Killing Machine (2 page)

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he talked about the Iraq War as not just an aberration of American foreign policy but the culmination of trends and impulses of a long-standing nature. Here is what he said in one of his campaign appearances: “I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.” After that declaration, however, he added, “We need to have a strike force that can take out potential terrorist bases that get set up in Iraq.” The one thing to avoid, he said, was “mission creep,” which would have the United States keep a large number of troops on the ground in a Middle Eastern country. Was this statement an early indication of how Obama would seize upon drone warfare as the ultimate escape from past mistakes?

As in so many cases, how one parsed presidential language supplied answers—if not always the right ones—to such questions. Many of Obama’s listeners, it seemed, wanted to pay attention only to his statements about winding down the Iraq War. Obama’s views were never so uncomplicated, however: he was not a “McGovernite,” as some in the Democratic Party hoped and many others feared. The “mind-set that got us into war” was really a description of the neocon obsession with Saddam Hussein, not a more general commitment to peaceful diplomacy over the use of force. The broader quest, in Obama’s vision, was for “a strike force that can take out potential terrorist bases.” And within that sentence, the key word would turn out to be “potential,” for there is where the drone debate eventually led—whether the threats to be addressed by the use of drone attacks were “potential” or “imminent,” and whether they were the same thing.

It could be argued that Barack Obama was trapped or fell into the embrace of Reaper and Predator drones by circumstances beyond his control. He had not been the first to use UAVs. Counter-insurgency strategies clearly were not working, and the ambiguous attitudes of government leaders in Afghanistan’s neighboring countries only exacerbated its failure. Moreover, the Great Recession put limits on future military budgets in a global theater of war in which the enemy wore no uniforms and box cutters could be deadly weapons.

That there is terrific pressure on federal budgets is absolutely the case, so much so that Republicans have so far not flinched in a showdown with the president over “sequestration,” the implementation of automatic budget cuts that would scale back the Department of Defense’s procurement of new weapons. Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, told the
New York Times
: “Fiscal questions trump defense in a way they never would have after 9/11. But the war in Iraq is over. Troops are coming home from Afghanistan, and we want to secure the cuts.” Falling for drone warfare as a substitute for manpower-heavy defense appears to some to be the best way to “Lean Forward.”

Polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly favored the use of drones, even if they had some doubts about things such as “signature” strikes, where Hellfire missiles were launched at gatherings of supposed plotters, and follow-up attacks against those who came to the scene in the aftermath of a strike—and even if they felt especially uneasy about the possibility that drones could be used inside the United States, either by a foreign country or by American officials at different levels of government. In an article in the
Washington Post
, “Who Signed Anwar al-Awlaki’s Death Warrant?” the noted columnist Richard Cohen pondered the meaning of the drone attacks on Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen. Cohen was not sorry he was dead: “A little ‘yippee’ emitted from me when I heard the news. Awlaki was a traitor to his country and its values.” But there was a nagging sense that somehow, somewhere, the administration knew it had crossed a line in a secret memo, on the sneak.

We live in a soft police state. It’s not a film-noir one, based on ideology and punctuated by the crunch of hobnailed boots, but one created in response to terrorism and crime. Cameras follow us. Our travels, our purchases, are recorded. Our computers and cellphones snitch on us. There’s no Orwellian Big Brother, just countless little ones, all of them righteously on the lookout for the bad guys. It’s necessary, I suppose. It will be abused, I don’t suppose.
⁴

There were those, on the other hand, who had
absolutely
no doubts about the drone policy: it was the only “realistic” way to deal with jihadist death threats emanating from seven thousand miles away that could be handled by guys hunched over before bright computer screens inside trailers. The counterterrorism adviser to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Richard Clarke, wanted to claim paternity for the drones. He had opposed the war on Iraq and claimed that 9/11 might have been prevented if Bush had listened to him: “We found him [Osama bin Laden] in October 2000 using a Predator. There was, however, no such thing then as an armed Predator, so we saw him but could not kill him.” After that experience, Clarke avers, President Bill Clinton gave orders to create an armed drone force. But when George Bush came into office, “the CIA and DOD refused to fly the armed Predator to get Bin Laden in Afghanistan, including balking at a cabinet level meeting
on Sept. 4, 2001
.”
⁵

So one week before the tragedy, George W. Bush had an opportunity to take out the author of the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor—and he refused. This is close to calling out the president for dereliction of duty. Then there is Senator Lindsey Graham, a former U.S. Air Force judge advocate general officer, who claimed in a speech in his home state, South Carolina, that drones have killed 4,700 people: “We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al-Qaeda.” Graham put no numbers on “innocent people” versus “senior members of Al-Qaeda.” Graham’s figures were close to the highest estimates by various groups that opposed the use of drones, and far and away above any figures the administration admitted to. One study concluded, “The number of ‘high-level’ targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low—estimated at just 2%.”
⁶

The chapters that follow wrestle with these issues without hiding my view that the United States has already flown drones across constitutional boundaries and has them headed dead on for the foundations of the Republic. This book is dedicated to all those
writers who have given us the information—if we will only use it—to halt the flight before the drone hits its target.

