Thursday, May 31, 2012
A very strange story, a 6,000-word front-page New York
Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with
the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses
who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of
whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders
is significant.
The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone
Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign.
On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a
White House press release.
Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. And why now? Because
in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing
helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in
nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in
Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action
on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s
G-8 and NATO summits.
The Obama camp thought that any political problem with
foreign policy would be cured by the Osama bin Laden operation. But the
administration’s attempt to politically exploit the raid’s one-year anniversary
backfired, earning ridicule and condemnation for its crude appropriation of the
heroic acts of others.
A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the
courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed,
“the downside would have been horrible for him.” Outraged veterans released a
response ad pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for
the dead SEALs. Obama only compounded the self-aggrandizement problem when he
spoke a week later about the military “fighting on my behalf.”
The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what
to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death
with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.
So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer,
apologizer to the world for America’s having lost its moral way when it harshly
interrogated the very people Obama now kills has become — just in time for the
2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.
A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening
about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president
profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment,
and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge,
jury, and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing, and whatever
innocents happen to be in their company.
This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle,
they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear
civilian clothes, hide among civilians, and target civilians indiscriminately.
But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities
were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who
now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.
Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead
terrorists can’t talk.
Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of
least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or
terror plans.
One capture could potentially make us safer than ten
killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s War on Terror, there
are practically no captures any more. What would be the point? There’s nowhere
for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama
having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number
interrogation?
This administration came out opposing military tribunals,
wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day
bomber his Miranda rights, and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being
— surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this
exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them
in their beds.
You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no
prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We
do kill terror operatives, an important part of the War on Terror, but we
gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.
But that will cost us later. For now, we are to bask in
the moral seriousness and cool purpose of our drone-warrior president.
No comments:
Post a Comment