How the President Became a Drone Operator: From Obama to Trump, the Escalation of Drone Warfare

By Allegra Harpootlian, TomDispatch

13 January 20

 

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“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief... In previous eras... presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts. We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.”

Note that I wrote that not last week when President Donald Trump ordered a CIA drone to take out Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani, but in June 2012 after the New York Times published a reasonably glowing piece about President Barack Obama’s deep involvement in the process of “nominating” those to be killed by CIA drones halfway around the world. It was already obvious where we were heading. Of course, at the time, the Obama White House was focused on killing non-state actors, including, in the end, such figures as Osama bin Laden (though not by drone) and an American exile and leader of al-Qaeda’s Yemenese affiliate, Anwar al-Awlaki. But sooner or later, actual state actors like Suleimani were sure to come into some president’s drone sights.

In fact, drones aside, the direction this country was heading in when it came to the assassination of state actors had long been obvious. There was, for instance, the CIA’s attempt to poison Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba before he was killed (possibly at that Agency’s behest). There were at least eight similar assassination attempts (including by poison) against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the successful assassination of the Dominican Republic’s leader Rafael Trujillo. And that’s just to start down a list.

But in the Obama years, as I wrote in 2012, assassination became “thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president,” even if “targeted killing” was then the term in use. (Almost eight years later, in the wake of Suleimani’s death, “assassination” has become a commonplace in the media and has even been used descriptively by some Democratic senators and one presidential candidate.) Today, TomDispatch regular Allegra Harpootlian, an expert on the still-growing nightmare of drone warfare, returns us to that Obama moment to consider just how we got here -- to, that is, a drone killing chosen impulsively by a president who is the definition of turmoil, a killing that has brought us to the edge of another Middle Eastern nightmare, one which, if the last 18-plus years have taught us anything, can’t end well.

Back in 2012, I concluded that “an American global killing machine (quite literally so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a single, unaccountable individual. This is the nightmare the founding fathers tried to protect us from.” I wouldn’t change a word.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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e’re only a few days into the new decade and it’s somehow already a bigger dumpster fire than the last. On January 2nd, President Trump decided to order what one expert called “the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched." This one took out not some nameless terrorist in a distant land or a group of civilians who happened to get in the way, but Major General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force and the mastermind of its military operations across the Middle East.

Among the thousands of ignored American drone strikes since the 9/11 attacks, this was not one of them. In the wake of the assassination, we’ve seen: the Iraqi parliament vote to expel American forces from their country; all the Democratic presidential candidates make statements condemning the strike; thousands of protestors around the world take to the streets; and both chambers of Congress introduce resolutions aimed at curbing the president’s expanding war powers. Even though there is still so much we don’t know, one thing is for sure. Everything we thought we knew about drone warfare -- and America’s wars more broadly -- is about to be thrown out the window.

When I first started writing this piece, I was simply reflecting on a decade of U.S. drone warfare and the problems it had spawned. But when this world-altering news broke, I immediately started thinking about how I got here, as well as how my country could continue to recklessly breed chaos and destruction throughout the Greater Middle East.

New decades afford us a chance to take a good, hard look at what transpired in the years past. Until that strike in Iraq occurred, it seemed like every time I opened Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram in the new year, I was inundated with sentimental reflections about how far we’ve come in the last 10 years and where we’re going next. And I get it. I really do. It’s the beginning of a new decade and nostalgia is in the air.

In fact, over the holiday season, I found myself with time on my hands and that same sort of sentimentality creeping up on me. So I decided to indulge myself by looking through old journals of mine. One entry in particular caught my attention. In 2010, when I was still an idealistic high school student in Tennessee, I wrote about the democracy movement I saw rising in the Middle East (what we came to know as “the Arab Spring”) and how hopeful it made me that global peace might be achieved in my lifetime. I wrote about my desire not only to see the world but to help make it a better place.

Rereading that entry 10 years later, a few thoughts came to mind. First, I was amused by my unwavering optimism and how sure I was that everything would work out okay. Although I’d like to think that I still see glasses as at least half-full, the never-endingly destructive feedback loop of American foreign policy has certainly left me a more jaded twenty-something.

