Another reason to care about drones
by digby
I’ve been less concerned about the drone technology itself and more concerned about the problem of unfettered presidential power. But there’s more to it than that. I’ll be honest and say that I hadn’t looked at it quite this way before:
America, the world’s leading democracy and a country built on a legal and moral framework unlike any other, has adopted a war-making process that too often bypasses its traditional, regimented, and rigorously overseen military in favor of a secret program never publicly discussed, based on legal advice never properly vetted. The Obama administration has used its executive power to refuse or outright ignore requests by congressional overseers, and it has resisted monitoring by federal courts.
To implement this covert program, the administration has adopted a tool that lowers the threshold for lethal force by reducing the cost and risk of combat. This still-expanding counterterrorism use of drones to kill people, including its own citizens, outside of traditionally defined battlefields and established protocols for warfare, has given friends and foes a green light to employ these aircraft in extraterritorial operations that could not only affect relations between the nation-states involved but also destabilize entire regions and potentially upset geopolitical order.
“I don’t think there is enough transparency and justification so that we remove not the secrecy, but the mystery of these things.”—Dennis Blair, former director of national intelligence
Hyperbole? Consider this: Iran, with the approval of Damascus, carries out a lethal strike on anti-Syrian forces inside Syria; Russia picks off militants tampering with oil and gas lines in Ukraine or Georgia; Turkey arms a U.S.-provided Predator to kill Kurdish militants in northern Iraq who it believes are planning attacks along the border. Label the targets as terrorists, and in each case, Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara may point toward Washington and say, we learned it by watching you. In Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
This is the unintended consequence of American drone warfare. For all of the attention paid to the drone program in recent weeks—about Americans on the target list (there are none at this writing) and the executive branch’s legal authority to kill by drone outside war zones (thin, by officials’ own private admission)—what goes undiscussed is Washington’s deliberate failure to establish clear and demonstrable rules for itself that would at minimum create a globally relevant standard for delineating between legitimate and rogue uses of one of the most awesome military robotics capabilities of this generation.
Now it’s true that just because the US establishes rules it wouldn’t necessarily follow that everyone else would follow. But we are the worlds only super-power, a military hegemon of unparalleled scope, and if we don’t do it, nobody will. The responsibility lies with us to set the example. And we are setting the wrong one.
The article goes on to list all the pluses of such a program and then assesses the criticism of the Obama’ administration’s rigid insistence on secrecy. It doesn’t come out looking very good on that score.
But even if you are one of those who have a starry-eyed view of American goodness and rightness, this, at least, should worry you:
[I]f the administration is not willing to share with lawmakers who are security-cleared to know, it certainly is not prepared to engage in a sensitive discussion, even among allies, that might begin to set the rules on use for a technology that could upend stability in already fragile and strategically significant places around the globe. Time is running out to do so.
“They’re not drawing names out of a hat here.”—Mike Rogers, chairman, House Intelligence Committee
“The history of technology development like this is, you never maintain your lead very long. Somebody always gets it,” said David Berteau, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They’re going to become cheaper. They’re going to become easier. They’re going to become interoperable,” he said. “The destabilizing effects are very, very serious.”
Berteau is not alone. Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, has urged officials to quickly establish norms. Singer, at Brookings, argues that the window of opportunity for the United States to create stability-supporting precedent is quickly closing. The problem is, the administration is not thinking far enough down the line, according to a Senate Intelligence aide. Administration officials “are thinking about the next four years, and we’re thinking about the next 40 years. And those two different angles on this question are why you see them in conflict right now.”
That’s in part a symptom of the “technological optimism” that often plagues the U.S. security community when it establishes a lead over its competitors, noted Georgetown University’s Kai-Henrik Barth. After the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States was sure it would be decades before the Soviets developed a nuclear-weapon capability. It took four years.
With drones, the question is how long before the dozens of states with the aircraft can arm and then operate a weaponized version. “Pretty much every nation has gone down the pathway of, ‘This is science fiction; we don’t want this stuff,’ to, ‘OK, we want them, but we’ll just use them for surveillance,’ to, ‘Hmm, they’re really useful when you see the bad guy and can do something about it, so we’ll arm them,’ ” Singer said. He listed the countries that have gone that route: the United States, Britain, Italy, Germany, China. “Consistently, nations have gone down the pathway of first only surveillance and then arming.”
Yes, I’d say the destabilizing effects are very serious indeed. And we are leading the way.
I can’t help but think of Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” in which she posited, quite convincingly, that the war was brought on by a desire among the boys to use their new toys as much as anything else.
And I also can’t help but think of President Obama saying to Netanyahu the other day that he was glad to “get away from congress,” in light of this:
Obama is the commander in chief as covert operator. The flag-waving “mission accomplished” speeches of his predecessor aren’t Obama’s thing; even his public reaction to the death of bin Laden was relatively subdued. Watching Obama, the reticent, elusive man whose dual identity is chronicled in “Dreams From My Father,” you can’t help wondering if he has an affinity for the secret world. He is opaque, sometimes maddeningly so, in the way of an intelligence agent.
Intelligence is certainly an area where the president appears confident and bold. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who has been running spy agencies for more than 20 years, regards Obama as “a phenomenal user and understander of intelligence.” When Clapper briefs the president each morning, he brings along extra material to feed the president’s hunger for information.
This is a president, too, who prizes his authority to conduct covert action. Clapper’s predecessor, Adm. Dennis Blair, lost favor in part because he sought to interpose himself in the chain of covert action. That encroached on Obama, who aides say sees it as a unique partnership with the CIA.
Perhaps Obama’s comfort level with his intelligence role helps explain why he has done other parts of the job less well. He likes making decisions in private, where he has the undiluted authority of the commander in chief. He likes information, as raw and pertinent as possible, and he gets impatient listening to windy political debates. He likes action, especially when he doesn’t leave fingerprints.
What this president dislikes — and does poorly — is political bargaining. He’s as bad a dealmaker as, let’s say, George Smiley would be. If the rote political parts of his job sometimes seem uninteresting to him, maybe that’s because they seem trivial compared to the secret activities that he directs each morning. If only economic policy could be executed as coolly and cleanly as a Predator shot.
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