6 Unanswered Questions About Obama's Drone War

[DirkGently]

37. The drone conceit would seem exactly the "permanent war footing"

Obama said he opposed in the SOTU speech. The entire logic is that the U.S. in in a permanent state of worldwide, borderless war with shifting groups of "militants" or "terrorists," determined by unaccountable processes, carried out in secret, and subject to no apparent repercussions.

It's Bush-era conceit, relying on the concept of "war" to enhance the power of the executive. Cheney's baby, rationalized by Woo and others cooperative White House lawyers, to deliberately distort the balance of powers contemplated in the Constitution for the purpose of creating a "unitary executive" or whatever they're calling it now.

This will be the ugliest part of Obama's legacy, eventually condemned here as it is already everywhere else as a crime against humanity and an usupportable assumption of worldwide authority on the part of the U.S. that neither we nor anyone else accept from any other country.

Whether the number of innocents killed so far is in the hundreds or thousands is largely beside the point. We don't have the right to do this. We do not have the authority to rain death down on whomever we see fit, on whatever basis we claim, anytime, and anywhere.

Moreover, it's not going to solve terrorism or protect the country. It doesn't matter whether we've annhilated one civilian village or wedding party or a hundred. Every Hellfire is guaranteed to produce more anti-American sentiment than it can ever hope to snuff out.

Obama is wrong on this. History will blame him, and us, we will spend a long time crawling our way back toward any kind of worldwide credibility as an aribter of humanitarian standards or the rules of war or the wrongness of extra-territorial aggression.