Laurie Calhoun, We Kill because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age (2015) — a Book Review

23 November 2015

Occasionally repetitious, but clearly written and soundly reasoned — highly recommended

Laurie Calhoun capably criticizes the moral and legal justifications for President Obama’s drone murder policy in We Kill because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age (Zed Books, 2015).

None of what she says will be new to the handful of people who have considered the implications of drone assassination. Unfortunately, this group constitutes only a tiny fragment of the United States' too frequently easily frightened, often sheep-like public:

Given the nearly complete absence of domestic debate over the use of drones before they were deployed in hundreds of strikes abroad in countries with which the United States is not officially at war, it seems safe to say that technology has guided policy . . . .

The first clue . . . is the preponderance of neologisms [new expressions for something] used to defend the practice of targeted killing. ‘Unlawful combatants’ are said to be protected by neither the Geneva Conventions nor the laws of civil society.

‘Imminent threats’ need not imply immediacy.

The category of combatants subject to targeting has been enlarged to include all military-age men (from sixteen to fifty) in hostile areas, where ‘hostile’, too, is defined by the killers.

On its face, this all looks like a suspicious form of linguistic legerdemain [magician’s hand tricks] designed precisely to render permissible the use of Predator drones to dispatch persons abroad.

Samples of Laurie Calhoun’s easily understood analysis

Regarding preemptive war

What [President] Obama failed to grasp as he went on to expand the drone program is that preemptive war and summary execution of suspects are two sides of the same tyrannical coin.

Summary execution by Predator drone is triply protected by secrecy, for neither the perpetrators nor most of the victims can be identified, and the procedures used to produce target lists are not subject to critique.

On the semantic fiddling that ignores conceptual distinctions

The execution by Predator drone of Anwar al-Awlaki [see here] has received far more attention than any other drone strike . . . for the simple reason that he was an intentionally targeted US citizen.

But the very same doubts raised by critics in this case apply to every other person alleged to be a ‘collaborator’ or ‘supporter’ or ‘associate’ of violent terrorists, many of whom may simply have been protesting against what they took to be US war crimes.

There are important conceptual distinctions between suspects and terrorists, and between dissenters and killers. The US government appears to have lost all sight of these distinctions, perhaps as a result of the militarization of its intelligence agencies.

Regarding distortion of the concept of imminent threat

[T]he case for the use of deadly force against an alleged physical threat would seem to grow weaker and weaker the farther the farther from US territory the suspect is located, reaching the limit of impermissibility when there is no immediate physical danger to any other person present, as in cases where there are not even any troops on the ground to protect.

On the questionable relaxation of rules of engagement

[R]emote-control killers are granted a blanket power to kill not shared by soldiers on the ground . . . who are required to observe certain conventions, such as the provision to enemy soldiers of the opportunity to surrender . . . .

With respect to our related inability to see ourselves clearly

If the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a violation of international law, then every person killed in the conflict was the victim of a war crime, and no one should have supported the US occupation any more than they should have supported the German occupation of France.

It seems quite likely that a good portion of the supposedly ‘evil’ insurgents destroyed during the occupation were Iraqis who viewed their country as under attack by a foreign army . . . .

Regarding the strategic stupidity that easy killing generates

As war has come to require progressively less sacrifice of compatriot lives, US leaders have exhibited a greater willingness to wield deadly force in cases where war is neither the last nor the best resort.

The very fact that [President] Obama considered launching missile strikes against the [Bashar al] Assad regime in Syria after chemical weapons were used in August 2013 revealed that the military option appeals to leaders even when there is no strategic benefit to be gleaned, and even when the recourse to deadly force might well exacerbate what is already a bloody mess.

On the equation of manhood with ordering other people to sacrifice their lives

The willingness to sacrifice other people’s lives continues to be regarded . . . as a sign of courage and strength.

Regarding the morally debilitating influence of financial profit

[T]he more missiles used, the more will be produced.

As of 2013, the drone contracts for major weapons manufacturers were already as these figures: Boeing $1.8 billion; Northrop Grumman $10.9 billion; General Atomics $6.6 billion; and Raytheon $548 million.

On the cycle of death, as aggravated by self-interest and self-protective secrecy

An increase in state-inflicted homicide is predictable when persons with no qualms against killing and a self-interested financial incentive for racking up as many ‘bug splats’ and ‘splashes’ as possible are granted the authority to determine who should die.

Regarding the national hypocrisy that results from our thoughtlessness

Few US government advocates appear even to register that the targeting of suspects using missiles would be vociferously denounced as unconscionable crimes of aggression if carried out by a foreign government on US soil.

The moral? — A totalitarian shift

Calhoun points out that:

What is especially perplexing about the secretive Predator drone killing program is that the very people who ‘make the call’ at the culmination of deliberations behind closed doors are also the people who report on what is done.

The police, the judge, the jury, the executioner, and the narrator of the last word on what transpired are all vested in the executive, with no possibility for revision of the story.

Surprising indeed, given what most of us once thought anti-authoritarian American values were.

Again, none of Calhoun’s arguments will be new to ethically thoughtful, policy-interested people. Yet, given that so few of us seem to be such, her book serves as a reminder that none of what is going on with waging preemptive war and preemptive assassination is as straightforwardly righteous as Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama would have us think.

PeteFree.com

Laurie Calhoun, We Kill because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age (2015) — a Book Review