If you’ve got a little spare time for reading this weekend, I would like to recommend Tom Junod’s article in the new Esquire on “The Lethal President“:
You are a good man. You are an honorable man. You are both president of the United States and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You are both the most powerful man in the world and an unimpeachably upstanding citizen. You place a large premium on being beyond reproach. You have become your own deliberative body, standing not so much by your decisions as by the process by which you make them. You are not only rational; you are a rationalist. You think everything through, as though it is within your power to find the point where what is moral meets what is necessary.
You love two things, your family and the law, and you have surrounded yourself with those who are similarly inclined. To make sure that you obey the law, you have hired lawyers prominent for accusing your predecessor of flouting it; to make sure that you don’t fall prey to the inevitable corruption of secrecy, you have hired lawyers on record for being committed to transparency. Unlike George W. Bush, you have never held yourself above the law by virtue of being commander in chief; indeed, you have spent part of your political capital trying to prove civilian justice adequate to our security needs. You prize both discipline and deliberation; you insist that those around you possess a personal integrity that matches their political ideals and your own; and it is out of these unlikely ingredients that you have created the Lethal Presidency…
This is not to say that the American people don’t know about the Lethal Presidency, and that they don’t support its aims. They do. They know about the killing because you have celebrated — with appropriate sobriety — the most notable kills, specifically those of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; they support it because you have asked for their trust as a good and honorable man surrounded by good and honorable men and women and they have given it to you. In so doing, you have changed a technological capability into a moral imperative and have convinced your countrymen to see the necessity without seeing the downside. Politically, there is no downside. Historically, there is only the irony of the upside — that you, of all presidents, have become the lethal one; that you, of all people, have turned out to be a man of proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less popular than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen… indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all…
Because Junod is a true reporter and Esquire makes excellent use of the communications technologies now available, he has posted excerpts and updates on its Political Blog all week. The Thursday update discussed the “killer contradiction“:
I received a phone call on Tuesday from a person with intimate knowledge of the executive counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration… The call was a surprise, not simply because I’d tried to speak to this man over the months that I was researching my story, but also because he understood the story better than most of the people who’ve read it, and thought that I “captured the President fairly.”…
And then he proceeded to explain why transparency was a goal difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, even when a simple acknowledgment would go a long way toward expiating the sin of killing an innocent American teenager in the course of a counterterrorism strike.
State secrecy, the man on the phone said, exists for a reason, and it’s generally not the reason that the Glenn Greenwalds of the world think it is — it’s not to cover up wrongdoing. It’s to protect two essential things: the sources and methods of the intelligence community, and something called “the requirement of non-acknowledgement.”…
Secrecy isn’t always the main driver here. Sometimes diplomacy is… there are deals — deals that have already been made. And part of the deal is that you don’t acknowledge the deal. If you do, then the country you made the deal with is obligated to do react, because now there’s been a violation of sovereignty. The problem is that there are a lot of these kinds of deals, because they are so easy to make. They’re a little like allowing a source to go off the record in journalism. If the source asks, Can I go off the record?, you’ll say, Of course you can, because you want the source to talk. It’s the same in statecraft. You make the deal because you want there to be a deal….
This is a very hard story to do justice in an excerpt, and I would really recommend that you read the whole thing. Obviously this is a very complicated situation, way above my pay grade. Yet I keep thinking: Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was even younger than Trayvon Martin. And all the claims thrown up by the defenders of the man who killed Trayvon Martin — Kid should never have been running around in that neighborhood, if he cared about his own life! How do we know he wasn’t just another criminal, like so many of those people are! He wasn’t a child, by the standards of his culture he was plenty old enough to get into adult trouble and pay the adult price! And besides, teenagers just like him die senselessly every day in America, but you don’t make a big song and dance about those other kids, you liberal hypocrites! — were quite rightly dismissed for the feeble excuses they are.
burnspbesq
Two excellent rebuttals to Junod’s article, one by Andrew Sullivan and the other by Ben Wittes at lawfare, should also be read. These questions are not the slam dunks that Junod would have us believe.
andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/the-lethal-presidency.html
lawfareblog.com/2012/07/tom-junod-in-esquire-gives-obama-a-moral-dressing-down/
dan
George Zimmerman, as far as I know, wan’t trying to fight Al Queda. Although, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see him trying that defense.
kindness
I would not use Sullivan to bolster my side. I mean, I share the apprehensions of outright killing ‘civilians’ and am not even comfortable using drone attacks to kill actual Taliban or Al Queda folk in civilian settings. But Andrew has a moral compass I don’t share. He likes the macho shit a tad too much.
Now….I may not like what Obama is doing wrt foreign terrorists but the alternative political folk are way worse.
Steve in DC
Repeat after me, It’s OK If You Are a Democrat, now we can keep repeating this for another four years and start to give a shit about this sort of stuff once a Republican gets back in office. But it’s our guy, so let’s move along!
Culture of Truth
None of those, too my knowledege, are ‘excuses’ being offered by George Zimmerman, making this a very poor analogy.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Try this thought experiment: Imagine you are president of the United States. This isn’t a simple thought experiment, and it doesn’t necessarily have to change your mind at all, but as a Democratic president, you want to, among other things, end this war on terror and remove the troops from the two countries that your predecessor put troops in, and yet you don’t want to be seen as retreating.
And before anyone gives me any flack about how these don’t necessarily mean that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki has to be killed, I know. I just want to propose thinking about all of these things from sitting in the White House.
MikeJ
That’s the dumbest analogy ever proffered here, and that’s saying a lot.
Campionrules
@Culture of Truth:
Actually, I agree with that.
Zimmerman’s excuse is a straight up self defense claim – ‘He was hitting me and so I defended myself.’
I’m glad we’re at a point with Sullivan though where it’s ok if it’s just a 150 civilians being killed in Pakistan rather than something more ‘messy’.
bystander
Yes, Sully did offer Junod a response. And, Junod replied to Sully, in turn. Further quoting his interlocutor from the administration Junod offers this gem.
I marvel.
ETA: both paras blocked, but they were contiguous in original.
RP
For the upteenth time, the fact that he was an american citizen is irrelevant when you’re talking about military actions in another country. It’s just used provoke an emotional reaction and isn’t that different from saying that al Qaeda hates us for our freedom.
Moreover, Junod basically admits that the claim that Obama is a particularly “lethal” president by historical standards isn’t supported by the facts. Would he prefer that we kill “a lot of people” by dropping bombs or sending in thousands of troops instead of “killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are.” I would much, much, much rather do the latter.
Finally, the comparison to Martin makes no sense to me.
bystander
@bystander:
Whoops! Not exactly sure how I did that. Both paras should have been in blockquotes. C’est la vie. Apologies.
geg6
So Trayvon Martin walking down the street, with his Skittles and iced tea and hoodie, is the equivalent members of al Qaeda and Obama is George Zimmerman? You sure you really wanna go with that analogy?
Not to mention, exactly which US president did not have the power and/or the ability to kill people, even American citizens, whenever and however they wanted? I’d be curious to know since I can’t think of one.
RP
Also, the letter to Obama format is really cheesy.
burnspbesq
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Abdulrahman wasn’t a target; he was collateral damage. Any collateral damage is horrible and should be avoided if possible, because by definition it is the death of an innocent person. That said, what is required of belligerents, legally and morally, is that they take reasonable precautions to minimize collateral damage.
