The Squint: The antiwar Drone President - will Obama leave a Drone legacy?

That an antiwar president has found the drone so tempting ought to be a warning sign. As Hugh Gusterson writes in Drone: Remote Control Warfare:

If targeted killing outside the law has been so attractive to a president who was a constitutional law professor,who opposed the war in Iraq from the very beginning, who ended the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program, and who announced his intention to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp on assuming office, it is unlikely that any successor to his office will easily renounce the seductions of the drone.

And it is not only President Trump or Clinton we need to worry about. Other countries are unlikely to be reticent about resort to unmanned aerial warfare to “solve” problems beyond their borders. Already, Israel, the United Kingdom, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Pakistan have joined the US in deploying armed drones. China is selling them at a list price of only $1 million. In short order, most of the developed world will have them, Yikes!

So what is Obama’s record? If it is to be a guide for future conduct, it is important to understand precisely what he has and has not asserted and done. And as Obama looks to the end of his tenure, the critical question is, what can and should he do now to mitigate the risks that a world armed with drones will become a place in which lethal force is a first rather than a last resort?

Some critics equate Obama’s drone record with the war crimes of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Glenn Greenwald, for example, charges in his afterword to The Assassination Complex that Obama’s drone policy “embodies the worst of what made the Bush-Cheney ‘war on terror’ approach so destructive.” Fordham Law School professor Karen Greenberg maintains, in the collection Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict, that Obama’s drone war “is but a refocused and incrementally more legally rationalized version of standards and assumptions that have persisted since the beginning of the War on Terror.”1

Greenwald summarizes Obama’s approach to drones as follows:

The centerpiece of his drone assassination program is that he, and he alone, has the power to target people, including American citizens, anywhere they are found in the world and order them executed on his unilateral command, based on his determination that the person to be killed is a terrorist.

Greenwald summarizes Obama’s approach to drones as follows:

The centerpiece of his drone assassination program is that he, and he alone, has the power to target people, including American citizens, anywhere they are found in the world and order them executed on his unilateral command, based on his determination that the person to be killed is a terrorist.

And if drones inspire resentment and promote support for our enemies, they may be counterproductive. Most accounts suggest that they do just that. Imagine how Americans would feel if another country was executing individuals living among us by dropping bombs from unmanned aircraft hovering overhead—and refusing even to acknowledge that it was doing so. General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded US troops in Afghanistan, told The Huffington Post in 2013 that drone strikes create “a perception of American arrogance” and generate hatred “at a visceral level.” Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama’s first director of national intelligence, has similarly argued that drones are counterproductive because they cause so much anti-American resentment in targeted countries

The question for President Obama is whether he wants to be remembered as the leader who ushered in the era of permanent, low-level drone warfare. His actions will be looked to for justification by those that follow, here and abroad. As David Reisner, former head of the Israel Defense Forces legal department, has said, “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it…. International law progresses through violations.”

Yet under President Obama, the US has executed thousands of individuals, far from any battlefield, and has yet to offer any specific accounting of the basis for its actions, with the lone exception of the September 2011 killing in Yemen of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen. In particular, the administration has not explained who it has killed, the basis for the decision to kill, or the actual result of specific drone strikes. Killing enemy fighters in wartime on the battlefield is an accepted practice, and generally does not require individualized justifications; enemy status is sufficient. But when a nation asserts the power to kill specific individuals, outside of war zones, based on their alleged misconduct, it must justify its actions—and must do so publicly, to the extent possible. That justification has been lacking. Secret executions cannot be squared with the rule of law. They are the stuff of death squads, not democracies.

As President Obama said in his 2013 NDU speech, “The same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power—or risk abusing it.” He now has the opportunity to impose constraint in a meaningful way. If he fails to take it, his legacy will be as the Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered a dramatically dangerous and ethically dubious form of warfare. That’s not the Obama I want to remember.

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