Then I was suddenly impressed by how close I’d actually come to living the life that the 16-year-old me once imagined. Of course, I haven’t yet seen the entire world (though it’s on my bucket list) or managed to bring about world peace (a girl’s gotta sleep, ya know). Still, working to bring attention to undercovered issues like drone warfare seems like a reasonable first step to have taken.

With the world veering into unprecedented territory, I realized that it was time for me to take off those rose-colored glasses, reflect on what our world really looked like 10 years ago and how oblivious I was to so many of the darker parts of it.

If you remember, as 2009 ended, President Barack Obama went to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. While accepting the award, he made a moving speech about war and peace. Noting the absurdity of receiving the prize while still “the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he laid out his ideas on how to build a just and lasting world of peace. At the same time, he defended his continued use of military force in the Middle East, arguing that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” even if we “must also think clearly about how we fight” war.

Looking back, there’s no doubt about the eloquence of his words, which fit well with my 16-year-old dreams. Unfortunately -- for him, for me, and for the world -- he didn’t take his own advice. Instead of preserving the peace, he quickly embraced the latest instruments of war, like drones, and so helped usher in a new era of warfare that, as the latest drone strike in Baghdad makes clear, is likely to haunt us for decades to come.

Obama’s Legacy

A large part of Obama’s speech was dedicated to America’s adherence to the laws of war and the importance of protecting civilians when using force. As he put it,

“Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct... And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

For those not familiar with those “laws,” the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols specifically protect people in areas of armed conflict who are not taking part in the hostilities (civilians, health workers, and aid workers in particular) and those who are no longer participating in the hostilities, including the wounded, the sick, and prisoners of war.

Unsurprisingly, nowhere in Obama’s 36-minute speech did he mention that he had already authorized more drone strikes than his predecessor, George W. Bush, approved during his entire presidency. Nor did he mention that those strikes had already killed dozens, if not hundreds, of civilians in countries ranging from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia.

On January 23, 2009, for instance, just three days after Obama’s inauguration, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan ripped through a house filled with friends and family sitting down to dinner. Nine civilians were killed. As Faheem Qureshi, a teenager who barely survived the attack, told the Guardian, “I am the living example of what drones are... They have affected Waziristan [the district of Pakistan where he lived] as they have affected my personal life. I had all the hopes and potential and now I am doing nothing.” More than a decade later, Faheem has still not been given an explanation for what happened to his family, even though the president was told almost immediately that a mistake had been made and innocent civilians had been killed.

Six months later, a U.S. drone strike took out a mid-ranking Taliban commander in Pakistan. At his funeral, attended by 5,000 people, another drone fired missiles into the crowd in an attempt to kill Baitullah Mehsud, the founder of the Pakistani wing of the Taliban. Forty-five civilians would die, but not Mehsud who was targeted seven times before eventually being killed on August 5, 2009. The drone pursuit of him would leave at least 164 dead, including eight-year-old Noor Syed who was playing in a house near one of Mehsud’s suspected hideouts when a piece of shrapnel hit him.

Throughout Obama’s presidency events like these occurred with alarming frequency. A pregnant woman in Yemen died while driving with her children. A 4-year-old girl was left without an eye, nose, or lower lip in a rural province of Afghanistan. Rescue workers in Pakistan were killed while trying to retrieve bodies after an airstrike. Even American military personnel weren’t spared. In 2011, for instance, Marine Staff Sergeant Jeremy Smith and Navy corpsman Benjamin Rast were unintentionally killed near Sangin, Afghanistan, by a drone strike while on their way to rescue Marines pinned down by Taliban gunfire. According to outside monitoring groups, by the end of his second term, President Obama had authorized 528 strikes with a death toll reaching somewhere between 380 and 801 civilians in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen alone. And that’s believed to be a conservative estimate.

The “Precision” of Drone Warfare

In 2013, when discussing the high number of civilian casualties from drone strikes, the president defended them by claiming that “conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage.” That same year, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared, “You can far more easily limit collateral damage with a drone than you can with a bomb, even a precision-guided munition, off an airplane.” Or, as former CIA Director Leon Panetta put it, “I think this is one of the most precise weapons that we have in our arsenal.”