And it’s worth remembering that only one side in this conflict admits that collateral damage is a meaningful concept. The other side rejects the concept in its entirety. The other side’s objective is to kill or maim as many innocent civilians as possible.
General Stuck
Cool, we haven’t had a decent firebagger post in like forever. Let the little dears crawl out the woodwork for some quality time in the BJ comment section. I am all for that, and Bush did do the same thing with killing an American citizen that was also an American AQ member, in Yemen, by a drone strike, in 2002. And I had no problem with that. The analogy with Trayvon Martin is pure Anne Laurie though, and just as rotten as cheering the fresh murders of Christian missionaries.
Here is a thought. if you are opposed to the war with AQ, then fly your freak flag high and proud. That is an honorable stance. Without The cheap analogies and accusations of hypocrisy toward Obama supporters, really only make you look like, well, like Mitt Romney. Petty and wrong.
Ira-NY
This analogy is owed an apology.
pseudonymous in nc
@kindness:
True, but insufficient. Junod’s point — and it’s a fantastic bit of journalism — is that the test of American constitutionalism (at least in theory) should be its ability to prevent arbitrary executive power. My personal view is that that’s always been honoured more in the breach than the observance. Congresscritters who get anointed with right to find out about secret operations on the intel committees won’t make a fuss; the public largely goes along with it.
Chyron HR
@Steve in DC:
And yet you keep insisting that women and black people need to stop worrying about their civil liberties. Go figure.
Anne Laurie
@Culture of Truth:
Which is why I wrote, quote, “defenders of the man who killed Trayvon Martin”, end quote.
President Obama has never, to my knowledge, commented on Balloon Juice, but his defenders here sometimes recycle arguments on different topics.
FlipYrWhig
I still don’t get why we’re supposed to see the issue not in terms of civilian casualties, a standard that applies to all presidents who have ever used military force, but rather in terms of this particular cross of weaponry and decision-making, i.e., drones/targeted assassinations. If you’re going to use a phrase like “the lethal president,” it stands to reason that the president you’re assessing ought to be more “lethal” than others, and I’m pretty sure that’s not going to hold up, not if what you’re counting is dead innocents killed by any method. It’s like being hung up on Woodrow Wilson presiding over a dramatic increase in deaths by biplane.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I suspect that if Bush had bombed Tora Bora like everyone thinks he should have done, innocents would have been killed there as well.
MattR
The concept of state secrets might exist for the reasons the source stated, but I think it is also pretty clear that it is also used as a reason why shortcomings or wrong doings should not be exposed.
But then, the whole concept of transparency vs secrecy is not a simple one with an obvious correct answer about whether something should be kept secret for practical reasons or whether the people have the right to know even if that disclosure is potentially harmful to the nation.
RP
A single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths is a statistic.
FlipYrWhig
@pseudonymous in nc: And if it’s Congress’s job to check executive power, maybe people who don’t like Obama’s conduct should be pushing Congress to do something about it. Of course, I don’t think Congress is particularly interested in fulfilling that function, which leaves a policy vacuum Obama and the executive branch can and do fill. What’s the alternative, and do you really think it would be better for the Boehner/Cantor/McConnell Congress to make policy on these matters?
trollhattan
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
IIRC they bombed the bejezus out of Tora Bora but wouldn’t commit to sending in the needed ground forces to actually get the job done. Too busy planning for Iraq.
burnspbesq
@MattR:
Better?
scav
@Chyron HR: Forget that, SiDC’s all in favor of recreational rape games as cool, authentic and laudable examples of hip expressions of Hiz Kulure.
FlipYrWhig
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I similarly suspect that any strategy that strove to eliminate civilian casualties entirely would also result in a marked increase in US military casualties. A lot of Waco situations would play out. That has to enter the equation at some point, I think.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Chyron HR:
Au contraire — Steve in DC insists that women and black people should stop worrying about their civil rights, which are different from civil liberties because infringements on civil liberties mostly affect white men, while infringements on civil rights mostly affect non-whites and/or non-men, so clearly civil liberties must always trump civil rights.
lol
This is the kid that ran away from home to join his dad in Al Qaeda and then became collateral damage when two of the Al Qaeda operatives he was hanging out with got killed, right?
Totally like Martin.
Culture of Truth
@Anne Laurie: Well I must admit to being confused.
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was younger than Trayvon Martin. So? Their ages, while of interest, are far from the most important facts in either case, and I fail to see how the commonality in their ages links the two incidents in any meaningful way.
Some people, somewhere, said some stupid or irrelevant things about Martin case. Does this discredit the use of drones? To me it’s less than helpful.
Mino
If the technology exists, it will be used. And justification will always be found. If it were not being used, when the capability exists, and terrorists got lucky again–well, does your mind even want to go there?
Humans are seldom angels against their own interests. And even less of a chance of that today.
I see no parallel with the unfortunate Mr. Martin.
MattR
@burnspbesq: Either way, when I currently hear someone use state secrets as a reason to leave a topic alone and not dig further, I have to wonder if there is a legitimate need for secrecy or if they are using that as a excuse to cover their ass.
Mino
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yeah, I’ve noticed that tendency in more than a few.
Omnes Omnibus
Lethal? How about Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and the Bushes? They were pretty lethal too.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@FlipYrWhig:
Congress won’t do anything about it because they don’t want the responsibility. They’d rather bitch and moan about the executive overstepping his bounds than do their goddamned jobs as required by the Constitution. Meanwhile, shit has to get done.
Mino
@MattR: That is the crux, isn’t it. I think a lot of this secrecy shit is CYA-related.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Even then, though, the whole “civil liberties” discussion isn’t particularly about white men’s civil liberties, except by the slippery slope non-logic whereby what happened to Awlaki TOTALLY COULD HAPPEN TO ME BECAUSE I CRITICIZE THE GOVERNMENT AND WHAT’S TO STOP THEM ZOMG!1
Martin
Do people not understand the requirement of non-acknowledgement? I don’t mean the person on the street, I mean the folks around here?
And if anyone knows of a way to seek justice across national borders that doesn’t involve collateral damage, please reveal it here and now. FDR killed, quite literally, millions of women and children in that quest. The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people than Hiroshima and was specifically designed to use the winds to spread the fire in such a way that it would consume entire wooden neighborhoods – and it did. There was no escape from it. But that’s how warfare was waged. There were no drones. No precision bombs. No cruise missiles. It was the bluntest of blunt force. It was horrible.
We’ve gotten it down to dozens or hundreds. Maybe it’s harder to rationalize when the number is small enough to attach names to the dead or to question ‘if we can get it down to 100, why is it so hard to get it to zero?’ The only answer that I think can be given is that it was hard to get it down from thousands to hundreds, but we should, while not celebrate that, at least accept that it’s a real progress – that we’re claiming roughly the same number of foreign civilian lives battling al Qaeda than we claimed civilian lives fighting for Civil Rights. That’s non-trivial, even if it’s not ideal.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): That’s why I tend to see this set of things as having more to do with inter-branch checks and balances gone awry than with any particular zeal on Obama’s part for war or secrecy or power.
Anne Laurie
@burnspbesq:
I don’t think Junod considers ‘these questions’ to be ‘slam dunks’. In fact, I think the whole point of Junod’s articles is that treating this whole new technological/legal paradigm as just another tactic in a sporting event is part of the problem. Using targeted drone strikes should be more complicated than “Just win, baybeee!”, and our mutual refusal to look at how “our” methods affect the final results doesn’t speak well of our political maturity.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
And double so when they have invoked their power to direct the CiC to engage in warfare with Al Quaida. With that action still in effect as the AUMF. And part and parcel to Obama’s duties as the chief executive charged with carrying that war out. Congress, and the people they represent need to clarify any problems they have with whatever tactics a CiC is employing that crosses a line. And using air power in war has always been a legal tactic, long as it doesn’t target civilians, and does what it can to minimize civilians dying in the cross fire.
