The
American public and the world will never know how President Bill Clinton’s and President
George W. Bush’s drone programs would have evolved during their respective terms
in office due to the two-term limit to the U.S. presidency. There had not been
widespread prescient opinion about how the newly elected President Barack Obama
in 2009 would conduct his foreign policy after inheriting his predecessor’s
two-pronged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Would he expand the wars he
inherited? Would he invade Libya or another Middle East country? No one knew
for sure. One sound informed comment came from two University of London
academics, Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh. They argued in The Wall Street Journal back in June 2008, “Administrations
bequeath foreign policies to their successors that are then tweaked, but rarely
transformed.”[1] Looking back, this was
correct with Obama in the election year of 2008: there has not been a
transformational change in his foreign policy from George W. Bush’s.
In his first term, President Obama
expanded Bush’s drone attacks in Pakistan, waged covert wars in Yemen and
Somalia, and drastically increased American troop levels in Afghanistan. He overthrew
Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya. In 2011, Obama became the first U.S. president to
authorize the assassination of an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki,
and ordered the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad
compound in Pakistan. Nevertheless, many pundits and most of the American
public continue to perceive Obama as dovish. [2]
Barack Obama promised some lofty
acts in his campaign platform if elected: more transparency in governing, pull
out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, ban brutal interrogation of suspects,
shut down Guantánamo prison, focus narrowly on the war against Al Qaeda
guerrillas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to name a few. But where did these quasi-isolationist
notions originate? These notions were the residue of the Democratic Party’s
disastrous foreign policy under John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon B. Johnson’s
Vietnam War in the 1960s. For twenty years - from 1968 to 1988 - the Democratic
Party suffered reduction of voters (with the exception of the one-term
presidency of Jimmy Carter during that era) because of the devastation and
disaster that was the Vietnam War.[3] It
was a conflict where the United States engaged in a counterinsurgency program
that evolved into a full-scale war. A historian and former Washington official
even went as far as condemning the U.S. intervention in Vietnam as coming close
to committing genocide of the Vietnamese people, where about two million of
them were killed.[4] More than 58,000 American
troops died in the Vietnam War. The United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam
than the combined armed forces of the world during the Second World War.
With its disastrous reputation in
the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party had to change its course from the 1970s
on to be more isolationist and multilateral, mirroring its constituency’s position
on the American role in the world.[5] This
came to be termed the “Vietnam syndrome.” Thus, the Democratic president Barack
Obama in 2009, planned to skirt the Republicans’ hawkish foreign policy under
George W. Bush of direct invasions of countries - e.g., Afghanistan and Iraq -
and move it more in the direction of clandestine warfare involving the use of
unmanned aircraft to conduct airstrikes. The first drone strike under Obama’s
watch was in Yemen, on December 17, 2009. That strike killed Obama’s intended
target, but it also killed innocent civilians in two neighboring families
leaving a trail of cluster bombs that killed even more people.[6]
The advent and development of drone
technology at the turn of the century came the opportunity in 2009 for a newly
elected Democratic president to take advantage of a program that obviated the
need to resort to “boots on the ground” in the war-torn Middle East. Obama did
this by ordering unmanned airstrikes in places where his advisers deem
international terrorism breeds. The first U.S. predator drone flew over Tarnak
Farms (believed to be an al Qaeda camp) in Afghanistan on 7 September 2000 when
Bill Clinton was still president. That U.S. predator drone just took photos of
a man in what CIA analysts later determined was Osama bin Laden. From that time
forward, the U.S. government had been using the drone as an auxiliary tool and weapon
for ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, the United States began
using drones to kill suspects associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the declared war zones. Between 2004 and 2012, the
Central Intelligence Agency conducted 320 drone strikes in Pakistan killing
more than 2,560 people including 139 civilians. It conducted 55 drone strikes
in Yemen.[7]
The first U.S. killing by an armed
drone occurred in November 2001 when Muhammad Atef, Al Qaeda’s military
commander, was struck. Since then, the U.S. government has regarded the predator
drone as an important weapon in its interventions in the Middle East.[8] But
it was not until the Obama administration that the weaponized drone was used as
the major weapon of choice in its counterterrorism efforts.
