into a particularly nasty pit of hypocrisy. Most of the comments to this diary do not rise to the level of progressive discourse.