Far as i know. Obama is now personally signing off on drone strikes, that must meet a standard to minimize civilian deaths. But they can never be perfect on that.
taylormattd
“your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen… indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all”
And “Trayvon”? Really?
Why the fuck did you feel the need to bring up a black kid who was murdered in cold blood by a Florida racist? Why?
Over and over, you act like a fucking firebagging PUMA troll.
rikyrah
I’ll be honest. I never saw this kind of defense of terrorists when a White Man was President.
Drones or troops; I choose drones.
Of the list of things that I can criticize the President about – this just doesn’t make it on there.
MattR
@Mino: An interesting example is United States v Reynolds which was the first court case that recognized a state secrets privilege. From Wikipedia:
You can make the argument that revealing the poor health of the plane might give the enemy valuable intel about the capabilities of the whole fleet. But IMO, once you go down that road with your rationale, you can use it to justify nearly anything.
Chris
@MattR:
This. The fact that there are legitimate reasons for secrecy doesn’t mean the concept isn’t frequently abused to cover up wrongdoing. Not as often as GG thinks, maybe, but more often than the word “generally” implies.
taylormattd
@Anne Laurie: What the fuck does the situation involving attempting drone strikes against alleged al-qaida, a situation which you actually seem embarrassed enough to admit is “complex”, have to do with a racist killing a black kid?
burnspbesq
@FlipYrWhig:
Apparently some people struggle to get their heads around the idea that there are legally and morally relevant differences between criticizing the government and sending people out with guns and bombs to massacre the innocent.
It isn’t inevitably the case that every time one sets foot on a slippery slope, one will end up sliding all the way to the bottom.
eemom
omfg is that Trayon Martin analogy the stupidest thing I ever heard. And now it — rather than the actual substance of the issue the poster purports to be concerned about — will suck up all the oxygen in the thread.
I would say that’s pretty danged impressive, even by AL standards. Maybe not QUITE up there with that Geraldine Ferraro post….but close.
taylormattd
@eemom: No shit.
Frankensteinbeck
@Anne Laurie:
‘Your arguments sound kind of like other arguments that were wrong’ is itself a terrible argument. ‘He was running around in the wrong neighborhood’ applied to a black youth in a white community is not merely a bullshit argument, it’s disgusting racism. ‘He was in a military rebel camp which was also a terrorist operating base’ is a wee bit different in nuance and strength. To try to equate the two as the same argument is just plain wrong.
Martin
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, we’ve already gone down that route as well. Hell, we could have Tomahawked OBL, but we sent soldiers in – and how many civilians emerged from that house alive as a result? We took no casualties in this case, but we invited the risk there.
There’s always a balance, and much to our military’s credit I think they do a decent job of focusing on effectiveness over efficiency. And that focus requires putting military lives at risk more than would otherwise be needed. What we’ve bought with our ungodly military budget is options. There isn’t just one way to target a building or a person. There’s multiple ways – and we can choose among them to suit the conditions – and one of the variables in that is minimization of collateral damage.
Mino
@Anne Laurie: Political maturity?? I think we’re headed in reverse in that respect.
And remember, right now we’re using these drones on un-stated third world actors. Even Pakistan is limited in her retaliation. In a way, I think it tempts men to force when it is so easy. Negotiation is hard work.
TFinSF
Can you link to the Zimmerman defender you were quoting here?
I’d like to see who made that argument.
Mino
@Martin: We could not test dust for DNA. That is the only reason we sent live troops in.
I think you’ve kind of summarized it as a tool in the box. The danger is when every little thing starts to look like a nail. And, more importantly, when it’s so cheap to drive a nail, you refuse to cut a mitre.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, I agree. It IS Congress’s duty to oversee the executive, but it’s completely abdicated any and all responsibilities in that respect. Too bad the Church Committee hearings led nowhere.
Martin
@rikyrah:
It does for me, but for a fairly subtle reason.
Given the choice, I’d choose the same way. But there’s two kinds of choices that we make in life – initiating decisions and continuing ones. Obama actually illustrated both types quite well during the 2008 campaign. He campaigned that he was opposed to the Iraq war (an initiating decision), yet he voted to fund the war (a continuing one).
The initiating decision has a different opportunity cost – what’s the cost if you decide to not invade Iraq? The cost could be high if Iraq were to attack the US or something like that. But the evidence suggests that the cost of not attacking Iraq was overall quite low while the cost of doing it was quite high.
The continuing decision has a different opportunity cost – we’ve committed to this thing. We have troops there. We’ve overthrown a government. The cost of walking away mid-effort is huge – much larger than the cost of not starting the war in the first place. So you have to make different decisions here.
Technologies like drones change the economics of those decisions. It makes the cost of initiating something MUCH cheaper than it would have been before, so you can now initiate things that have relatively low opportunity costs (like the Iraq war). Decisions that 10 years ago leaders would have said ‘No way, that’s not worth it, we don’t think the risk of not acting is high enough’ now become ‘Sure, let’s try it’. While I trust Obama with these decisions, I can’t say I even trust most Democrats with these decisions, nor do I think we should overall be satisfied with that state. The ease with which US presidents can enter into these conflicts, even if we do trust them, is a situation that we should have some sort of check and transparency to. I’d like to see Obama address that in some way.
pseudonymous in nc
@Anne Laurie:
Exactly: and he spends a lot of time talking it out. On the one hand, the new paradigm theoretically makes warfare less bloody. On the other hand, it makes it easier and less accountable.
@rikyrah:
Is it a binary choice? Does “CHOOSE DRONES” now mean you end up using troops later without much choice in the matter?
I was in a conference hall a while back when the people behind the Roomba segued their talk on robot vacuum cleaners into all the cool whiz-bang stuff they were doing with military robots, which is what actually pays their bills. Let’s just say they lost the audience at that point.
kindness
@pseudonymous in nc:
I agree with you. But the alternative here isn’t between a Democrat and another Democrat. It’s between Obama and any Republican which is a completely different setup.
Mino
@pseudonymous in nc: Well, when your local police force owns an armed drone, you don’t have to be a paranoid to wonder.
Anne Laurie
@Frankensteinbeck:
Except, if you RTFA, according to his relatives, the younger al-Awlaki wasn’t in a terrorist operating base, he was hanging around with a bunch of teenage cousins at his family’s summer house. And maybe they lied about that, or they just didn’t appreciate how dangerous young al-Awlaki could (wanted) to be. But when al-Awlaki was killed in 2010, a lot of Balloon Juice commentors (in the absense of further evidence) immediately made the same sort of observations about him that they would quite rightly condemn when they were made, in the absense of further evidence, about Trayvon Martin.
It’s more complicated than “My team good, your team bad”. That’s why I wanted to draw attention to Junod’s article, because he’s a professional reporter and a waaaay better writer than me.
Martin
@Chris:
How do you achieve one without the other, though? I hear these arguments all the time about how we should do this thing to avoid outcome A while preserving outcome B with no proposed policy to achieve that. Sometimes there is no policy path there – at least as outlined by the Constitution.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
I can understand if you want to argue the use of force that causes or is likely to cause the death of innocent civilians. I can understand even if you want to argue for or against the use of any military force.
