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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.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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