Obama's War

Posted September 06, 2012 09:10:24

There is growing discomfort over the close involvement of the US president himself in the use of armed drones in pursuit of terrorists, writes Fatima Measham.

Armed drones have become the centrepiece of American efforts to neutralise Al Qaeda.

Eleven years after the US began its pursuit of terrorists in Afghanistan, it has now ventured into Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, where Al Qaeda continues to operate despite the death of Osama Bin Laden. In this phase of the war, remotely piloted missiles routinely target areas of known or suspected terrorist activity.

It is a stage of conflict that has slipped past scrutiny, without the broad moral debate that attended the decision of former president George W Bush to enter into a purportedly just war. Yet its complexity demands greater examination.

For one, the geographic location of the war has been allowed to drift south, dangerously widening its scope. Though the Pakistani and Yemeni governments tacitly permit drone attacks within their borders (it is not in their interest to have  Al Qaeda gain more than a foothold), civilian casualties have not only made their position untenable, they are also radicalising a new generation - and reinforcing the prospect of perpetual war.

The technology itself raises questions around ethical warfare.

For instance, how are we to interpret the principle of proportion in a situation where one combatant remotely deploys an anti-armour Hellfire missile from half a world away at a group of men standing in the open in a mountain province?

How does international humanitarian law (IHL) regarding the distinction between combatants and civilians apply when combatants are defined loosely, according to US administration officials, as 'all military-age males in a strike zone… unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously [emphasis mine] proving them innocent'?

How may drones fitted with weapons be reconciled with the essential ideas promulgated by IHL, that there is no such thing as an unlimited right to choose methods and means of warfare; that it is forbidden to use weapons or methods of warfare that are 'likely to cause unnecessary losses or excessive suffering'?

Has the use of such weapons in fact been 'normalised'? What would be the repercussions of a globalised drone industry?

These questions merely sketch some of the troubling aspects of drones.

As high-level sources reveal the process in which targets are identified, there is also growing discomfort over the close involvement of the US president himself.

"This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president," says former CIA director Michael Hayden, "And that's not sustainable".

Drone strikes have increased from 44 to 240 since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Not only that, according to a report in The New York Times, he is signing off on every named target in Yemen and Somalia, and a third of the strikes in Pakistan.

It is not difficult to understand why drones have become the Obama Government's strategy of choice. As more and more American soldiers made their way home from Afghanistan (and Iraq) in a casket, the protracted conflict had become politically untenable, despite general acceptance that the terrorist threat remained real.

For a man steeped in law and aware of the moral demands of leading a nation at war, it must seem to Obama that drones present the most feasible method for attacking an amorphous enemy.

On the one hand, this active ownership of what is essentially a 'take no prisoners' policy almost seems laudable. The bureaucratic, albeit morbid, process devised by the Obama administration to identify targets provides a semblance of deliberation - a sense of gravity that is apt and seemed to be missing during the previous administration.

The nominations for strikes, over which more than a hundred national security officials confer regularly, is passed to the White House, where Obama receives the list and pores over the targets with his counterterrorism team in the Situation Room. It is described by an official speaking to The New York Times as a macabre 'baseball cards' of an unconventional war.

It is a process that removes the ability to deny knowledge when things go wrong, known in legal circles as plausible deniability. It is that which has long protected the White House from potentially illegal or unpopular activity by government agencies.

Despite the supposed rigour of the nominations process and the precision of drones, serious errors are made.

The civilian casualty rate from drone attacks in 2004 to 2010 was a third of total deaths (peaking at 50 per cent in 2008). At least two 'personality strikes' in 2009 in Pakistan and Yemen resulted in the deaths of family members and neighbours.

In the case of Baitullah Mehsud, the order was made even though he was with his wife and in-laws. They died with him. The other strike left a trail of cluster bombs that claimed the lives of children.

Such patterns have been met with dismay by international human rights activists such as Clive Stafford Smith, who last year befriended a 16-year-old Afghan three days before the boy was killed in a strike.

That the US president is so immersed in the decision-making process that led to these deaths raises the discomfiting spectre of war crimes, though the extent to which the International Criminal Court (ICC) has jurisdiction remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, the Rome Statute that governs the ICC is quite explicit about what constitutes war crimes. Among other serious violations, Article 8b includes 'intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects'.

It is a statement that leaves the presidency exposed.

On Tuesday revered Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu pointed out that Tony Blair and George W Bush must be made accountable for launching a war against Iraq on what he said was fraudulent grounds.

There may be a case for such scrutiny to also be directed toward Barack Obama.

Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based writer and former state school teacher. She blogs and tweets. View her full profile here.