However, I don’t understand the focus on drones. How is a drone different from using a sniper? There is justifiable controversy over the use of land mines,for example, and yet there is a lot of reporting that takes the use of IEDs by Al Qaeda and others in stride as no big thing, which is distinctly odd.
@Mino:
I am not sure what you mean here. No one, including Pakistan, wants US troops on the ground in that country pursing Al Qaeda or the Taliban. On the other hand, Pakistan has often lied about using its own forces to pursue identified enemy groups. And of course, there have been suspicions that elements of Pakistan’s military or intelligence services, have alerted hostile groups about coming US actions. In some ways, the US has used drones because Pakistan is an unreliable ally.
Negotiation is hard work. It’s harder when your supposed ally is working all the angles it can.
ChrisNYC
Way to use the death of both Al-Awlaki’s son and Trayvon Martin in the noble task of slamming Obama. Because, get real, this post isn’t about drones or killing of innocents or war or kids being murdered or sorrow over any of those things, it’s about PBO.
CW in LA
@Caz: Fuck you.
General Stuck
I don’t think you can make a case that Obama and the military are treating drone strikes like ‘a sporting event’/ That may have been the case under Bush, and in fact I do remember the military hammering one drone crew for being sloppy in their duties.
And it seems Mr. Junod needed a little more research to clue in on the current state of affairs concerning Obama and on going drone strikes.
Let’s nail this motherfucking bullshit to the barn door.
Hal
@Caz:
Yawn. In all seriousness, you would write this response to a story about how Obama preferred spicy mustard over honey mustard, so you’ve kind of used up any relevancy you ever had.
If you ever had any to begin with.
Cris (without an H)
This reminds me of something Dan Baum wrote in the intro to Smoke and Mirrors.
Paraphrasing, he said “I never allowed a source to speak off-the-record. If they wanted to say something to me, eventually they would always agree to go on record.”
Don’t know how true that is in general. But it apparently was true for him and he was writing about a pretty politically charged subject.
Martin
@Anne Laurie:
Fair enough, but do you think those observations in 2010 were valid? I don’t. Nobody needs to defend the killing of a civilian in that case – to shift blame to them, or to anyone else. We had a target, we killed the target, and someone else died in the process. That’s it. That’s the reality of military actions.
My issue here isn’t that you drew a parallel to Trayvon, but you did it in a way to validate the observations made at that time. The opposite should have happened – the observations on Trayvon were correct, while the parallel observations on al-Awlaki were not. I think you have the entire thing backward.
salacious crumb
@eemom: lol the Dear Leader Obama defense group is never late..make sure you go crying to ABL about this latest travesty while she finds ways to brand AL as the latest Hitler worshipping Ahmedinajad loving racist.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
You are 100% correct. That must be part of the equation. If it is not worth spilling American blood to amass dead brown people, maybe we should not be killing them in the first place. Maybe we need a shift in our moral compass. Hell with “maybe”. We do need a better morality.
Of course it will not happen. The over-supply of relative power tends to warp moral judgement (see the Catholic Church). I fear we will go on finding reasons to kill people whom we otherwise would not try to capture just because it is so easy and we have all these really neat toys. I call this the Tazer Effect – as now there are folks being tazed who normally wouldn’t even have been booked back in the old days.
Cris (without an H)
the ghost of Caz haunts this thread
Mino
@Brachiator: I merely meant, at this time, I would not expect to see a drone used on an Iranian nuclear scientist. (I wouldn’t say that it would never happen, though deniablity might be a problem.)
Mr Stagger Lee
@geg6: In other words it is known as the Who’s being naive Kay defense.
Mino
@General Stuck: I pray you are correct, but there’s a Pakistani journalist that’s saying otherwise. I saw a piece on Current, I think, on his efforts to get physical evidence out of hit sites.
Hal
@rikyrah:
I’m conflicted. People seem so shocked because it’s drones, but would a soldier blowing al-awlaki away in person somehow be better?
Beyond that, if you move to a foreign country and join a terrorist organization and plot to kill people in your former country, how out of the way should the US military go to capture you as opposed to taking the same action they would if you were not originally a US citizen.
Like I said though, I’m conflicted, but I just don’t buy into the Obama as Cobra Commander vibe, and as someone else said, the letter to Obama format is just fucking corny.
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: Drones are cheap, but are they being used in a cavalier manner? That feels like the crux of the argument against them, that they make it too appealing and too easy to come down with a decision to just pull the trigger already. You could use a missile, but they’re expensive and shouldn’t be wasted, or you could use a guy with body armor and a gun, but you’d have to notify his widow, so just send in the drones and wash your hands of all the ethical dilemmas. But is that really what’s happening?
Chris
@Martin:
Checks and balances via things like the FISA court? Won’t stop it all, but it’s a good start.
The truth is, a lot of the rules are already in place. You simply need a Congress and Judiciary to actually fucking ENFORCE the rules, which sadly, they have exactly zero interest in.
Rex Everything
Real Dems—you know, the kind that aren’t firebagging closet Republicans—cite Sully and Ben Wittes. Christ on crutch. Hey, I bet Ann Coulter agrees with your cause too; why not link to her?
Anne Laurie
@Martin:
The directionality is confusing me here (I’m dyslexic, that’s not hard), so I will state for the record: A lot of unthoughtful racist remarks were made by non-BJ-commentors in the immediate aftermath of Zimmerman’s exposure. BJ commentors, quite rightly, rejected those remarks, and the ideas behind those remarks. A lot of unthoughtful comments about “those al Qaida operative people” were made, by BJ commentors, back in 2010 in the immediate aftermath of al-Awlaki’s death. (I can’t get Cole’s post titled “Staggering Hypocrisy” to load on my machine, but I’m sure you can.)
In retrospect, maybe we (BJ commentors, also Americans in general) need to examine some of our unthinking tribal prejudices?
Fairbanks
Isn’t that because the administration changed the way they are counting.
Formerly, any non targets that were killed were “civilians”.
Now, if you are male of “military age” which I think is probably 9 to 9 and you’re killed, then you are presumed to be bad guy.
On the bright side, I guess women and children are still counted as civilians.
General Stuck
@Mino:
Did you read the entire article. Bergen goes into detail on the various composite info from a number of sources. And actually does some in depth analysis, other than the emo smarmy passive aggressive article posted as this thread.
I will put my trust in Peter Bergen over any other reporter in this field. Bar none. Greenwald calls his analysis ‘propaganda’. That is not surprising. and is further proof of reliability, imb/
Mino
@FlipYrWhig: Not yet. But the temptation is the same as with tasers, as someone upthread mentioned. Familiarity breeds contempt.
Brachiator
@Mino:
Let’s see. An Iranian scientist and a possibly innocent driver were killed in a car bomb, just as messy as a drone, and also leaving deniability problems.
rea
14-year old Confederate, dead in a trench at Petersburg.
War is hell.
Don’t see that either Lincoln or Obama is gravely at fault, though.
Mino
@General Stuck: I hope you are right, as I said. The real problem is there is no oversight/check and balance. And in the temperature of today’s politics, the temptation is to overinsure that Republicans will never have a club to beat Dems with. And we all know it.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
Not William “The Maine blew up, THIS MEANS WAR” McKinley.
Not Woodrow “Oh hey the Germans are in Mexico, WAR IT IS” Wilson.
Not Franklin Delano “Lemay and Harris want to set the world on fire, why the hell not” Roosevelt.