If it sounded too good to be true, that’s because it was and still is.

When political scientists Micah Zenko and Amelia Wolf did a careful analysis of this claim for the Council on Foreign Relations, they found that “the White House is deeply misleading about the precision of drone strikes. They are, in fact, roughly thirty times more likely to result in a civilian fatality than an airstrike by a manned aircraft.” A deeper dive into the technology used for military drones showed that it’s prone to significant error. After analyzing documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act related to drones, previously unpublished court documents, dozens of engineering and technical studies, and contract data, CorpWatch’s Pratap Chatterjee and Christian Stork came to a similar conclusion: “Planning for drone operations was handicapped by a fog of numbers and raw data derived from flawed technology marketed by contractors, the military, and the intelligence agencies.”

The false notion that drones are more precise and effective -- and so less dangerous -- to civilians gained special, if grim, traction in the Obama era. During the Trump presidency, it would only become more of a given. In the years since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, in fact, the U.S. military has only expanded its use of artificial intelligence, or AI, in warfare in order, as the Pentagon’s chief information officer Dana Deasy puts it, to maintain America’s “strategic position and prevail on future battlefields.”

Unfortunately, as my colleague Emily Manna and I have pointed out, this is a development that’s anything but relegated to those “future battlefields.” The military is already hard at work making its existing weapons systems, including drones, ever more autonomous. This process is sure to accelerate, even if the American public will hear little about it, thanks to the secrecy surrounding the application of AI and the fact that private companies with no commitment to public accountability are deeply involved in creating the technology.

Under the circumstances, one thing is predictable: ever more civilians are going to die in America’s wars.

Drone War Escalates Under Trump

Almost as alarming as the rate of civilian casualties from drone and other air strikes in the Obama years was the lack of information provided about them. The American public couldn't find out how many civilians had actually been killed, whether their government compensated those who were harmed or not, or even the legal rationale for such strikes. Sometimes, it was impossible to tell whether drones were even behind them. Most of what could be known about the U.S. drone program, in fact, including the CIA’s role in it, how its “targets” were tracked, or even what those in targeted countries thought about such strikes, came from leaked information and independent reporting. On rare occasions when the drone program was officially acknowledged, statements made about it usually turned out to be lies.

Through executive orders just before he left office, President Obama finally put in place modest reforms to make the drone program more transparent and accountable. His key order outlined a process of review and investigation that had to be set in motion anytime reports of civilian casualties from drone strikes came in. Information from all available sources, including non-military or government organizations, was to be taken into account and the government was required to acknowledge responsibility for civilian deaths and injuries while providing redress to the victims and their families. Finally, the director of national intelligence was to release estimates of the number of combatants and civilians killed by military drone strikes since 2009. Another executive order required future presidents to release similar information annually. Although the numbers still proved dubious and many questions remained about, among other things, the CIA civilian casualty count, at least the pendulum finally seemed to be swinging in the right direction.

No such luck. Soon after President Trump took office, his administration began to quietly dismantle the safeguards Obama had just created. His administration would subsequently expand the battlefields on which drones would be used, ease combat rules in Somalia intended to protect civilians, rescind most aspects of Obama’s executive orders, and stop publishing civilian casualty data entirely, while telling the public even less about the program. Not surprisingly, drone strikes across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa would rise and a lot more civilians would start dying from them. None of this was exactly shocking from a commander-in-chief who had once asked a CIA official why he didn’t kill a terrorist target’s family during a drone strike.

In his Nobel Prize speech, Obama claimed that the reason the United States adhered to certain rules of conduct in war like protecting civilians was because “that’s what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is the source of our strength.” In the first half of last year, U.S. and Afghan air and drone strikes killed more civilians than the Taliban for the first time ever. Those strikes hit wedding parties, farmers, pregnant women, and small children. In Somalia, drone strikes decimated entire communities, destroying not only lives, but crops, homes, and livelihoods. And as the new decade began, President Trump not only carried out a drone strike so drastic and rare that many experts believed it was a straightforward act of (and declaration of) war, but also threatened to bomb non-military targets (“cultural” sites), a move which is generally considered a war crime under international law.

