Between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945, a clarity of
thought and purpose pervaded America. We understood who our enemies
were and undertook as a nation to bring about their utter defeat.
After September 1945, that clarity was dulled in Korea and by the
midpoint of the Vietnam War it had disappeared altogether.
We never had that clarity after the war that was brought to our
homeland on September 11, 2001. Since then, we have muddled through
bereft of the unifying knowledge of who the enemy really is and the
pervasive purpose of bringing about its defeat. Now we have another
episode of ad hockery: a U.S. president has undertaken to choose
personally who shall be targeted for what the left used to call
“non-judicial killing” and to reveal the once-secret killing
program to his media allies.
The New York Times May 29
story on President Obama’s “Secret Kill List” put together the
pieces of the process Obama established to identify terrorists and
decide himself who would be targeted for drone strikes. The article
was produced in cooperation with the White House. (In the long and
tendentious piece, the Times claimed three dozen
interviews with current and former Obama administration officials
as the story’s foundation.) It was clearly intended to portray the
heroic and moral role the president had created for himself but
instead demonstrated how undecided the president is, and how
timorous his approach to defeating the terrorist threat
remains.
There have been a number of articles analyzing and criticizing
how the president goes about deciding who will be killed and how.
But many of them either pass by the most important issues or simply
get it wrong.
Fox News’s Judge Andrew Napolitano condemned the program as
illegal. But the judge apparently decided his case without all the
facts. Saying that the president’s powers were bound by the
Constitution and our laws, he concluded that Obama’s program wasn’t
lawful because it lacked the necessary statutory authorization.
However, as I have been repeatedly informed by members of the
intelligence community, the CIA has secret lethal authorities.
These statutory authorities almost certainly provide the legal
basis for the targeted killings of terrorists.
My sources will not describe those authorities because they were
enacted in secret and remain so. There’s no validity to the point
that secretly enacted laws are themselves unlawful: there is
nothing in the Constitution barring them. Though uncommon, such
laws are passed when some aspect of our intelligence or military
operations require them. For example, top secret intelligence
satellite programs need the authorization of Congress — and
congressional appropriations — to be brought to fruition. That
same congressional action almost certainly is the basis for Obama’s
use of CIA and military assets to target and kill terrorists.
Congress’s “Authorization of Military Force,” passed soon after
9/11, gave the president the authority to attack those responsible
for the attacks, meaning al Qaeda. That explains Obama’s limitation
of the targeted killings to those revealed by intelligence
information to be al Qaeda’s members and those acting in concert
with them. Combined with the CIA’s secret lethal authorities, we
must conclude that Obama’s targeted killing program is legal until
it is shown that the CIA’s lethal authorities — and those of the
military — do not provide for it.
But that it is legal does not mean Obama’s “kill list” program
is the right tactic or that it is properly applied.
Obama remains committed to closing the terrorist detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He failed to overcome
congressional objections to moving the Gitmo inmates to the U.S.
and has, since his inauguration, released many of them. None has
been sent there since he came into office.
Defined by the Clausewitz Cliché, war is the continuation of
politics by other means. Obama’s politics — which do not permit us
to pursue victory over the nations that sponsor terrorism and their
ideology — is the foundation for the targeted killing program and
the means by which it is run.
As the Times article points out, the executive orders
Obama signed quickly after his inauguration ended the so-called
“enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA, closed the
secret prisons abroad where terrorists were held for interrogation
(except those in which people could be held only briefly), and
limited — but didn’t end — the practice of “rendition” in which
captured terrorists were turned over to other nations for
interrogation. Those orders encompassed the principles by which
Obama continues to run the war.
Obama and Attorney General Holder were justly — and harshly —
criticized for putting known terrorists, such as the failed
underwear bomber Abdulmutallab, into civilian custody rather than
shipping them to Gitmo for the long interrogation by intelligence
operatives that might have revealed who and where their superiors
and cohorts are. Now, Obama is apparently using the targeted
killings to avoid the political objection he has to sending more
terrorists to Gitmo.
According to the Times story, some terrorists have been
targeted but the president has canceled strikes at the eleventh
hour in order to avoid other casualties. In other cases, Obama has
ordered the strikes even when those casualties were evidently to be
caused. Obama, taking the lawyerly approach the Times
praised at three points, adopted a means of counting the collateral
deaths that “did little to box him in.” In other words, he’s
fudging the facts to suit his own purposes.
Obama’s tactic is no more than a game of whack-a-mole. He is
killing terrorists, some of importance and some of none at all. He
has probably interdicted some terrorist operations and, for a time,
possibly weakened the terrorist groups which organize and manage
their attacks. But nothing in this tactic weakens the terrorists’
sponsoring nations or attacks the Islamist ideology that propels
them all.
Obama, like Bush before him, has only undertaken to define who
our enemy isn’t, not who it is. As I have written often, our enemy
is not only the terrorists but the nations that sponsor terrorism.
Unless and until we undertake an ideological war against
all Islamists as well as a
kinetic war against the nations that sponsor terrorism, there’s
also no prospect of an outcome that benefits us.
That reasoning doesn’t preclude the targeted killing of
terrorists to interdict terrorist attacks against us or against our
forces abroad. Such targeted killings are an essential part of
fighting the war. But the president is using those strikes as an
alternative to a decisive strategy that could lead to victory over
the enemy.
Obama is a mass of varying principles and liberal emotions. He,
and his worshippers in the media such as the Times, want
to characterize his personal control of anti-terrorist drone
strikes as moral, courageous, and risky. But this is the same
president who refuses to recognize and deal with the Islamist
threat that emanates from Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
It is the same president who two years ago banned the use of the
terms “Islam,” “jihad,” and even “Islamic extremism” from our
national security strategy documents. And it is the same president
who is doing everything in his power to prevent an Israeli attack
on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
If Obama is reelected, we can expect more and less of the same.
He may not continue his once-secret program of drone strikes
because his beliefs do not permit it and his leftist constituency
— even including the Times — says that the program is
untenable in the long term. Part of the rationale for the program
is to interdict terrorist attacks on our forces in Afghanistan.
Once those forces are withdrawn, that rationale will disappear but
the terrorists, the nations that support them, and their ideology
won’t.
Obama will do less, not more, in a second term to defeat the
continuing threat of the Islamist ideology and the terrorism it
requires.