Not Harry S. “I just incinerated two cities in less than sixty seconds” Truman.
Not “Hey Hey” LBJ “How many kids did you kill today?”
Not Richard M. “Vacation In Cambodia” Nixon.
Not George W. “Fuck Osama, I want Saddam” Bush.
Obama is the ‘Lethal President’, the guy who’s killed fewer American citizens than Abraham Lincoln.
Bonus points for the attempt to connect to the Martin shooting too. Way to wave that white privilege banner high there.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: Uh, well, was it “worth” sending ATF guys to apprehend David Koresh? At some point one of the good guys is going to die, regardless of the righteousness of the struggle, unless you’re advocating a pure hands-off approach to dangerous people. It just seems like if you go down this rhetorical path, you’re reduced to saying that using military hardware that protects against your side’s casualties just isn’t sporting, because the guys you’re fighting should have a fair chance at killing them, lest it become too tempting to wage war. I find that odd.
WJS
The enthusiasm for the use of drones is very similar to the enthusiasm that existed for invading Iraq in 2003.
I believe that using drones is a form of remote-control warfare that gives us a great body count but actually causes a lot of viable intelligence sources to dry up or change communication methods, resulting in less capability for figuring out what’s going on, big picture. Drones were supposed to supplement intelligence gathering, and then someone stuck missiles under the wings and told a general officer that “oh yeah, and we can kill with this thing, too.”
With that, the collective wisdom is “let’s do this cheap, fast, and with a lot of violence.” When drones are no longer useful, what then? We do not live in a world where a weapon that gives us enormous advantages is going to be unanswered.
This mentality caused us to do things in Iraq “cheap, fast, and with a lot of violence,” and that led us to a situation where we lost the big picture and ended up driving around in remote parts of the country with the wrong vehicles and taking huge casualties for years and years. When our tactics were challenged, and when we had no viable answers, we blundered on, sacrificing lives for little or no gain. Will we do that when our drones are dropping out of the sky or can no longer find viable targets?
There is going to be a moment of clarity when someone says that using drones to kill people wasn’t really the game changer we thought it was, and that it will lead to a response from our enemies that ended up being more costly than we ever could have imagined.
Yes, Ann Laurie’s analogy to Trayvon Martin is ridiculous, but the debate over whether or not we should be killing people with drones is not one that should be rooted in legality but in strategy. If our strategy is wrong, being able to say that this was a moral, legal, or just thing to do won’t mean anything.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Also, too, count me in the camp who doesn’t understand why drones are extra-super-scary in and of themselves as opposed to, say, nuclear weapons. Living as I do in California, I can see lots of nonviolent, civilian uses for drones that seem pretty self-evident (like scouting forest fires or doing search and rescue in the mountains where it’s too dangerous to send helicopters). So I don’t think that automatically banning the domestic use of drone technology makes any sense.
Mino
@Brachiator: Well, drones are rather exclusive to the US, at the moment. Car bombs are equal opportunity.
Spatula
@taylormattd:
Is that trial already over? I didn’t know a verdict had been reached! Link?
God, you’re an ass.
slag
@Martin:
I’m stuck in this mindset as well. Except I’m not sure I trust Obama with these decisions because I can’t even say for sure that I would trust myself.
A friend and I were just having a conversation on the relative neutrality of technology. Drones don’t kill people–people kill people…that sort of thing (only more related to information technologies). But the “economics” (for lack of a better word) of technologies do change us as people. And while I really wouldn’t have touched that Zimmerman analogy with asbestos gloves, it’s the economics of the lethal weapon of choice where the analogy might have some play. The better question is: Why is our government cruising around those neighborhoods with a deadly weapon in the first place? We can say that the answer is obvious but not according to this dude:
SatanicPanic
@FlipYrWhig: Trying to guess how often they are used as compared to just doing nothing would be something else you would need to know, but I have no idea where you would get such a statistic.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@rikyrah:
Neither did I.
RP
Read The Better Angels of Our Nature. I just can’t see how targeted strikes using drones represents a lack of “maturity.” If anything, it’s part of a long trend away from violence. Massive military strikes are becoming less and less acceptable. Collateral damage is becoming less acceptable. This is almost certainly the safest time to be alive in human history.
FlipYrWhig
@Mino: But both still come down to the problem being an itchy trigger finger. And, frankly, the complaint that some new weapon makes soulless killing at a distance frighteningly easy goes back to the bow and arrow.
General Stuck
Oh, I remember that thread, making a personal appearance for a front page burning at the stake at Cole’s direction. And at that time, I was actually agreeing that we needed more evidence showing Al Awaki, but got crucified anyways.
Later, when Al Awaki presented himself as an AQ member on that groups teevee site, that was enough for me to prove he was an AQ member.
Jeebus, AL, are you bucking for some kind of promotion on this blog, sucking up the owner in such a brazen toadified way? Or just bored with all the Bain talk and demise of Mitt Romney. Maybe you wanted Mitt to win. Maybe not.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
Was there kvetching this loud when Clinton was firing off Tomahawks like General Dynamics was having a sale?
CW in LA
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-: Win. I would add James K. “I want California, so I’m going to beat the shit out of Mexico for it” Polk.
Honorable mention to James “War with Britain because of, um, well, there just is” Madison.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@slag:
Flag on the play, Attempting Reasoned Discussion In A Moral Outrage Thread. 10 yards, loss of down.
(Seriously though? I agree.)
FlipYrWhig
@slag: The word “bothered” is the crux there. Would they not have bothered because the targets are small fry, or would they not have bothered because they’re virtually unassailable? Obviously drones change the risk level on the risk-reward meter. Does that mean they’re being used on targets of little reward, or that they’re being used on targets of previously untenable risk?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Anne Laurie:
I’m pretty sure you’re misremembering the remarks regarding al-Awlaki’s son. I recall them being more along the lines of “al-Awlaki is primarily to blame for his son’s death because he took him into a war zone,” not that a 16-year-old kid was to blame for his father’s poor decision making.
An al-Qaeda camp under frequent attack by at least two governments and a Florida suburb are not quite the same thing in terms of obvious child endangerment.
FlipYrWhig
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-: Yes. There was loud kvetching about the air campaign over Yugoslavia too. But I think this particular complaint has to do with a new technology with an ominous name _and_ a preexisting set of gripes about presidential war powers and suspected terrorists that arose in the Bush years.
General Stuck
@Mino:
This is patently false. And if you won’t read the article I linked to, then I’ll just have to bring the relevant parts here.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Plus I don’t remember a lot of talk about how Martin was in A Dangerous Neighborhood, even from the Zimmermaniacs and the gun nuts.
Linda Featheringill
Obama is not a pacifist. If you wanted a peacenik, you should have supported Dennis Kucinish.
All the other forms of war available at the moment are also dirty and ugly. The previous forms were, too.
I don’t think that the Obama administration will use drones on the civilian population but I’m darn sure the next Republican administration will. But probably some regional police will get hold of them before then. I don’t think we can prevent that.
On the other hand, previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have refrained from using several military weapons against the US population. So there is hope for the future.
In this instance, I don’t think that righteous indignation will accomplish jack shit.
Tosh
Still trying to figure out how the president can tuck his daughters into bed at night without thinking ; You know I just gave an order that killed some kids that were about your age.
WJS
@FlipYrWhig:
For reasonably little cost, and with no threat to a human pilot, the drone is being used in two ways. First, it has the ability to collect intelligence, not limited to imagery, communications, and numerous other emitters. Second, you can combine that with the ability push a button and deliver weapons mounted on the drone or delivered from another platform.