In its recklessness and brutality, Trump’s escalating drone war should remind us all of just how dangerous it is when a president claims the legal authority to kill in secret and no one can stop him. Maybe this decade we’ll learn our lesson.

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Allegra Harpootlian, a TomDispatch regular, is a political partner with the Truman National Security Project. She currently works at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. You can subscribe to her drone newsletter here and find her on Twitter at @ally_harp.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

The Ulterior Motives of the Anti-War Right

By Osita Nwanevu, The New Republic

12 January 20

Liberal critics of Trump's Iran belligerence got bipartisan support this week, but they should watch out for their sudden allies' agendas.

ednesday’s classified Hill briefing on the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani seems to have gone poorly for the White House. According to Republican Senator Mike Lee, Trump administration officials not only failed to fully justify Trump’s strike but also suggested they would have had no trouble assassinating the supreme leader of Iran without prior authorization, as well. Earlier, Lee had described the meeting as “the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue.”

“They had to leave after 75 minutes,” he told the press afterward, “while they were in the process of telling us that we need to be good little boys and girls and run along and not debate this in public.” Senator Rand Paul agreed. “I see no way in the world you could logically argue that an authorization to have war with Saddam Hussein has anything to do with having war with people currently in Iraq,” he said.

Lee and Paul’s outspokenness has been unsurprising. Both have condemned military intervention in the Middle East and voiced support for restoring congressional war-making authority for some time now. Lee, in particular, has been a leader of efforts to withdraw American support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen; Paul has joined him in this endeavor. But while the pair have garnered media attention for standing apart from their Republican colleagues, reducing their opposition to Trump’s strike to a simple anti-war stance obscures the nature of the right’s rift on foreign policy.

It’s true that their criticisms of Trump stood out all the more within a discourse on Soleimani’s assassination that has been colored by rhetoric from conservatives even more grotesque than the bluster Trump offered in his own defense. In an appearance on Lou Dobbs Tonight this week, Republican Congressman Doug Collins, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, intimated that Democrats critical of Trump were, in essence, terrorist sympathizers. “They’re in love with terrorists,” he said breezily. “They mourn Soleimani more than they mourn our Gold Star families who are the ones who suffered under Soleimani.”

On Thursday, the National Republican Congressional Committee effectively endorsed this rhetorical approach by confronting members of the Democratic caucus with the question of whether Soleimani was a terrorist. Those who ignored the question were recorded in videos the NRCC’s Twitter account captioned gleefully. “Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans,” one read, “but @GilCisnerosCA can’t bring himself to acknowledge he was a terrorist or that America is safer with him gone.”

Republicans are following the lead of the conservative press. On Tuesday, for instance, former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka mused that Iran’s counterattack on bases holding American personnel was a good thing, in that it potentially opened the door to a larger conflict. “Paradoxically, we should welcome what they have decided to do,” he said, “because now they have done in the open what they have been doing against us and our friends for decades in the asymmetric warfare domain.” The next day, Fox’s Pete Hegseth managed to outdo Gorka’s bloodlust:

What better time than now to say, we’re starting the clock, you’ve got a week, you’ve got X amount of time before we start taking out your energy production facilities. We take out key infrastructure. We take out your missile sites. We take out nuclear developments.…

We take out port capabilities. Or, you know what, take out a Quds headquarters while you’re at it, if you want. I understand that’s not a popular idea. I don’t want boots on the ground, I don’t want occupation, I don’t want endless war. But Iran has been in endless war with us for 40 years. Either we put up and shut up now and stop it, or we kind of wait, go back to the table, and let them dither while they attempt to continue to develop the capabilities to do precisely what they said they want to do.

What’s emerged in the days since Soleimani’s assassination is a clear split, not just between a handful of Republican critics of intervention like Paul and Lee and the conservative establishment, but within the institutions of the conservative establishment itself, including Fox News. Tucker Carlson, for instance, has spent the week condemning Trump’s strike. “There are an awful lot of bad people in this world,” he said last Friday. “We can’t kill them all, it’s not our job. Instead, our government exists to defend and promote the interests of American citizens. Period.” This was the kind of messaging that earned him his largest-ever audience on Tuesday night.