Upon election, Obama shrewdly navigated
enough wiggle room within the U.S. Constitution from which he could act hawkish
without seemingly being so to the American public. Yet, among his aides, he has
declared several times that he was really adept at killing people.[9] In
late June 2016 the Obama administration has released official government
statistics declaring that since 2009 it has conducted 473 strikes that
successfully killed between 2,372 and 2,581 terrorist suspects identified by
his advisors as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Furthermore, it released a
statistic showing the number of innocent bystanders that were killed during
those strikes - between 64 and 116. But according to various independent
sources, such as The Long War Journal,
New America, and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism - reported by The New York Times - the number of
innocent civilians that were killed in the Obama drone strikes ranges from much
higher numbers, 207 to 801.[10] The
civilian toll is much higher than the Obama administration would prefer to
admit.
In 2013, international lawyers and
human rights groups began criticizing Obama’s drone program. One United Nations
official, Christof Heyns, submitted an official report to the U.N. General
Assembly regarding drone strikes. Heyns has pointed out that under the laws of
war, the standards for attacking a person had to rest on whether or not this
person is engaged in ongoing combat function and is directly participating in
hostilities.[11] Responding to the
criticisms, the president was forced to shift the bulk of the control of drones
from the CIA to the Defense Department. The agency continues to conduct drone
strikes on Pakistan and Yemen. Initially, it made for good policy that the
program of targeted killings had to be completely under the auspices of the CIA
because the agency’s modus operandi is
conducting foreign interventions clandestinely. Now that the program is mostly
under the U.S. military, it will have to be more transparent to the public.
Yet, the Obama administration
continues to be opaque about its drone program even though the president
himself has admitted through his White House National Security Council
spokesman Ned Price, quoted in The Wall
Street Journal, that his administration should “‘be more transparent about
both the basis of our counterterrorism actions and the manner in which they are
carried out.’”[12] Both The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union have
pursued legal efforts to have the Obama administration make public the legal
bases for its killing of suspects overseas.
One way the administration defended
its drone program was it had its Justice Department lawyers try to refute the
critics’ arguments about the legality of the strikes. The administration’s
attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, for example, were in violation of
international law, the critics contend. The strikes are extending the armed
conflict outside of declared war zones. In response, a counterargument the
Justice Department lawyers cited in support of Obama’s drone program was the
speech given by State Department lawyer John R. Stevenson on May 28, 1970, when
President Richard M. Nixon was secretly bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam
War, as pointed out by professor of law Mary Dudziak in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times.[13]
In the speech to the New York City Bar Association, Stevenson claimed that the
Nixon administration kept from bombing Cambodia despite its knowledge that
since 1965, North Vietnam was using the country as a base for its military
operations. Because the North Vietnamese was in Cambodia, he stated that it had
long been justified for the administration to start bombing it for self-defense
but they had refrained out of careful adherence to international law. In fact,
however, as pointed out by Dudziak, Nixon was already secretly carpet-bombing
Cambodia beginning on March 17, 1969 – more than a year earlier of Stevenson’s
speech. Why did Nixon have to keep the bombing secret? Because had he consulted
Congress and made his attacks of Cambodia public, there would have been an
escalation of the mass protests already prominent in the United States against
the Vietnam War.[14] The Nixonian precedent,
as Obama’s legal backers have invoked, proved inconsistent with contemporary
scholarship about the Vietnam War.
Another exposure of the thin legal
rationale for Obama’s targeted killings was when in 2014, the Justice
Department was forced by a federal appeals court to release a 2010 memo
explaining why the drone strike in Yemen that killed an American citizen and an
Al Qaeda Sunni Muslim cleric, Anwar al Awlaki, in 2011 was legal. The
administration, to the extent that it could, fought against the memo’s release.
