Michael Hirsh, the national editor of Politico Magazine, came out with a piece over this past weekend taking stock of where things stand in terms of the United State’s “Global War on Terrorism.” He states the obvious on the total, unmitigated quagmire that the war has become, and spends a good fraction of the piece tearing apart the Bush Administration’s decisions in this respect.
He tells us here that our nation’s battle against terrorism could have been one wrapped up in roughly six months, a sentiment expressed by people such as CIA officer in charge of the Tora Bora operation in Afghanistan that once cornered Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, Gary Berntsen. Of course, instead, beginning with that very moment, when then-President George W. Bush turned down Berntsen’s request to go after Bin Laden, disastrous foreign policy mistake after disastrous foreign policy mistake was made, leading to the current messy situation in Iraq and Syria, facing a viscous, brutal enemy in ISIS with no end in sight.
One obvious area where the Bush administration has blundered significantly in is when it comes to civil liberties. We now know about the renditions, the waterboarding (along with the other enhanced interrogation techniques), the indefinite detentions, etc. Barack Obama was elected president in part to repudiate these violations and to leave the US with a better “code” to combating terrorism while still respecting civil rights and liberties under the Constitution.
However, as Hirsh points out:
“Sadly, rather than developing a ‘code’ for future presidents, as he’s said he wants to do, the president’s policy of dramatically stepped-up and secretly targeted drone killings and special-ops raids—for which there is no real public accountability—could well end up leaving a less principled successor an open-ended license to conduct permanent drone warfare, or to place American boots on the ground anywhere in the world.
Obama has in fact stretched the laws of war—never that clear to begin with—past their intended breaking point in the effort to continue his secret global war without new authorization. There may be no better example than the concept of ‘elongated imminence’—a new, quasi-Orwellian term for a tactic the Obama administration is using to justify more strikes under Article II of the Constitution, under which the president has the power to respond on his own to ‘imminent’ threats. Under this new interpretation, according to an account in Daniel Klaidman’s 2012 book, Kill Or Capture, terrorists no longer have to be on the verge of pulling the trigger or boarding a plane, or for an attack to be about to happen. They just have to be in the first stages of planning an attack for the president to order them killed. ‘It would be enough if they were designing the suicide vests,’ Klaidman wrote.”
I agree with your worry regarding Trump and his potential overstep with respect to the elongated imminence concept. Especially since President Obama, a seemingly more stable individual, has appeared to have done so himself. Your post reminds me of the age old question of whether or not ethics should be involved in war/is there such a thing as going too far? In previous political classes, we often debated things of this nature – whether there should be laws regarding war? Given the cringe worthy nature of several American war campaigns from Vietnam to Iraq, maybe there should be some form of legally defined policy for international war. Hindsight is 20/20 but why must time by the bearer of bad news…
My thoughts on that age old question is yes, there should be ethics involved in war. We very well should have some sort of code in conducting war, as, at the end of the day, we can’t use conflict as an excuse to engage in some of the worse atrocities imaginable. As history has shown time and time again, following moral codes in the middle of conflict is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. However, pushing for ethics here is a major part of working towards a better, more civilized society and world.