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MAY 24, 2013
The Lethal President Sends His Regrets: What Obama's Drone Speech Meant
By Tom Junod
at 11:48am
The speech was not only notable for what the president said. It was notable primarily notable for the fact that he said it.
The lawyer said that the speech was a response to several things, among them the drawing down of the war in Afghanistan and the promotion of John Brennan to the directorship of the CIA. But most of all, the lawyer added, the speech was an opportunity a chance for the President, finally, to be himself. "From what I know of the president, these are things he really cares about. He's been displeased with the constant war footing and frustrated with the lack of transparency. These are themes he's been pressing from day one. But now he thinks that time is running short and he thinks it's important to the United States and the world for him to be clear about what the administration is doing. It's hard to move the institutions he has to deal with. He's finally said, 'Enough. We have to do this.' I think this was always coming. What you'll hear from the president today is what he's always wanted to say. It's what I've always heard him say."
A few minutes later, I called one of President Obama's former counter-terrorism advisors. I told him what the lawyer had said, about the entrenched institutions of government frustrating the president's inclination to push for transparency, and he said, "I never saw any inclination to push for these things. He's always talked transparency without being transparent. He must have started pushing after I left."
From the start, Barack Obama has been a man of epic divisions in matters of national security. He outlawed torture and announced his intention to close Guantanamo as his first significant act in office; he approved a drone strike as his second. He won and accepted a Nobel Peace Prize while personally approving the elimination of those identified in secret as our enemies. Even now, in the matter of national-security leaks, he speaks of reporters not having to go to jail for doing their jobs in response to his administration raising the prospect of reporters having to go to jail for doing their jobs. What passes as his breadth of vision is often the result of the lengths to which he'll go to reconcile the irreconcilable.
Yesterday's speech was no different. It was a remarkable speech, in the way that only a Barack Obama speech can be remarkable for the president's ability to speak to Americans in the language of moral struggle, and equally remarkable for his ability to make himself representative of moral struggle. Even when he did not speak of himself, the speech was personal, almost confessional, in its weighing of doubt and its admission of second thoughts:
For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power or risk abusing it.... Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live...The very precision of drone strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a president and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.
Does this mean the president himself views drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism? No, it only means he is aware of the danger and is guarding against it an example of the kind of rhetorical self-inoculation that must have led the New York Times and other observers to say that he placed "new curbs on the use of drone strikes," when he did no such thing. Even when he said that "before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured," he was not proposing a new curb but rather reiterating an old one. Indeed, he did not offer a new vision of his drone policy but rather a defense of the policy as it now exists and as it has lately, in the "Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday," been codified. According to the lawyer I spoke to, the administration has been working on the Policy Guidance for a long time. Does anyone think that it contains anything but the collective wisdom of an administration that until recently has been killing people at an extraordinary rate despite all its care and caution? Does anyone, for that matter, even bother to believe the president when he says that we have a strong preference for detaining terrorists instead of killing them and only use drones as a last resort?
Of course, President Obama was not the first representative of the Obama administration to offer a thoughtful and rather tortured public apologia for drone strikes. He was merely the latest and possibly the last, and as such his speech was remarkably consistent with what has come before. When administration officials have spoken of targeted killing, they have always spoken in the language of limits. They have never spoken in the language of expansion. But expand targeted killing they have, to an extent that has made some of their characterizations of a program marked by "precision" and "deliberation" sound like either a folly or an outright falsehood. To an extent unimaginable just a year ago, the president yesterday took ownership of his own Lethal Presidency. But while he took ownership of the policy that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, he did not take ownership of the policy that killed al-Awlaki's son Abulrahman. And while he took credit for the policy that has killed "dozens of highly skilled Al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives," he never came close to taking credit for or acknowledging the policy that has killed people by the thousand.
The speech, then, was not only notable for what the president said. It was notable primarily notable for the fact that he said it. The danger of the Lethal Presidency has always been its assurance that its killings are moral because they are accomplished by moral men. And so what critics of the president's drone policy might have hoped from yesterday's speech was that he would not merely portray himself as a moral man but rather offer to do the moral thing and submit to legal structures outside himself and the power of his office. He did some of that, saying that he asked his administration to "review" the feasibility of "a special court to evaluate and authorize legal action" or "the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch." He also said that he was declassifying information pertaining to the four Americans killed by drone strike and promised not to sign any bill that would extend the Authorization for Use of Military Force. But mostly he did what he so often does, at his best and at his worst, using his own moral standing to advance an overarching moral vision instead of a simply political one in this case, the end of the "war on terror" that he did not invent but has done so much to amplify and advance.
Much has been made of the way he handled the incessant interruptions of Code Pink's Medea Benjamin, of his ability to turn an annoyance into a ringing affirmation of Constitutional principle. But the president can do this in his sleep. Much more significant was the frustration he permitted himself to express when he called again for the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo, saying that "given my administration's relentless pursuit of Al Qaeda's leadership, there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened." It was the closest the president has ever come to confirming what many have suspected that the drone war is not just the expression of a moral tradeoff but also a political one, and that the finality of targeted killing exists as an alternative to open-ended detention.
Yesterday's speech was rhetorically important and rhetorically remarkable a rhetorical step forward, as many commenters have said but if the Lethal Presidency reminds us of anything, it's that we should be a long way from judging this president on his rhetoric or his portrayal of himself as a moral actor. Of course, when a man is as successful in fusing morality and rhetoric as Barack Obama, there's always a tendency to think that the real man exists in his words, and all he has to do is find a way to live up to them. The lawyer I spoke to yesterday cast his former boss almost as a Promethean figure, bound to the rock of government, his idealism continually pecked away by politics. The president, in his speeches, usually seems to agree with this characterization, keeping us interested by threatening to break his chains. But yesterday's speech, for all the verbal and moral energy it devoted to the task of moving on, reminds us of what Prometheus was in for:
He gave the world fire.
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Solomon2 observes: Democratic presidents say what they mean; Republican presidents mean what they say.
