It was unrealistic to expect President Obama to roll back the American war machine or reverse the "terror fighting" forces set in motion by George Bush. American foreign policy is brutal, period, presidents simply don't restrict their own power, and it's fair to say, as Chris Floyd does, that in terms of the National Security State, this is effectively Truman's 16th term.
In many ways, we are not really living through Bush's third term, but the 16th term of the National Security State that was founded by secret presidential directives during Harry Truman's second term. Beginning with the ur-document, NSC-68, these directives mandated a thoroughgoing militarization of the American state, complete with vast secret forces specifically designed to carry out criminal actions – subversion, coups, "black ops," break-ins, kidnappings, torture, assassination programs, gruesome medical experiments: "the dark side, if you will." Not that things were all peaches and cream before then, of course; just ask the Filipinos (or the Cherokee, or the slaves, etc.) But in 1951, the new National Security State raised the war machine budget by 400 percent in a single year. And it has never looked back, not even after the collapse of the Soviet Union – the ostensible reason for devouring the lifeblood and seed-corn of the nation and giving it to war profiteers.
That's not to say, however, that President Obama isn't driving (or being driven by) the National Security State in new and reckless ways. Perhaps most notably, he's increased combat drone attacks so much that the Washington Post can now state that "no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals." A better sentence would say, "ostensibly to advance the nation's security goals".
A lot of people probably missed the article because it ran the Monday after Christmas. It doesn't contain much new information but provides details about the expanding program as well as historical perspective.
In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.
Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.
The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.
The numbers:
When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead, according to the New America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.
What the article doesn't say is that many, if not most, of "those killed" have been civilians. In recent posts, I've written about the human cost of American drones in the form of dead and maimed innocents. Here's a video about one of the "lucky" victims -- lucky in that she survived after a medical mission found her near death in a trashcan and she's now in Texas where a doctor is doing his best to repair her burned and disfigured face.
The Post piece also illuminates the views of President Obama's national security team, who've all been wild about drones -- with one notable exception.
Key members of Obama’s national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator, said a former official who served in both administrations and was supportive of the program. Current administration officials did not dispute the former official’s characterization of the internal dynamics.
The only member of Obama’s team known to have formally raised objections to the expanding drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence...
...His opinion contributed to his isolation from Obama’s inner circle, and he was fired last year.
Blair has since gone public with his opposition to the drone-craze, and I'm surprised (but only a little) that his pronouncements on the subject haven't gotten more attention. Hardly a human rights activist (three years ago I wrote about his refusal to say water-boarding is torture), Blair opposes the reliance on drones for strict national security reasons.
Qaeda officials who are killed by drones will be replaced. The group’s structure will survive and it will still be able to inspire, finance and train individuals and teams to kill Americans. Drone strikes hinder Qaeda fighters while they move and hide, but they can endure the attacks and continue to function.
Moreover, as the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan. American officials may praise the precision of the drone attacks. But in Pakistan, news media accounts of heavy civilian casualties are widely believed. Our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented in a country that cannot duplicate such feats of warfare without cost to its own troops.
Our dogged persistence with the drone campaign is eroding our influence and damaging our ability to work with Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure.
Elsewhere Blair has said that the secrecy of the drone program contributes to civilian deaths and argued that the military, not the CIA, should run it. (The military handles drone strikes in Afghanistan; the CIA controls them in Pakistan and other countries.)
"Within the armed forces we have a set of procedures that are open, known for how you make decisions about when to use deadly force or not, levels of approval degrees of proof and so on and they are things that can be and should be openly put out. So yet another of the problems of trying to conduct long-term sustained covert operations is this secrecy," Blair said. "So, I argue strongly that covert action should be retained for relatively short duration operations which — no kidding — should not be talked about and should not be publicized."
The secrecy, of course, serves an all-important purpose, shielding it from scrutiny. Drone warfare is, as Jane Mayer says, a "new frontier legally, politically, and morally." Lawyers, journalists, national security experts, and human rights groups, suffering from a lack of information, are playing catchup as they try to figure out precisely what is happening and what it means. But then finding out about it is one thing; actually formulating a response and trying to curb this "new American way of war' is quite another.
In the meantime: hellfire.