Oddly, it seems like the Libertarians might be on the right side of history and morality on this issue. Progressives seem almost supine re the moral and legal questions surrounding the targeting of Americans to be killed by drones sans any judicial oversight and the collateral damage to innocents that happens all too often in drone strikes.
Why are the Libertarians the main ones carrying the water on this issue? Why are Progressives sitting on their hands and giving the POTUS a pass on this?
Because they are so few and so powerless in this country that they effectively don’t exist, so you won’t hear anything they say. The Left has been complaining about Obama since literally day one of his Administration; you just don’t hear it reported much.
There are a few. The Atlantic, hardly a right-wing publication, had one of its editors write a series of editorials about how he couldn’t vote for Obama because of drone strikes. He very nearly convinced me.
It feels like we’ve had an awful lot of threads asking this question, always with at least a few posters saying they do have problems with the drone program (and in some cases total opposition to it). If you expect all Democrats or liberals to be opposed, you’ve misunderstood their views on foreign policy. People who identify as progressives have probably been saying they are opposed- you just haven’t heard them.
You know what is even cheaper, safer and creates even less collateral damage? Not performing these strikes at all.
They generally trust the administration to use drones only when it’s in the country’s best interests
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They aren’t just supporting Obama having these powers, but also his successor. Apparently they’re just too stupid to realise that.
Then they need to be reined in.
This is the most stupid excuse of all. Even if we took it as a given that this was true, what the Democrats are doing right now is the exact same goddamn thing.
I dislike the program, but the fact is that its supported by the Democrats, Republicans, the Senate, the House, SCOTUS, large majorities of the population including large majorities of registered Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Obama obviously supports it, Boehner supports it, McConnell supports it, Reid supports it, Pelosi supports it.
Even Rand Paul seemed pretty OK with the program with the exception of the very specific case of targeting Americans with a particular weapons system if they’re standing on American soil at the time.
What push back there is comes from paleo-conservatives, libertarians and the more peace-nik wing of the liberals. Put all of the members of Congress who qualify as a member of any of those three groups, and I imagine you could fit them all into a mini-van.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and convince people, but the fact is there isn’t going to be any meaningful political action to do anything about it unless there’s a huge shift in popular opinion.
As a progressive, I like the Democrats much more than I like the Republicans.
False equivalence is a key tool used by Republicans to turn off a good deal of the public.
I question the drone program too. But much as with Shirley Sherrod, with ACORN, with the early days of the ACA (I remember when it was dead), I’d like to take a bit of time to see what develops before following the right wing leading a credulous media to a hasty conclusion.
I stand with The Undertaker on this, although, perhaps, I might phrase it negatively: I hate the Democrats a lot less than I hate the Republicans. Seriously, there are a lot of planks in the Democratic Party’s formal platform that I like a lot, and damn few in the Republican platform.
I do not understand why drone strikes have been singled out for such odium. How do they differ, really, from any other artillery strike? Why is it so much worse that people are being hit by missiles from drones…rather than, say, just being shot?
Deadly violence is always a last resort in law-enforcement. Cops shoot criminals; it happens. It isn’t the default plan. No good policeman goes in to a confrontation planning on shooting; the situation has to lead up to it. Do the same people complain that the Constitution forbids the shooting of American Citizens by law enforcement officers (whether or not on American soil?)
If some violent and felonious gang of armed criminals sheltered themselves in an arroyo somewhere, shooting at anyone that came nearby, a drone strike seems not to be the worst way to take them down.
When the fellow stole a tank from a National Guard armory in San Diego, and went on a suburban rampage in it, the Marines at Camp Pendleton had dispatched a unit with anti-tank rockets. The guy ended up hanging the tank up on a concrete freeway divider, and a policeman shot him with a pistol, but the U.S. Military was preparing to attack him with a rocket, not much different from the rockets launched by drones. How is this “unconstitutional?”
Obviously, but that option isn’t really on the table. We are not going to let known terrorist roam freely if we can take him out.
How is it stupid to trust one person with certain powers and not another? For example, I trust the Obama administration to determine when and how we need to strike militarily whereas I didn’t generally trust the Bush administration to do so. I trust Bernanke to run the Fed and make the decisions he did during the recession, whereas some other guy might not have been as trust worthy. I have trusted all presidents in my lifetime to have the final call on when to launcvh nukes, but if some nutcase was elected President in 2016, I might reevaluate my support. Ultimately, the powers specifically enumerated are sometimes less important that having someone use those powers judiciously.
Now you are gonna say, well what if the next president abuses those powers. If that happens, then you attack that person for their abuses of power- not the ability to do something that was essentially already being done via more costly and less efficient means. All wars are essentially targeted killing. It’s not like we are talking about government being able to do something they couldn’t do before.