This can be done from a command and control center that allows more than one or two people to assess risk and act on a threat. This distributes accountability from one pilot to a remote pilot and the intelligence and command personnel working in the same space.
When you have a room full of people who can kill someone, the problem is, they tend to kill a lot of people and can avoid a lot of accountability at the same time. This eliminates the idea that one person is going to pull a trigger. The room pulls the trigger. The room engages in the collective decision to use all of the tools at their disposal to justify pulling the trigger. Yes, the remote pilot hits the button, but he does so with a room full of people there to share the consequences. This means that if you have a problem with what the drone killed, you have a problem with a room full of people, not a pilot. And that room has a lot of plausible deniability.
Do you want America to have a thousand of those rooms?
I think that’s what the debate should be about.
Mino
Why is our government cruising around those neighborhoods with a deadly weapon in the first place?
Fear of Republicans? (Covers head from incoming.)
Brachiator
@Mino:
Not quite true. And this, like much “useful” military technology, can be duplicated if any country sees its value.
@WJS:
And aircraft was used for reconnaisance, until someone said, “Hey, why not drop some bombs with these things, too?”
And I don’t know that drones provide “great body count,” especially when they are used to go after “important” targets.
I don’t know that drones are supposed to be a game changer. I don’t even know that they serve the purpose of minimizing the risk to Americans and American forces, in the long run.
Still, pretending that drones are some kind of extra hellish weapon is not convincing.
BTW, even the “remote control” aspect of drones is often misunderstood. It’s not just some guy sitting in a cushioned chair directing the thing. Targeting puts friendly locals and American personnel in the target country at risk. And remember that 7 CIA personnel were blow up as retaliation for that agency’s role in drone operations.
Frankensteinbeck
@Anne Laurie:
And my point is that no, they are not the same type of argument. At all. They bear only the most general of similarities to each other. So it’s not a case of it being fine if our side do it.
burnspbesq
@Rex Everything:
At last, a substantive critique!
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
i wouldn’t want anyone to call me cynical, but this is a nice way to get people talking about what a badass the president is. i know, left wing earnest p urity and all that, but remember they are trying to find votes in some very national defense loving, god fearing parts of the country.
Rex Everything
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
You’re saying “Hey, at least Obama’s death count is lower than confederate casualties,” which is a confession of abject failure (similar vaunts: “New Orleans’ citizens are better off today than during Hurricane Katrina”; “Thalidomide–less hazardous to fetuses than Agent Orange.”) But you’re framing it as a boast. Congratulations: you do Rove proud.
Mino
@General Stuck: No, you misunderstood me. There is no institutional check/balance. No legislation to formalize the ad hoc/ voluntary steps being taken now. I would guess they are operating under the umbrella of CIA oversight regs right now?
WJS
@Brachiator:
Yes, that’s why the room pulls the trigger, not the pilot. How do you hold someone accountable when they make a mistake, and do we want to find out what happens when someone hands this power to a room full of cops in such-and-such town where, for the last however many hundred years, a lot of the cops have been pretty dirty?
Do you want the Kansas City Police Department to have these things? Do you want the Minneapolis Police Department to have them? How comfortable is anyone with the idea that the NYPD is doing counter terrorism? What about Podunk, Nowheresville, and Shit Holler? Do you want local cops to band together in a regional task force and start using drones to stop people from speeding?
Where does it end?
General Stuck
@Mino:
I have no idea what you are talking about. I gave you a well researched news piece from a highly respected journalist in the war zone coverage field, that says precisely what you say you want, that it is being done as we speak. With details how Obama has tightened up the oversight process, as well as the Intelligence committee.
slag
@FlipYrWhig:
I was wondering that myself. But then I somehow reasoned my way into thinking that the distinction didn’t matter all that much. I think it’s because I’m still stuck on the weapon’s risk-reward quotient as the main variable. And maybe that’s because our choice of weaponry is one of the very few things we seem to have control over in these conflicts.
FlipYrWhig
@WJS:
I guess that’s the fear, but I don’t think we’ve actually seen any tendency to “kill a lot of people.”
Stories about bombed wedding parties are horrifying, but, again, that’s not the technology making the problem, that’s the botched decision-making. Dropping a bomb, or parachuting in commandos, would result in the same slaughter of innocents. The way people talk about drones, you get the impression drones are just lighting up the sky like those waves of bombs in the closing sequence of Apocalypse Now.
FlipYrWhig
@WJS: Would you want an FBI drone to take out Eric Rudolph hiding in the hinterlands somewhere? I don’t think I’d mind that myself. YMMV.
Rex Everything
@burnspbesq:
No, it’s not a critique. It’s an insult. I’m calling you and your compadres phonies, chickenhawks, and war-cheerleading pigs who belong on the other side of the aisle. Just so you know.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@WJS:
Yes, because the CIA operating overseas uses the exact same rules as domestic police departments operating under the US Constitution.
Are people seriously afraid that because we killed al-Awlaki by bombing an al-Qaeda caravan in Yemen, the next logical step is KCPD sending hellfire missiles after highway speeders on I-40? Are you fucking kidding me?
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
No. I am certainly not saying that.
One of the checks on the urge to combat is the pain and costs of engaging in that action. Yes troops on the ground or even an air campaign would be very costly and damaging, which is why any government at this time would not be using that option short of making an amazing case for it.
I am starting from the assumptions that life is precious and there is no such thing as a surgical strike. Therefore, it is usually the case that when my government kills someone in my name more then likely others who should not die will be killed as an extra bonus to my kharma. A necessary (?) barrier of secrecy separates us from any transparency in the decision making of how and why the drone attacks are needed. I was born a ways ago and I stopped trusting my government’s word on military actions in 1968. So I am doomed to be suspicious when I am told, “Take our word: They need to die”
I detest the US death penalty because of (among other reasons) those innocents killed with my Texas tax dollars. Do you think I should feel differently about a kid in a Pakistani or Yemeni village? I know that there are bad guys who are capable of bad things. I just hate being part of an organization that uses weapons of mass destruction that (ooops) kills innocent folks.
And just for the record, drones are no more evil than butter knives. Both can be misused. Of course there are times when a drone strike can be the best alternative in a last ditch effort to protect American lives, just as some times a cop really needs to pull his gun and kill a person endangering others. But if that cop unloads his/her weapon and sprays a nursery school, there is going to be a lot of pissed off BJ commenters.
WJS
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, go vigilante. Nothing bad will come of that.
@FlipYrWhig:
Why do you need to kill people with a drone in the first place?
I would argue that drone strikes with weapons should be rare and as a last resort. We’re killing a lot of people who might be better used as intelligence resources. This is why the use of drones should be limited to the military and why they should support collection resources.
Again, as soon as you give a room full of people something that will kill people, they’re going to kill people and there will be less accountability for their actions. When our enemies figure out how to respond to this, what good will it be to consider strategy?
Martin
@FlipYrWhig: In a sense, yes that is what’s happening. I don’t think they’re being used in a cavalier manner, but I’m convinced that if we had no drones, most of the people that were killed by drones (rightfully or not) would be alive today, and for those that weren’t how many other innocents would have been killed along with them.
The real question is whether the state of things with drones is better or worse than if they didn’t exist. I think that things are better, but that takes a number of things on faith (which we’re forced to take on faith) – that being that the people targeted were targets worth killing.
