Barack Obama: Drone Warrior
By Charles Krauthammer,
A very strange story, that 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 vets released a response ad, pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs.
That ad also highlighted the many self-references Obama made in announcing the bin Laden raid: “I can report . . . I directed . . . I met repeatedly . . . I determined . . . at my direction . . .
I, as commander in chief,” etc. ad nauseam.
(Eisenhower’s announcement
of the D-Day invasion made not a single mention of his role, whereas
the alternate statement he’d prepared had the landing been repulsed was
entirely about it being his failure.)
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 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 10
killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror,
there are practically no captures anymore. 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.
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