Obama's 'kill list'

Short-term counterterrorism efforts undermine the United States' long-term goals: to prevent safe havens for terrorists.

Washington, DC - "Don't believe what you read in the papers," my father used to say. And as with most of the sage advice I ignored in my youth, experience would later prove him to be right. It eventually occurred to me when in government that if on topics I knew as an insider the press was at least half wrong, it was unlikely that they could be right on everything else.
And so it is with some scepticism that one should greet the latest journalistic sensation which has set tongues wagging and the blogosphere ablaze in Washington: Last Tuesday's blockbuster article in the New York Times concerning drone operations and US President Barak Obama's counterterrorism "kill list". The piece is putatively based on interviews with some three dozen current or former Obama administration advisers. As at least one wag has pointed out, an article featuring that degree of willing cooperation from the administration might more accurately be labelled a press release. Indeed, as one might expect given the context, the take-away is highly complimentary of the President and, presumably, highly advantageous to him politically, save perhaps among the sort of left-leaning hand-wringers with whom Obama's Republican political opponents would love to see him identified.
Here in the pages of the New York Times we see the stern, steely-eyed American president, prepared to do what is necessary to defend the nation against its terrorist enemies, dealing death from the air at a pace which would put George W Bush to shame, first in Pakistan and now in Yemen, as well. But here also we see a model of benign, humanitarian restraint, determined to limit civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible by imposing his personal discipline on an otherwise rampant national security structure. And finally we see the lawyerly paragon of justice who, as advised by his warrior-priest counterterrorism advisor, insists upon taking personal moral responsibility for the targeted assassinations through which the US war on terror is, in important part, being waged. Not content to delegate to others the ultimate decisions of life and death, this president insists upon personal approval of every addition to the death roster after an elaborate bureaucratic process through which, putatively, only those targets which pose an imminent threat and who are not otherwise susceptible of capture are winnowed out. And when judgments must be made as to whether a target poses a sufficient threat to justify the collateral killing of innocents, it is the president himself who weighs the scales.