Teaching a Neocon Exactly How WWII Is Different From the War on Terror

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/teaching-a-neocon-exactly-how-wwii-is-different-from-the-war-on-terror/272948/


American noncombatants were unlikely to be found on the beaches at Normandy, especially compared to a War on Terror "battlefield," which encompasses the whole earth.



On Special Report tonight, Charles Krauthammer explained why he was unfazed by the use of drones to kill Americans without a trial. He pointed out that, "thousands of Americans died at Antietam without due process" and "when we stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, and Americans approached a German bunker, I don't think anyone asked, 'Is there a German-American here? I want to read you the Miranda rights.'" Unfortunately, the administration's guidelines "were probably written by someone in the lower quintile of his law school class" because "they want to pretend that you can only hit an American al-Qaeda operative who is an imminent threat and then define him as a threat out of existence by saying al-Qaeda is continually hatching plots so he's always an imminent threat."
Left out of that summary is his passing acknowledgment that the War on Terror is different than past wars. What Krauthammer doesn't realize is that identifying how the wars are different goes a long way toward demonstrating that drone critics are being reasonable, not hysterical.

The Civil War and World War II were discrete, declared wars against specific enemies who fought the U.S. on geographically predictable battlefields. At Antietam or Normandy, it would've been very difficult for Presidents Lincoln or Roosevelt to abuse their power by killing an innocent American they falsely labeled an enemy combatant -- they didn't send a kill list of individuals into battle, and the odds that a given innocent they wanted to kill would just happen to be there were rather low. Finally, quite apart from every other argument, there was literally no way to afford anyone due process on the battlefield at Antietam or on the beaches of Normandy.

In contrast, the War on Terrorism is a never-ending conflict against an amorphous, un-uniformed enemy fought in secret, often far from any traditional battlefield, with opaque rules of engagement carried out by the CIA rather than the Armed Forces. If drone strikes are constrained only by a secret executive branch process wherein any American is treated as an enemy combatant on the mere say-so of a "high-level official," and requires no evidence that the target is planning an attack any time in the near future, it would be very easy for the power to be abused. Lots of innocent people just happen to be walking around on the battlefield in the War on Terror, as it's defined by the CIA, because the battlefield encompasses the whole earth. And it would be very easy to afford guys like Anwar Al-Awlaki more due process than Obama has extended -- in that case, he likely could've been tried in absentia, convicted, and killed.