Bad Precedent: Obama’s Drone Doctrine is Nixon’s Cambodia Doctrine (Dietrich)

http://www.juancole.com/2013/02/precedent-cambodia-dietrich.html

Bad Precedent: Obama’s Drone Doctrine is Nixon’s Cambodia Doctrine (Dietrich)
Posted on 02/11/2013 by Juan

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Commentators have admirably analyzed the flouting of the U.S. Constitution. Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic hits the mark in his critique of the legality of the recently-leaked Justice Department white paper. The Obama administration vindicates the potential liquidation of American citizens through a spuriously broad redefinition of “imminent threat,” even when the U.S. government does not have “clear evidence that a specific attack…will take place in the immediate future.” The administration holds that the use of deadly force is “reasonable” even in the case of relative ignorance. This “trust us” argument moves against a core constitutional right of citizens to neutral judicial review. Yet the Justice Department rationalizes quashing speech and assassinating citizens without sound evidence of an imminent threat.

The rationale of the white paper is equally specious on the international level. Most shockingly the Justice Department invokes the legal reasoning of the Nixon administration for the extension of the Vietnam War into Cambodia first through secret bombing and then outright invasion. “If a neutral state has been unable for any reason to prevent violations of its neutrality by the troops of one belligerent…the other belligerent has historically been justified in attacking those enemy forces in that state,” the legal adviser to the Nixon administration wrote in 1970. The Obama administration takes a bad argument and makes worse. Because “terrorist organizations may move their base of operations” and “transnational non-state organizations” are so diffuse, the United States is justified in eliminating threats with the consent of a host nation or after the government determines that the host nation us “unable or unwilling to suppress the threat.”

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The bombing of Cambodia, along with the revelations of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, helped create a climate of doubt about the balance between means and ends in American foreign policy. Through Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee, Congress began to investigate the FBI and the CIA. After exposing just the details that led to the conclusion that the CIA “a rogue elephant rampaging out of control”—emphasizing plans in the early 1960s to “neutralize” Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Abdul Kassem of Iraq, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic—the committee turned to the international impression such activities left. Targeted killings, even on a far slighter level than the thousands of drone strikes since 2008, produced a backlash that threatened Americans’ safety.

Recent studies of drone violence support the appraisal of international history. The recent joint report by the Stanford International Human Rights Clinic and the New York University Global Justice Clinic, Living Under Drones, confirms the Cambodia effect. after nine months of interviews, the authors concluded that “the dominant narrative” that drones are a surgically precise tool that makes the United States safer is utterly false. Missiles kill innocent civilians on a regular basis. Extensive evidence also pinpoints an injurious effect of the drone policy itself: increased anti-American sentiment. Drone violence is not only immoral, it is counterproductive. The harmful impact of drones extends beyond the death and psychological trauma of people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Stepping up the use of unmanned killing machines is not beneficent for the image of America abroad. The moral justification for drone attacks—that they make the United States a safer place—is even less certain than the legal one. Such a wrongheaded notion moves against national security, not for it.