The only small difference is that we now have more of a legal issue with US citizens fighting against us trying assert their rights as Americans. I can see how that could occasionally be a thorny issue, particularly attacking a US citizen on American soil, but I don’t think that will be an issue in 99% of cases. Particularly given that such a decision would not be taken lightly by any competent President, nor would it be ordered without an extraordinary amount of evidence.
Why do you think one side is gonna be above politics and the other won’t? More importantly, let’s review what happened. Drone strikes started under Bush. Some liberals raised objections, and were basically ignored, called un-American, etc. The policies basically continue. Finally a new president comes with whom they happen to agree with on many other issues, and you expect them to stand in lockstep with people who are primarily raising objections in order to derail the President’s entire agenda? Might they still disagree with the policy? Sure, but they don’t need to continually state their disagreement, especially if it can be used to further policies that happen to agree with.
I was totally going for being read as the Undertaker… heh heh…
The thing is, I understand the reticence regarding drones. A missile is more lethal than a bullet, for one thing. Also, it is far easier to send something to scan the skies with no risk to the government or government agents and eliminate any target that a government might want eliminated. It’s all well and good when it’s President Obama, but what happens when the Kochs install their president of choice?
Confusion. Evil. Chaos.
Not only that, collateral damage is really just an attempt to sanitize the statement ‘killing innocent people’. I have great sympathy toward being very, very careful with this technology, just as we should have been as a species with bombs, bullets, spears to begin with.
I think I’d be satisfied if there were a transparently laid out process (I miss you, FISA) for determining who is considered a legitimate target for this technology. And in order to trust that process, the AUMF and the Patriot Act need to go bye-bye for this progressive. You wanna use the term victory to describe Afghanistan? Osama and most of Al Qaeda is dead? Great. We won. Time to get back to being Americans again… and that means, innocent until proven guilty and we all get to see court procedures.
But that is not the choice. The choice is between a missile shot from an unmanned drone vs. a missile shot from a manned fighter jet, or a drone vs. doing nothing. Consider the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American born terrorist killed in a drone strike. In 2009, they attempted to kill him. It was a manned Yemeni air assault, not a U.S. drone strike. When they finally got him in 2011, it was done via a drone. Is there really any substantive difference between the two things?
When that guy slips up, you nail him. It’s if not as if there is no recourse when a President does something unethical or unwise even if he is within the bounds of the law. At a certain point, you just have to have a basic level of trust for those in government. We trust them with nuclear weapons, viruses, data, etc. If some President was really planning to use all those powers for nefarious means, there are multiple redundancies, means of addressing such issues, and moral people in government to prevent widespread chaos.
I think some of the trepidation comes from this belief that these are unilateral decisions made in haste. I don’t even think that was the case with Bush. To quote the times article, killing al-Awlaki,“the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, intense deliberation by lawyers working for President Obama and turf fights between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., whose parallel drone wars converged on the killing grounds of Yemen.” While there is not a formal, transparent process, I don’t think it’s arbitrary or capricious.
Drone strikes result in fewer innocent people killed. If anything, it’s better along those lines.
Which is in part why progressives and libertarians don’t really agree on this issue. Rand Paul was basically getting all bent out of shape because Holder wouldn’t rule out a drone strike on an American citizen in the US under extraordinary circumstances. Best as I can tell, he was outraged by an extremely unlikely scenario, not that people (Americans and foreigners) are being targeted for assassination without trials. Progressives generally viewed that as the primary issue, which is why many had issues not only with drones, but also with Guantanamo.
Neither progressives nor libertarians are giving Obama a pass on this policy. Libertarians are not giving it a pass because of the potential for extra-judicial killings of Americans. Progressives are not giving it a pass because of the small percentage of civilians that are killed in the strikes.
Luckily, both sets of individuals are fringe groups where many of their views belong. The people responsible for the longest war we will ever fight - the war on anti-American Islamic terrorism - see the drone strikes for what they are: efficient and effective. Drone strikes are a vital tool for our war against an enemy that does not run a country or have its own borders, but instead act as parasites where government is weak.
Ouch! My myopia got me good that time! I’m glad you didn’t take it as snark, because, honest to goodness, it was my eyes playing tricks on me! Sincere apologies!
I s’pose, but, to me, it seems like it’s a pointless distinction. There might be some horrible situation, some day, when artillery is legally and properly used against American Citizens. (Antietam comes to mind…)
Total agreement. The phrase is Orwellian – remember when villages in Vietnam were “pacified?” And, definitely, the weapons system is far from minimally “surgical.”
(Sigh… I figure to see mini-drones and micro-drones in the near future, armed with small-arms, to be used with more precision – but no more morality.)
This has pretty much been my opinion ever since GWB decided that the World Trade Center attacks were an “act of war.” No, they were a crime, and could have been dealt with as a criminal matter. We wouldn’t have had to live under the absurd “phantom zone” definition of “enemy combatant,” let alone the really scary business about how any of us, donating money to a charitable organization, might be accused – and imprisoned without trial – for “supporting a terrorist organization.” They don’t tend to disclose that on their web sites!
