A Liberal Argument FOR Drone Attacks
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During the second presidential debate, the one focusing on
foreign policy (remember that snoozer?), the big take-away was the fact that
President Obama and perennial presidential hopeful Mitt Romney were in such
lock-step on foreign policy that they hardly had anything to argue about. It seems
the center-right and center-left essentially agree when it comes to how to
prosecute the War on Terror, or at least they’ve both learned a lesson from one of Bush
II’s mistakes; Don’t stand in front of a Mission Accomplished banner and pretend
that an unconventional war will lead to a conventional parades-in-the-streets
victory celebration. This one is going to be ugly, and it’s best if we have
tamped-down, realistic expectations about that ugliness.
This has not stopped the far-right and far-left from
criticizing the use of unmanned drones to prosecute this war. Some of these
concerns are more legitimate than others. Among the least legitimate are concerns
that unmanned drones are a step across some great divide toward artificially
intelligent robots bringing war against humanity (sorry, but they are no more
or less human than the cruise missiles we sent after Saddam Hussein back in
Gulf War 1), that drones were fine when a real American was ordering their use but not
when our current president is doing it (quit choking on your sour grapes,
guys), or that drones are somehow undignified or cowardly (as though we are
obligated to show up and slap people with white gloves when they would gladly
blow up civilian targets with truck bombs). These arguments are patently
ridiculous.
Unfortunately, most of the other arguments against the use
of drones fall into a category in between the absurd and the worthy-of-debate.
Some argue that the President does not have the right to use drones in
countries where Congress has not made an official declaration of war. They use this as an example of President Obama’s
executive overreach. This is blatantly hypocritical coming from people who
turned a blind eye to previous presidents who authorized military actions in countries
where we were not officially at war. Here are some countries where we’ve had
military actions without actual congressional declarations of war. In
chronological order, we’ve had military incursions in the Dominican Republic, Cambodia,
French Polynesia, the West Indies, Argentina, Peru, Indonesia, Fiji, Samoa,
Mexico, China, The Ivory Coast, Turkey, Nicaragua, Japan, Uruguay, Panama, Angola,
Colombia, Taiwan, Colombia, Egypt, Korea, Haiti, Samoa, Chile, Brazil, The Philippines,
Honduras, Syria, Morocco, Cuba, Guatemala, Newfoundland, Bermuda, St. Lucia,
the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad, British Guiana, Greenland, Iceland,
Greece, Vietnam, Lebanon, Thailand, Laos, Congo (Zaire), Iran, El Salvador,
Libya, Chad, Italy, Bolivia, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia,
Macedonia, the Central African Republic, Albania, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya,
Tanzania, Afghanistan, Sudan, East Timor, Serbia, Nigeria, and Yemen. Oh, and
there are some that don’t even exist anymore, like the Kingdom of Tripoli,
Spanish Florida, French Louisiana, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Hawaii, the
Soviet Union, and Dalmatia. These are all pre-9/11, by the way. So if the
argument is that President Obama has overstretched executive authority by
taking military action without the formal authorization of Congress, that doesn’t
make him exceptionally tyrannical; it just makes him a normal president.
Another argument is that these are targeted killings of accused
criminals who deserve the right to a fair trial. This would be an entirely
legitimate argument if it came from people who had consistently held that the
declaration of war on Al Qaeda was illegitimate because the group isn’t a
country, so all actions against Al Qaeda should have been undertaken by law
enforcement. Conservatives who gave George W. Bush a blank check to fight Al
Qaeda all over the world can make this argument, but first they have to admit
they were wrong and slap “We Should Have elected John Kerry in ’04” stickers on
their cars. Liberals who want to make this argument would have to own it
completely, and would have to forgo the electoral benefits that came from the
killing of Osama Bin Laden, meaning they very well might have to accept that
this position is important enough for them that it would justify a Mitt Romney
presidency. I don’t hear that from either camp.
Slightly more legitimate is the concern that Americans have
been targeted. I recoil at this because it smacks of a kind of American
exceptionalism I find repugnant, the same kind that says foreigners can be
imprisoned without trial but Americans cannot, but I admit that our laws do
make different allowances for the treatment of American citizens than for the
citizens of other countries. However, if the President has the authority to
send troops to attack American nationals fighting against us in foreign lands,
then that authority necessarily extends to all the means at the military’s
disposal, and the military should be able to choose the means that is most
effective, threatens the safety of the fewest civilians, and puts the fewest American
soldiers at risk. Hence, drones.