Taken another way, I’m morally opposed to the death penalty in the US. I feel that the wrongful execution of an innocent person is worth more than the cost to society of not killing all of those that are guilty. But I don’t see military matters in the same light because we lack authority and control to mange the situation differently – we have no choice but to kill people. But the same moral calculation applies – it it worth allowing some terrorists to live in order to spare civilian lives. Certainly there’s a balance worth striving for there – some terrorists simply aren’t as dangerous as others as we all know. So the question is do we achieve that balance? And the answer is that we don’t know. I don’t see evidence suggesting that we aren’t achieving that balance, but at the same time we can’t ever stop asking the question. There’s got to be a point here that there’s nobody worth drone killing. Will there be a day when we stop doing it? I hope so.
Martin
@Chris:
Except in such matters, you can’t see whether the rules are enforced or not. We’ve been told repeatedly that the Gang of 8 reviews all individuals on the drone target list. How often has the Gang of 8 pushed back on Obama and said ‘No, that’s not warranted for this person’. You’ll never know. You have to trust that the check is working simply because everyone is saying that the check is working. Demanding evidence is akin to demanding to see Obamas long form birth certificate in person. It’s an impossible demand.
Brachiator
@WJS:
Ah, so we are moving from the actual use of drones by the US military to the potential use of drones by local law enforcement? With an extra helping of civil liberties paranoia?
So are we talking about killer drones here or just observational drones? If observational drones, there is more present danger from the authorities tracking you on your computer or smartphone than there is the use of observational drones.
And if we are talking about killer drones, then I guess it’s just a slippery slope to full RoboCop.
But hell, there are some jurisdictions where I wouldn’t want the local cops to even have one handgun and one bullet. But that’s a separate argument.
BTW, there was a story about college kids hacking a drone a while back. I suspect that countermeasures may make drones a lot less useful than they are now. This kind of thing always happens with military gear. And I could see that soon a high schooler will be able to take over the drones deployed by some dumbass local police forces.
Again, I’m just not buying the drone hysteria that some seem to want to sell.
WJS
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Have you ever seen what happens when a police department responds to a situation where one of their own has been shot?
You have numerous examples of police departments using heavy weapons to raid the wrong crack houses. You have numerous examples of how SWAT teams operate without impunity against innocent people because of mistaken identity.
Recently, police departments have started acquiring LRAD technology to use against citizens. It really isn’t much of a leap from military LRAD technology to using drones.
Mino
Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, is a director at the New America Foundation and the author of the new book “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad.” Jennifer Rowland is a program associate at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank that seeks innovative solutions across the ideological spectrum.
These are the authors of your report. They are depending on AP/Reuters accounts of the attacks.
In Pakistan, is illegal for civilians to enter areas that have been hit by drones.
And Congress is currently using CIA oversight authority for the drone program, as it mentions in your article.
slag
@Martin:
It also may be worth noting that people aren’t static entities. Even labeling someone a “terrorist” is a pretty sketchy affair and should only be done mindfully. Otherwise, we’ll be knocking pretty hard on the door of “evil-doer” next.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig: Lets change it up a bit,
Some of our hits have been in places where, gasp, other people live….well, they used to
FlipYrWhig
@WJS: So, capture more, kill fewer. I have no problem with that. I am more invested in making a distinction between the use of drones and the idea of indiscriminate slaughter. I think those two things get blurred into one another too often in these discussions.
@Keith G: For instance. I mean, obviously, the cop who mows down nursery school kids in pursuit of a dangerous fugitive is a ghoul whose actions can’t be justified. The Russians’ handling of Beslan falls under that category. But the actual use of drones hasn’t come anywhere close to that, has it? I want criticism to take into account what has happened more so than the nightmare scenario of what could happen.
Martin
@Anne Laurie:
Agreed. However, your piece above only dismisses one set of those unthoughtful comments and is largely silent on the other set, implying that you saw the Trayvon observations as mot just valid, but applicable to al-Awlaki. In fact, they’re not applicable in either case.
Yes, we are entirely too tribal. That’s why I’ve never registered under a political party – we need less tribalism, not more.
But there is a vast distinction between foreign and domestic policy – one that makes little sense at the micro moral level, but it incredibly important and vast at the macro diplomatic level. The distinction, made too crudely is this: Governments need to be responsible for their own people. There’s a set of rules for how you can treat those you can control within your own laws (civilian) and a different set of rules for how you can treat those that exist outside of your borders who are willing to reach into your borders (military). You can’t compare the two because diplomatically the rule is “If you don’t want your civilians killed as collateral damage, then fix this shit within your own borders, because our tools for reaching across borders are necessarily very coarse and very damaging.”
It’s not tribal to say “Fuck, this innocent person was killed” in either situation. The death of a 16 year old in Yemen is just as tragic as the death of one in Florida. But after that initial reaction you have to look at the context surrounding each and it’s at that point that the analogy completely fails and where some of the observations in each of those cases went totally off the rails.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: Well, in my mind, the answer is… No. Don’t use a drone-fired missile in a space occupied by civilians. I would want the weapon to be used as a sniper with a bigger bullet. So, again, it doesn’t seem that hard to imagine a reasonably judicious and restrained policy for when a drone should and shouldn’t be used. We can haggle out that policy — maybe less “we” and more “people with a background in balancing all the competing imperatives” — which is why I want to continue to resist the notion that the issue has anything much to do with drones per se. It has to do with using force of any kind with an abundance of restraint. And then, when relevant, decrying the lack of restraint, not the particular weapon used.
General Stuck
@Keith G:
Cool. Are you saying in your usual chickenshit way, that you would like to have me killed in a drone strike? sounds like it.
Mino
I’ve heard countless Dems remark that the majority of the US population had no skin in the Iraq/Afghan wars, which made their drawn-out nature palatable. Only the cost, the deficit, has finally gotten our attention.
Is that the future? Projecting our power becomes even more attractive? Remember what we’re looking at climate-wise/ resource-wise 30 years down the road. We were ever ready to send soldiers to protect our corporate financial interests in the past. Is that where we want to be?
Martin
@WJS:
But it’s not the fault of military technology that this trend exists. Police departments weren’t sporting bazookas in the 1950s. It’s the fault of a failed domestic policy that these things are happening. Blame that, not the drones.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@WJS:
So you’re advocating for indefinite detention of terror suspects as a humane alternative to using drones?
So mistaken identity of actual criminals and/or actual crime scenes and traffic enforcement are so interchangeable that there’s no point in differentiating between the two? Mistaken identity cases automatically lead to using drones to stop highway speeders?
Martin
@Mino:
And that’s a relevant worry here, I think. That military intervention becomes so frictionless from a cost/means standpoint that not enough political friction was added to balance it out.
The problem now, however, is that politically we’ve become incredibly dysfunctional. Even if we sought a responsible level of Congressional or Judicial checks against foreign intervention, nobody trusts that it’d work worth a shit. It’d just be used by the political opposition to discredit whoever was in the White House, which is part of the reason why the Executive preserves that authority.
Patricia Kayden
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s what I was thinking. Certainly Obama’s use of drones is not different than the use of force by other US Presidents.
In fact, given the alternative (sending US troops directly into Pakistan to find Al Qaeda fighters), sending drones that target specific terrorists is an effective way to fight terrorism.
The question for President Obama is when will he stop using drones. What does a win look like for a drone war?
