Droning On: Obama’s Targeting Killing Justification

Last month, President Obama delivered a major speech at the National Defense University in which he addressed the U.S. policy on drone attacks. (The full text is here.) The tactic of targeted assassinations of individuals suspected of threatening the U.S. originated during the George W. Bush administration. This tactic has been dramatically expanded under the Obama administration and has become the primary tactic utilized in the “War on Terror”. Not only has the frequency of drone strikes increased, but the geography has also expanded from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan to include non-war zones, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The potential target list has also expanded to include American citizens suspected of posing a threat.

In describing the source of this threat, Mr. Obama offered the “conflict of civilizations” argument saying, “Most, though not all, of the terrorism we faced is fueled by a common ideology — a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West, and that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is justified in pursuit of a larger cause.” In making this argument, he neglected to mention the U.S. invasions of Muslim lands, overall U.S. Middle East policy and previous targeted killings which tend to create more enemies than they eliminate. (Before the targeted killings began in Yemen there were estimated to be less than 100 al Qaeda sympathizers; today the estimate is over 1200)

In his justification for his use of targeted assassinations Mr. Obama said, “…we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat.” and “…despite our strong preference for the detention and prosecution of terrorists, sometimes this approach is foreclosed.”

These arguments, while nuanced and carefully framed, are arguments that could easily been made by Vladimir Putin when he was accused of orchestrating the assassination of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in London or by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet after the car bomb assassination of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington D.C. in 1976. Letelier’s American assistant, Ronnie Moffit, was simply “collateral damage”.

Right now the U.S. has a technological advantage in the production of drones, but this is unlikely to last long. Legitimizing a policy of extrajudicial execution of suspected threats in non-war zones is setting a precedent for other governments who might not be as inclined to take the precautions that Obama has outlined. As Georgetown University Professor of International Law, Rosa Brooks, pointed out in her testimony before Congress, “…the United States is effectively handing China, Russia, and every other repressive state a playbook for how to foment instability and -literally -- get away with murder."

The law of unintended consequences has not been repealed.

Technorati Tags: Obama,Drones

An Inconvenient Question

Helen Thomas, the 90 year old dean of the Washington press corps, has been a thorn in the side of US administrations for the 50 years since the administration of John F. Kennedy. Her penetrating questions and aggressive follow-up have been something that officials have wished that they could avoid. Avoiding her is just not possible. As the “Dean”, she sits in the front row and by protocol officials must call on her.

Her latest confrontation was with Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan at a press briefing about the Christmas attack on a Detroit bound airliner. (A clip is here.) Ms Thomas wanted to know, “What is the administration’s conclusion about the motivation of those who want to attack us?” Mr. Brennan tried twice to answer a different question and then ignored the question altogether.

One doesn’t have to speculate about the answer. Those have been involved in the attacks have been very public about their motivation. Everyone from Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood attacker, to Human al Balawi, the attacker of the CIA in Afghanistan, to the young Virginian men apprehended in Pakistan on their way to fight NATO in Afghanistan, to the young Minnesota men fighting the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia have said the same thing.

They have said that they were motivated by western occupation of Muslim countries in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, by the torture and degradation of Muslims in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and by western attacks on Muslims in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza. They heard George Bush say that this a “Crusade” and Bernard Lewis say that this is a “clash of civilizations” and they believe them.

When John Brennan was in the private sector, he likened terrorism to pollution with the terrorists being “particles in the air”. When you want to stop pollution you don’t deal with the “particles in the air”, you deal with the smoke stack. If the administration were to answer Helen Thomas’ question honestly, the answer would raise at lot of inconvenient issues concerning US policies in the Middle East and around the world that would be politically difficult to deal with. Better for them to chase the particles, but not better for American security.

Lessons learned

It has been interesting to observe the US government reaction to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the apparent counsel that they have given to the Indian government concerning their reaction to these attacks. The US appears to have learned some lessons from its own reaction to the 9/11 attacks.
As one considers how to react to attacks such as these there are several points worth remembering. Despite the fact that attacks like these are terrible tragedies for those killed and wounded and their families and friends, they are not existential threats to either the US or India. In terms of a threat to the existence of major powers like the US or India, they are better classified as a nuisance.
It is also important to ask not only who perpetrated the attacks, but why they did it and what did they intend to accomplish. “They hate us for our values” is not a particularly useful answer.
In the case of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qua’da was very up front about its goals and objectives; it published them on all of its web sites.
Osama bin Laden had learned some lessons from his experience as an American ally in the Afghanistan war against the USSR, the “godless Communists”. If one can lure them into an un-winnable war in Afghanistan, one can bleed them until they collapse. A major attack on the “godless Americans” would lure them into un-winnable war in Afghanistan. In the case of 9/11, he got a “two for”. He lured us into Iraq as well and came close to getting us into Iran.
Although he didn’t succeed in bleeding the US to collapse, he certainly inflicted a lot of pain, emotional, physical and economic.
In Mumbai, we seem to be asking not only who did it, but why. The answers to these questions are not yet clear, but we seem to be counseling a measured response and seem to be determined to insure that we don’t play into the hands of the terrorists.
One can only hope that the incoming Obama administration will not have to relearn these lessons in the “school of hard knocks”.