One has to wonder why, assuming the administration was being honest, it should
feel insecure about its legal justifications for Obama’s orders to kill an
American citizen. Were officials worried that it might expose their little
regard for Fifth Amendment protections of due process under the normal procedures
of a court trial? Additionally, in 2013, the Obama administration refused to declassify
a fifty-five-page memo prepared over a six-month period in the Office of Legal
Counsel that lays out the legal basis for the use of drones.[15] A
plausible answer to the administration’s reticence in releasing information
would be what The New York Times editorial
pointed out after reading the 2010 memo released in 2014 that justified the
drone strike that killed Awlaki: “…the memo turns out to be a slapdash pastiche
of legal theories - some based on obscure interpretations of British and
Israeli law - that was clearly tailored to the desired result. Perhaps the
administration held out so long to avoid exposing the thin foundation on which
it based such a momentous decision.”[16]
The Democrats have pulled back from
direct invasions of other countries during the Clinton era. Now, post-911, the
Middle East has been a much more volatile region after George W. Bush’s
invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Both countries have been
severely devastated. The latter descended into chaos and sectarian violence.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent instability it unleashed there has
resulted in more than 150,000 Iraqi deaths (mostly civilians) between 2003 and
2009, and a total of 4,491 U.S. service members killed between 2003 and 2014.
So, how does a new Democratic
president in 2009 conduct his foreign policy after these devastating invasions
by a Republican administration? By 2008 at the end of the Bush era, American
policymakers started to believe that killing jihadists before they attack the
American homeland was preferable to direct military invasions.[17]
This has been the predilection of policymakers in both parties, especially the
Democrats with Obama. And with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down,
Washington figured out a way to continue to stymie jihadist retaliation against
the United States by depending on drones because it is inexpensive, high tech,
and secretive. This advantage in foreign policy also resonates with the public,
as policy analyst Audrey Cronin has written:
Given the shocking nature of terrorist
attacks, U.S. counterterrorism policy depends not just on objective measures of
effectiveness but also on public opinion. And the American public demands zero
risk, especially of a terrorist attack at home. In this sense, drone strikes
offer the ideal, poll-tested counterterrorism policy: cheap, apparently
effective, and far away.[18]
The statistics show an interesting
contrast between the views of Americans about the drone program versus the
populations of other countries. A majority of Americans support Obama’s drone
program, at 58 percent.[19] No
surprise that in the rest of the world, especially in heavily drone attacked
places like Pakistan, the support is quite low. A majority of Pakistanis, 74
percent of the population, regard the United States as their enemy and 90
percent are against U.S. drone strikes.[20] Other
states in the region also have a majority of their population against the U.S.
drone program: Turkey at 81 percent; Jordan at 85 percent; and Egypt at 89
percent. Europeans who oppose U.S. drones are the Poles, at 51 percent; the Germans,
at 59 percent; the French, at 63 percent; the Spanish, at 76 percent; and the Greeks,
at 90 percent.[21]
Americans’ high support for the
drone program may be the outcome of feeling war-weary. Proponents of drones
laud it as being very effective in killing key leaders of Al Qaeda and stopping
other jihadists from building sanctuaries in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Between
2009 and 2013, Obama’s drone program has killed an estimated 3,300 suspected
jihadists.[22] Drones attacks, according
to its supporters, are low cost; provide zero risk to U.S. troops, and results
in fewer civilian deaths than conventional military means.
The alternatives to the drone
program, proponents argue, are just too risky and unrealistic. To capture,
arrest, search compounds, interrogate, and try militants in court are just too
cumbersome and dangerous to the military. Professor of Security Studies Program
at Georgetown University and a proponent of Obama’s drone program, David Byman,
has argued that:
Raids, arrests, and interrogations can
produce vital intelligence and can be less controversial than lethal
operations. That is why it should be, and indeed already are, used in stable
countries where the United States enjoys the support of the host government.