Among the most legitimate concerns are those regarding the
transparency of the means by which the targets are chosen. “[The] review
process occurs entirely within the executive branch, violating the principle of
the separation of powers. The executive is the judge, jury and executioner,”
Juan Cole argues. “The drone program in the United States is hugely
anti-democratic because the whole thing is classified. Therefore, it cannot be
publicly discussed or debated with the officials behind it, who can neither
confirm nor deny its very existence.” This concern is real, but the same could
be said about any military planning. Decisions regarding household raids in
Iraq and Afghanistan were made under the same conditions, with the targets
receiving no trials unless they were captured. The drone strike program is
striking because it is employed when the President invokes his right to kill or
capture suspected Al Qaeda operatives, despite the fact that the drones have no
means to capture anyone. That shocks the conscience, but only because we were
willing to take it on faith that ground forces always make every effort to
capture enemies. Not only is this assumption naïve, but it must be
counterbalanced by the recognition that our forces put themselves in incredible
danger when seeking to capture suspected terrorists. As much as it seems
monstrous that President Obama personally authorizes the killing of suspected
terrorists, we should remember that the alternative is to personally authorize
missions to capture them and to take responsibility for the inevitable loss of
American lives that would accompany those decisions. I completely understand
that some are concerned that this President or the next might abuse his/her
authority to send in the drones, but without some evidence that the 227 strikes
he’s authorized as of January 23rd of this year have been so capricious
that the loss of American soldiers lives would be preferable because it would
focus American attention on the abuse, this argument is simply premature.
There’s also the legitimate concern about civilian
casualties. Any moral person should share this concern. Also, in a conflict
with an asymmetrical group like Al Qaeda, where winning the hearts and minds of
the locals is paramount to “victory” (whatever that means in this kind of war),
we have to acknowledge that every civilian casualty is not only a moral tragedy
but also a strategic failure. But in this context, criticizing drone strikes is
also a philosophical failure. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
there have been between 472 and 885 civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes as
of October of 2012. That’s in 350 strikes going back as far as 2009. That’s
certainly a lot of civilian deaths, but, for the sake of an honest comparison,
consider five years of boots-on-the-ground combat in Iraq: According to our own
government’s judgment (leaked through Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs) 66,081 Iraqi
civilians died in the period between January 2004 and December 2009. No one can
make a claim that President Bush or President Obama lacked the legal authority to put
our soldiers in harms’ way in Iraq during the period between 2004 and 2009. But
putting soldiers on the ground produced 140 times as many civilian casualties
as drone strikes in a similar amount of time. So if civilian casualties are the
concern, criticizing drone strikes simply doesn’t cut the mustard.
Ultimately, the most philosophically consistent criticism of
our drone strike policy comes from complete pacifists; if you don’t like that
people are killed in wars, drone strikes are certainly a part of that equation.
Wars between nations do not produce winners; they produce countries that lose
more and countries that lose less. Even in a post 9/11 world, we should
acknowledge that the people who actually attacked us are all dead, and that we
exchanged the threat of potentially devastating future attacks for the very
real and quantifiable loses we’ve suffered as a consequence of our reaction to
the attacks on 9/11. The War on Terror may have prevented X, but X is
unknowable, and the more than 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, the more than
3,000 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan, the more than 3,000 U.S. contractor
deaths in both, the $4 trillion dollars worth of projected costs (about $13,000
per American), and the estimated tens of thousands of Afghanistani civilian
deaths and the estimated 120 thousand Iraqi civilian deaths are knowable, and
should weigh heavily against any abstract threat. I used to be an absolute
pacifist on religious grounds, and though I’ve always thought of the men and
women who commit themselves to our Armed Forces as exemplars of duty and
self-sacrifice, I’m still highly skeptical of the efficacy of any war to
produce anything but human misery and opportunities for profiteering for corporations.
With that being said, I would encourage my fellow liberals to lay off the drone
strike arguments. Questioning the need for war of any kind should be a part of
our political debate, but holding hands with hawks to criticize drone strikes
threatens to sound like an argument that we should exchange the lives of more
soldiers and more civilians because we’re uncomfortable with a new technology
or with opaque military strategizing that isn’t actually new at all.
Righties, you hate Obama. You can’t articulate a good reason
why you hate him so much (despite my requests, hell, my begging for a good explanation), so you’re grasping at straws.
My fellow Lefties, you don’t like war. Good. Stick with
that. Unlike the Righties, you have literally trillions of good reasons.
But both sides, lay off the drones.