Acknowledgments

My greatest debt for encouraging me all along the way is to Marc Favreau. No author could have a better editor and friend than Marc. He knows when I go overboard and gets me back to the heart of the matter. The book reflects his good sense of what is important and what is not. My old friends and colleagues are the usual suspects who turn up in all my books: Marilyn Young, who showers me with crucial information on a daily basis, and Walter LaFeber and Tom McCormick, who are still always ready to offer their best opinions—after nearly fifty-seven years of a never-ending conversation on American foreign policy. Warren Kimball, a colleague from the Rutgers days and a friend forever, never lets me get too sure of my opinions. Then there is a wise old colonel, Paul Miles of West Point and Princeton, with whom lunch has become a seminar on U.S. military policy and the state of diplomatic history. What I have learned about counterinsurgency owes much to the work of Gian Gentile and Greg Daddis. Copy editor Sue Warga and Sarah Fan of The New Press are superb editors, with a keen eye for the right word in the proper place whenever I bog down in the midst of a sentence. Thanks also to the history department of Wofford College, which provided me with a temporary home in the fall of 2012 as visiting occupant of the Jones Chair in History. I will always feel honored that Rutgers graduate John Adams has created a seminar in my name for undergraduates to prepare themselves for careers in public service, and it is to those students present and future as well that this book is dedicated.

So thanks to all these people but, of course, especially to Nancy for hearing me out on all these questions—and for being there always.

Newtown, Pennsylvania

February 24, 2013

1

THE DREAM CANDIDATE

And then, on September 11, the world fractured. It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow
—
the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction
.

—Barack Obama,
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

The meteoric rise of Barack Obama began with a speech to a Chicago antiwar rally in October 2002. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress had voted on a resolution authorizing the president to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed with only one nay vote and was signed by President George W. Bush on September 18, 2001. Now, a year later, most Democrats were unwilling to take on the White House when the president asked Congress for a blank-check resolution to deal with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, one he could interpret as empowering him to act as he saw fit, including going to war.

Obama, an Illinois state legislator, took up the challenge. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he declared. “What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
¹

He did not stop with neocon presidential advisers. Obama went after the man in the Oval Office. “You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.” However hateful Saddam Hussein was, he posed “no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors.” That phrase sounded very much like an opening call for a foreign policy debate on national security policy beyond the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and Cold War triumphalism—somewhere that maybe 80 to 90 percent of the members of his own party feared to tread. And there was more yet. The Iraqi economy was in shambles, he said, and the dictator’s military was but a fraction of its former strength: “In concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

The speech was a stunner, and obviously very risky. Two weeks later Congress passed the Iraq War Resolution—the vote was lopsided but not unanimous, for doubts had begun to creep into the minds of some legislators. In the House a majority of Democrats voted no, but in the Senate twenty-one Democrats voted no while twenty-nine said yes, including Hillary Clinton—already looking ahead to 2008—and a wavering John Kerry, whose ambitions were focused on 2004. Six months later the United States was at war, with its “coalition of the willing” contributing a few non-U.S. soldiers and a thin international cover for Washington’s determination to bring down Saddam Hussein. Only Great Britain from what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed as “old Europe” showed interest in sending troops, while there were nearly six thousand from former Soviet satellites.

Had the war gone as the White House predicted it would—a quick march to Baghdad with Iraqis cheering their “liberators” all
along the way—Obama’s rhetoric would have landed him in obscurity, alongside a deflated peace wing of the Democratic Party. But the war did not go well, and Obama became a Kennedyesque profile in courage for speaking out while others cowered and sought political safety in Bush’s assurances that Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction really did exist someplace besides Vice President Dick Cheney’s version of Grimms’ fairy tales.

The opening salvo of the war was a series of decapitating air strikes to kill the tyrant. They failed. Next there was “shock and awe” and the march on Baghdad. But once the coalition of the willing got there and Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down, there came conditions that looked more like chaos and incipient civil war than World War II liberation. And there was still no sign of those weapons of mass destruction the White House had warned the nation could show up as mushroom clouds over American cities; finally it came time to admit that they simply did not exist. That being the case, the administration turned to historical analogies to find the justification for war and the need to spend billions upon billions of dollars in new weaponry not only to destroy Saddam Hussein’s army but to spread truth, justice, and the American way to the whole Middle East.

Thus national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in a June 2003 speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London spoke of World War II: “No less than Pearl Harbor, September 11 forever changed the lives of every American and the strategic perspective of the United States. . . . [W]e resolved that the only true defense against a threat of this kind is to root it out at its source and address it at its fundamental and ideological core.” Not just the United States, she intoned, but “all civilized nations” were called upon to fulfill this duty, one that presented both “unparalleled opportunities” and “unprecedented challenges.” Magnifying Saddam Hussein’s army to the status of America’s World War II enemies or the Cold War military challenge was, of course, nonsense, but she had in mind the need to link Osama bin Laden and the “al Qaeda network” to the “fundamental and ideological core” of a global conspiracy. The task for “all civilized nations” was,
therefore, an ongoing struggle on many fronts, even though she said half the al Qaeda leadership had already been captured or killed and “the rest is on the run—permanently.”