But in war zones or unstable countries, such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia,
arresting militants is highly dangerous, and even if successful, often
inefficient. In those countries, the government exerts little or no control
over remote areas, which means that it is highly dangerous to go after
militants hiding out there.[23]
Thus, as vulgar as it sounds, “It
has become more politically palatable for the United States to kill rather than
detain suspected terrorists,” Byman added.[24] If
the United States wants to continue its hegemony in the Middle East region and
to stop jihadists in places where they are plotting attacks in the United
States without having to put boots on the ground, then drone attacks are the
way to go. But what makes this method of war unpalatable to most of the world
besides the countries being drone attacked? Writing a review of a book by New York Times journalist Scott Shane
called Objective Troy, Thomas Nagel
in the London Review of Books has
pointed out that, “The president as killer is a chilling new face of the role
of commander-in-chief. I suspect that it is the personal individualised nature
of drone warfare that many people find so repellent.” It is the newness and
strangeness of drone warfare in the United States under Obama that many in the
world feel uneasy about. The world is familiar with conventional wars - Europe
suffered through two world wars that devastated it. But it is not used to a
lone world hegemon, the United States, and with one person taking
responsibility for targeted killings (assassinations) that makes this program
particularly unpalatable. “War is hell, as we all know,” writes Nagel, “But
when the president puts someone on a kill list to be taken out by a precise
drone strike, it creates the illusory sense of a more direct responsibility for
that death than for the other kind.”[25]
Besides the “illusory sense” the
world experiences about Obama’s drone program, it also has at least two
official problems. In June 2014, a bipartisan panel produced a report on the
drone program. Two major warnings from the report were noted by The New York Times: One, the targeted
killings put the United States in a dangerous position of perpetual war; and
second, the method may be adopted by other countries like China and Russia. On
the concern of perpetual war, more than a decade has passed since the United
States started using drones to kills suspects but it still has not thoroughly
analyzed its benefits versus its costs. The one possible major drawback of
Obama’s drone warfare is that it is creating more enemies as it is killing them
- though no conclusive evidence of this has been put forth. Nevertheless, the
picture is mixed when it comes to drone warfare. As Audrey Cronin has written:
“drones are killing operatives who aspire to attack the United States today or
tomorrow. But they are also increasing the likelihood of attacks over the long
term, by embittering locals and cultivating a desire for vengeance.”[26] One
very dangerous situation of note is in Pakistan, where, as mentioned above, 90
percent of the population is angered by the U.S. attacks in their country: it
has about 100 nuclear weapons entirely controlled by the Pakistani military. If
those weapons land in jihadi hands it could spell nuclear conflagration, a
situation well worth avoiding.
The other issue raised by the panel
on drones is the dangerous precedent it may inculcate in other countries like
China and Russia. They brought up the latter country as an example: in circumstances
where Russia conducts drone attacks on suspected anti-Russian militants in Ukraine
and then refuse to be transparent about the basis for its attacks, the United
States then would be in no position to condemn Russian targeted killings in
Ukraine. Other examples are as troublesome. It would be predictable what
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria would do with drones, if he had them,
considering his violent response to the peaceful pro-Democracy protestors
during the Arab Spring. Iran can conceivably send drone attacks against rebels
in Syria. And China has announced in 2013 that it was considering the targeted
killing of a drug trafficker hiding in Myanmar, though Beijing has later denied
it.[27]
As President Obama is nearing the
end of his term it is imperative that he continues to be more transparent with
his use of drones, particularly in the countries the United States is not at
war with (Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) because his successor will most likely
continue to abuse them.[28]
Since Obama has decided recently to switch the bulk of the drone program from
the CIA to the Department of Defense, there has been a decrease in civilian deaths.
As David Cole has pointed out in The New
York Review of Books, according to the New America Foundation in 2011,
there had been between forty-nine and sixty-three innocents who have died in
Pakistan; but from 2014 through 2016, when Obama became more transparent about
his drone program and has subjected his administration to some limitations on
its operations, there were only two reported. In Yemen in 2012, there were
sixteen civilian deaths reported compared to only five in 2014.[29]
These changes suggest that when the administration decides to be a bit more
discriminating and transparent with its drone program, as it had in its second
term, fewer civilian deaths occur. This may lead to an improved U.S. standing
in the world.
