In assessing President Obama’s “drone war” the editors of the New York Times declaim:
The Obama administration in 2013 adopted stricter guidelines for the drone campaign, which is run by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. They instruct intelligence and military personnel to determine with “near certainty†that their target is present at the location of an intended strike, that noncombatants will not be hurt or killed, that capture is not a feasible option and that the local government is not equipped to address the threat.
But it is impossible to assess whether these rules are being followed without more detailed information, including the identity of targets, dates, locations and assessments of collateral damage by strikes. This data could be released without compromising national security. This is also true of the secret legal memos that justify the drone campaign. Harold Koh, who served as the legal adviser at the State Department from 2009 to 2013, said the lack of transparency has unnecessarily damaged perceptions of the drone program.
Let me help the editors: there are no rules. On the one hand there are actions and on the other there are public relations statements.
That’s completely characteristic of the Obama Administration in which laws and regulations are mere instruments of ego gratification—addressing the concerns of the moment. Rules that flexible are no rules at all. We can look forward to four or eight years of the same since Hillary Clinton operates by the same playbook.
You would prefer what? The only options to our drone war that I see are abdicating and creating safe zones for terrorists to organize, and a larger scale military engagement with a whole lot more dead civilians.
For all its flaws, the perpetual drone war — even with minimal oversight — is less worse in terms of civilians killed.
Whether this creates fewer terrorists in retaliation is an open question — the specter of death hanging over everyone for months and years at a time may be more damaging to the community than a few cruise missiles and more dead.
I would prefer that we obey the international agreements to which we’re party, only make war when sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council (or abandon our membership—take your pick), only allow uniformed members of our armed forces to make war, and have rules of engagement that are open to debate, at least behind Congress’s closed doors.
How do you know that? We only know what we’re being told and the few things that we can tell from outside evidence. The president’s drone war has already destabilized one country (Yemen) and is a cause célèbre in others, including Pakistan where it could potentially destabilize a nuclear-armed country.
The evidence suggests that most of the drone attacks are not directed against terrorists but against political enemies of ruling regimes.