It would be easy to chalk the growing constituency for anti-interventionism on the right to Trump’s erratic, on-and-off promotion of a populist isolationism during his 2016 run. But a Republican divide on foreign policy had already begun to emerge well before he arrived on the scene. Lee and Paul, for instance, had inveighed against intervention in Syria and Libya during the Obama administration. In the long lead-up to the 2016 presidential primary, old comments Paul had made criticizing the neoconservative consensus, including remarks that Vice President Dick Cheney had been motivated by Halliburton to back the war in Iraq and that a nuclear Iran would not pose a threat to Israel, were unearthed by conservatives and seen as a liability for his anticipated campaign—so much so that Paul defended himself in a 2014 Time magazine piece titled, “I Am Not an Isolationist.” Among other things, that broadside criticized Obama for not acting “more decisively and strongly against ISIS.” The next year, Paul voiced support for arming the Kurds.

All of this might feel like ancient history, but there are two things about Paul’s and Lee’s records that are of particular importance now. The first, of course, is that both Paul and Lee ultimately opposed the Iran nuclear deal. In fact, both joined 45 other Republican senators in sending a letter to Iran arguing that the Obama administration lacked the authority to broker a real deal, a move that was widely seen as an effort to undermine negotiations. The second thing, which is more significant as a guide for the future of Republican foreign policy, is that both Paul and Lee have been ambivalent at best on certain relevant questions of immigration policy.

Paul, for instance, opposed the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States and defended Trump’s Muslim travel ban. “You don’t have a right to come here,” he told The Guardian in January 2017. “We have a right to make rules on who comes.” Lee initially responded to the ban with “technical questions” for the White House and has since been a defender of the constitutionality of Trump’s efforts. After the Supreme Court upheld a version of the travel ban in June 2018, Lee affirmed his approval to The Deseret News. “It is not the place of the Supreme Court to question the wisdom of a presidential action,” he said, “but rather to resolve disputes as to whether such an action was lawful and constitutional.”

Anyone who doubts the relevance of those stances should take a closer listen to the rhetoric being offered against Trump’s strike by voices like Carlson, who drew a connection between the risk of war with Iran and undocumented immigrants immediately after news of Soleimani’s assassination broke last week:

[T]he very people demanding action against Iran tonight, the ones telling you the Persian menace is the greatest threat we face, are the very same ones demanding that you ignore the invasion of America now in progress from the south. The millions, the tens of millions, of foreign nationals living among us illegally; the torrent, more significantly, of Mexican narcotics that has killed and disabled entire generations of Americans—nobody cares, in case you haven’t noticed.

Carlson refers to the Iranians as “Persian” because he and others on the right see the world through the lens of civilizational conflict. As Carlson has suggested himself, he came to oppose the war in Iraq not only because it was strategically unwise, but because he came to believe the Iraqi people were too inferior to care about. “Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate primitive monkeys,” he said in 2008. “That’s why it wasn’t worth invading.”

This attitude, combined with anxieties that chaos in the Middle East could drive more refugees from the region to the U.S., as well as anti-Semitic theories about Jews puppeteering the world’s major powers as agents of Israel, drove much of the opposition from the far right to Trump’s strike in Syria in 2017. For example, the white nationalist site VDare accused Trump of fostering an “anti-West, pro-terrorist foreign policy.” It was thus unsurprising, in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination, to read Richard Spencer, once again, repudiating his former support for Trump.

Lee and Paul now regularly pair up with progressives such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ro Khanna on anti-war measures. These collaborations are to the good as long as progressives keep in mind that the widening gulf on the right between old-fashioned interventionists and isolationists of various stripes has emerged for reasons not fully reducible to diverging assessments of the war in Iraq and the costs of American empire. Any alliances between those who oppose war because they recognize the common humanity of innocents abroad and those who oppose war precisely because they do not will always be uneasy. If the anti-war right is ever assured that conflicts abroad and the sustenance of American hegemony can be maintained without the risk of refugees fleeing to the U.S.—and without putting boots on the ground, thanks to American technological power—these alliances will also be short-lived.