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US Drone Killing Machine Now on Autopilot
By Laurie Calhoun
January 24, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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For years now I have been pointing
out that
Obama’s lasting legacy would be his ill-advised
decision back in 2009 to normalize assassination, which
his administration successfully rebranded as “targeted
killing”. This was supposed to be the latest and
greatest form of “smart war”: the use of unmanned combat
aerial vehicles (UCAVs), or lethal drones, to go after
and eliminate evil terrorists without risking US
soldiers’ lives.
It all sounds so slick and, well, Obama
cool. The problem is that any sober consideration of
Obama’s foreign policy over the course of his eight
years as president reveals that the reality is
altogether different. Judging by the murder and mayhem
being perpetrated all across the Middle East, “smart
war” was not so smart after all.
It’s not easy to tease out how much of
the mess in the Middle East is specifically due to
Obama’s accelerated use of lethal drones in “signature
strikes” to kill thousands of military-age men in seven
different lands. For he also implemented other, equally
dubious initiatives. Planks of Obama’s bloody “smart
power” approach included deposing Libya’s dictator
Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and massively arming (from 2012
to 2013) a group of little-understood “appropriately
vetted moderate rebels” in Syria.
Adding fuel to the fire, Obama oversaw
the largest exportation of homicidal weapons to the
Middle East ever undertaken by a single US president.
Saudi Arabia wasted no time in using its US (and also
UK) military provisions to lay Yemen to waste. Conjoined
with Obama’s use of drones in that land, the result has
been a horrific civil war in which many civilians have
been killed and many civilian structures destroyed.
As if all of this were not bad enough,
Obama also managed to drop more than 26K bombs in 2016,
after having dropped more than 23K in 2015. Given all of
this very warlike behavior in undeclared wars, no one
can truly say precisely how much drones are to blame for
the ongoing carnage throughout the Middle East. What is
beyond dispute is that together these measures
culminated in a huge expansion and spread of ISIS and
other radical jihadist groups.
At the same time, given the tonnage of
bombs dropped by Obama in seven different countries, the
use of drones does seem to have led directly to a
willingness of the president to use also manned combat
aerial vehicles, notably in countries with which the
United States was not at war when Obama assumed his
office. While his predecessor, George W. Bush, can be
properly credited with the destruction of Afghanistan
and Iraq, Obama managed to contribute heartily to the
destruction of Libya, Yemen, and Syria, while
attacking the people of Somalia as well.
Enter Donald J. Trump, who became the new
US president on January 21, 2017. On that same day, two
drone strikes in Yemen killed a slew of people, three of
whom were said to be “suspected Al Qaeda leaders”. The
US government has not confirmed that it launched the
strikes. It is the policy of the CIA, put in charge by
Obama of the drone program “outside areas of active
hostilities” (in countries such as Yemen, Pakistan,
Somalia, et al.), not to share the details of its covert
operations. This would seem to imply that the drone
strikes on January 21, 2017, were not the doings of the
Pentagon, now under the direction of
General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who was sworn in on
the same day as the new president.
Trump’s choice for CIA director, Mike
Pompeo, has not yet been sworn in, as his confirmation
process is still underway. In other words,
the drone strikes carried out under the auspices of the
CIA this past weekend were done so without a
director in place. Obama therefore succeeded not only in
normalizing assassination as “targeted killing” when the
implements of homicide used are missiles, and they are
launched under the direction of the CIA, but he also
left the killing machine on autopilot. Note that the
former CIA director, John Brennan, who first served as
Obama’s drone killing czar, before being promoted to
director, has spent his time in recent days
bashing the new president, not serving as Trump’s
interim adviser.
The incineration of military-age men
using missiles launched from drones has become so
frequent and commonplace that US citizens, including
legislators, did not blink an eye at the fact that the
killing machine set in motion by President Obama is now
effectively on autopilot. It’s worth remembering that,
once upon a time, acts of war were to be approved by the
congress. Now even acephalic agencies such as the
directorless CIA are permitted to use weapons of war to
kill anyone whom they deem to be worthy of death. All of
this came about because Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Barack “no boots on the ground”
Obama wanted to be able to prosecute wars without
appearing to prosecute wars.
Fait accompli.
Laurie Calhoun, a philosopher and
cultural critic, is the author of
We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination
in the Drone Age (Zed Books, September 2015;
paperback forthcoming in 2016) and War
and Delusion: A Critical Examination.
https://thedroneage.wordpress.com |