Martin
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
And even the intelligence assets is a silly idea. They are only useful as assets toward some goal, and you’re still going to have to blow up whoever becomes that goal. So in truth, we’re already doing that – instead of using the bottom ⅔ of the organizational pyramid to target the top ⅓, we using the bottom ⅓ to target to the top ⅔. That should be seen as better, not worse.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig: But Flip, our drones have killed few more more innocents than populate the average day care in my part of town. Does the count get to start over with each new strike? So at some point when we have killed another fifty innocents it is ok as long as it is in ones or twos and it is in the hinterlands? Instead of trying to rephrase their excellent commentary, allow me to just point to with great appreciation to the ideas of WJS @125 and Martin @126
Our current drone efforts are killing bad guy and due to the math of collateral damage, it is killing even more innocents. That in turn brings up the ancient and inescapable mathematics of the blood feud. this, if for no other reason, should give us pause.
Oh, and Flip…I enjoy your good-faith argumentation.
Martin
@Patricia Kayden:
Unfortunately, we’ll never know. At some point the intelligence community will declare that the risks to the US are low enough that we can stop, and we will. But we’ll never know if we already passed that point or not. And there’s no real way to demand anything better than that.
General Stuck
@Mino:
so your a clown that doesn’t know it’s ass from a hole in the ground, and apparently doesn’t know that Peter Bergen has done a lot more battlefield reporting than about anyone, and even swapped tales with OBL in his cave before 9-11.
Not hardly.
So yer a clown and an idiot. Great. I got commenters wishing for a General Stuck drone strike, and a clown/idiot that can’t read, apparently.
This blog sucks, and so do I.
Keith G
@General Stuck: Well, actually not, as I am advocating against the use of violence and against injury to harmless infants and old people. But thanks for playing (and for brightening my eve with a bit of name calling). Anyway, I picked that name as a smallish community we drove through a few yeas back as I and my guy explored the lesser known haunts of the Southwest. If you live there, I am truly sorry.
General Stuck
@Keith G:
LOL, you sound like Mitt Romney, or Anne Laurie, or both. . liar Worms, one and all.
Keith G
@Martin:
Or that the risks or/and costs of continuing these action to too high. At some point we will need to think about recharging our lowered well of goodwill.
Or maybe, as I alluded to above, we reach a conclusion that the enemies we make are more significant than the bad guys we kill.
Frankensteinbeck
@Keith G:
It should give us pause. Any use of deadly military force should give us pause. So, is it worth using such deadly force against organized international criminals whose specific goal is to murder as many American civilians as possible, or not? ‘No’ is a defensible answer, but it will put you in a very, very small minority that includes no US presidents yet.
Keith G
@General Stuck: Really? Okay, it’s your dime.
General Stuck
@Keith G:
Keep on lyin’
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: Well, I’m not saying my own presidential drone policy would be identical to Obama’s, because I’m very queasy about the kinds of decisions that have a better option but no good one, like when to shoot down the hijacked plane full of innocent passengers before it crashes into a city full of innocent people, that sort of thing. But I don’t think “drones” equals wanton killing, and if what we want to avoid is wanton killing, we should let that be the core of the debate and discuss what rules and practices should be in place to assure that any civilian casualties are truly unforeseeable mistakes and not just treated as the cost of doing business with things that go boom.
Keith G
@Frankensteinbeck:
A fair and thorough reading of what I have typed will show that I have not taken an absolutist position, but I am not unfamiliar with small minorities, as in a rural high school government class I was the only person willing to argue for the total abolition of the the death penalty.
Again, we have the right to eliminate dangers to our citizens as well as having an obligation to preserve the lives of others from harm caused by our actions. A family in some mud shack in Yemen does not have a lessor claim to life than our dear friend, Stuck: yet, we do treat them differently and we should not.
General Stuck
@Keith G:
So you are both for and against drone strikes, especially if moi’ is in the cross hairs. Very Romnian of you. Yer such a badass killer.
General Stuck
@General Stuck:
Now give us your next Stuck murder fantasy. I feel like Kenny on South Park.
Spatula
@General Stuck:
If Schmuck is in the crosshairs, I am ALL for a drone strike.
General Stuck
@Spatula:
Then you seem to be a good match for this weblog.
meanie greenies
wouldn;t the most lethal president be Truamn who authprized the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Killing many innocents? Ending WW II? War is awful and the collateral damage makes it even more so, but it happens. When we were attacked as a country by AQ on 9/11 we were pulled into the war (whether you want to see it that way or not) and I see Obama as doing what needs to be done to win the war. Don;t we fight wars to win?
Oh and I know this is an important issue and all, but the timing, when romney is on the proverbial ropes, typical for the left wingers to the President for not being pure enough. Seriously folks.
Cacti
al-Awalki = Trayvon Martin
Anne Laurie, are you an attention hound, or just grotesquely stupid?
BruinKid
Anyone notice that some, if not all, of our greatest Presidents were all pretty bad when it came to civil liberties?
Lincoln got rid of habeas corpus for certain people living in Maryland. FDR interned Japanese-Americans. George Washington was very willing to use lethal force on Americans who didn’t want to pay their taxes. John Adams pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. American Indians may have a fairly negative view of Andrew Jackson.
Phil Perspective
@MattR: People around here seem to forget I.F. Stone’s famous comment about governments.
Cassidy
Dead is dead. I don’t think the person on the receiving end really gives a shit if it was by drone or by bullet. Trying to come up with acceptable levels of killing is like trying to decide which level of STD is okay.
El Cid
None of you have cause or authorization to be concerned about this matter. Competent officials have repeatedly informed you that based upon the best available information, this particular variety of lethal force is only used in the most necessary and urgent cases. I don’t see why you are wasting any time or thought on this matter, since it’s already being handled properly, given that we are clearly being told that our lives are at stake and that we have deadly enemies.
chuck butcher
Jayzus Petes… if you decide to go to war one thing is absolutely sure – people without a stake will get killed. AQ decided to go to war, a person could remember some airplanes and other things. Their access to weaponry and their tactics were what they were and continue to be. Their opponent of choice has other ones and a range from extremely lethal and broad to pretty directed and narrow and it seems chooses to use the directed and narrow. People without stakes are still going to get killed. You can run through the entire tool box and not find anything that is lower in unintended casualties or warfare expanding other than doing exactly nothing.
People who talk about “having skin” in the game are fucking idiots – the skin they’re talking about is that of kids who don’t make the choices – fucking great thinking.
No, I don’t approve of our Israeli ass-licking and oil depredations – but that is another issue. No, I don’t think warfare is a good idea – that is also something else.
Hypatia's Momma
@Cassidy:
Eh, not really. If forced to choose, I’d take vaginitis over syphilis or HIV every time, since everyone I know who’s had vaginitis was over it in less than a week.
Maybe a closer analogy would be trying to decide which body part should be lopped off.
CDWard
The collateral damage from these strikes is creating new terrorists at a far faster rate than it is killing the people the US claims (without giving any evidence) are current terrorists. Of course, this is intentional-The War on Terror has been the biggest boon to the Military-Industrial Complex since the Cold War.
Uriel
@CDWard:
Citation, please? I know it’s fun to just say things, but a charge like this should have *some* kind of support.
Lee Kimball
@burnspbesq: Each victim of collateral damage has a family that will hate the U.S. for the rest of their lives.
If they’re ethnic Pashtun, honor requires the death of their relative be avenged. So these drone attacks kill one suspected militant and create 5.
This is helping how? And these brave drone operators go home at night to sleep in civilian neighborhoods in VA, NY, NM, NV, and elsewhere. Are they using human shields?