Nevertheless, grave problems are
inherent in drone warfare for any U.S. president. As historian Lloyd Gardner
has written:
American policymakers…have been unable to
reconcile national interests with a strategy that will satisfy demands for
changes in the world order. Drones are an exciting prospect for holding down
American casualties and killing fewer civilians than in old-style wars. But the
“lesser evil” argument really doesn’t work when in the long run the strikes
creates new enemies and force the construction of new kill lists…Not only do
drones threaten the nation’s future by creating and sustaining an endless,
seemingly mystical war against terrorism, but defending drones requires the
abandonment of the Constitution. And that means the perpetrators of 9/11 have
won.[30]
[1] Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, “Don’t
Expect a Big Change in U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Wall Street Journal, June, 2, 2008, A15.
[2] Peter L. Bergen,
“Warrior in Chief,” The New York Times
[3] James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White
House to Redefine American Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 13.
[4] William R. Polk, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, & War, From
the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007),
xvii.
[5] Benjamin I. Page and Marshall M. Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What
Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2006), 227-228. Also, see James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American
Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 13-14.
[6] Jo Becker and Scott
Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, May 29, 2012, A1.
[7] Editorial, “Rules for
Targeted Killing,” The New York Times,
November 30, 2012, A34.
[8] Warren Bass, “The Dawn
of the Drone Era,” The Wall Street
Journal, July 26-27, 2014, Review sec. C3.
[9] Thomas Nagel, “Really
Good at Killing,” review of Objective
Troy: A President and the Rise of the Drone, by Scott Shane, London Review of Books, Vol. 38, number
5, March 3, 2016, 6.
[10] Scott Shane, “Drone
Strike Statistics Answers Few Questions, and Raise Many,” The New York Times, July 4, 2016, A1 and A3.
[11] Steve Coll, “The
Unblinking Stare,” The New Yorker,
November 24, 2014, 103.
[12] Adam Entous and Gordon
Lubold, “Drone Plan Gives Pentagon Wider Role,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2016, A7.
[13] Mary L. Dudziak, “Obama’s
Nixonian Precedent,” The New York Times,
March 22, 2013, A29.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Lloyd C. Gardner, Killing Machine: The American Presidency in
the Age of Drone Warfare (New York: The New Press, 2013), viii-ix.
[16] Editorial, “A Thin
Rationale for Drone Killings,” The New
York Times, June 24, 2014, A26.
[19] “Public Continues to Back
U.S. Drone Attacks,” Pew Research Center,
http://www.people-press.org/2015/05/28/public-continues-to-back-u-s-drone-attacks/
(accessed August 22, 2016).
[20] Daniel Byman, “Why
Drones Work,” Foreign Affairs 92
(2013): 39.
[21] Cronin, “Why Drones
Fail,” Foreign Affairs, 49-50.
[22] Byman, “Why Drones
Work,” Foreign Affairs, 33.
[23] Ibid., 34.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Nagel, “The Ethics of
Drones,” London Review of Books, Vol.
38, number 5, March 3, 2016, 6.
[26] Cronin, “Why Drones
Fail,” Foreign Affairs, 52.
[27] Byman, “Why Drones
Work,” Foreign Affairs, 41.
[28] Jameel Jaffer and Brett
Max Kaufman, “The Next President’s Drone War,” The New York Times, March 8, 2016, A25.
[29] David Cole, “The Drone
Presidency,” review of Drone: Remote
Control Warfare, by Hugh Gusterson, The
Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program
by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The
Intercept, Drones and the Future of
Armed Conflict: Ethical, Legal, and Strategic Implications editors David
Cortright, Rachel Fairhust, and Kristen Wall, Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy editors Peter L.
Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, The New
York Review of Books August 18, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/the-drone-presidency/
(accessed August 24, 2016).
[30] Lloyd C. Gardner, Killing Machine: The American Presidency in
the Age of Drone Warfare (New York: The New Press, 2013), 232-234.
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