How do our liberals think this kind of thing reflects on Obama, and do you think MSNBC would have attacked the previous president over these same facts.
I will stress a few points, and I will opine that on balance I think I am in favor of this. However, I have my worries, and they are substantial worries about the targeting of U.S. citizens without due process, and the use of the military (i.e. de facto going to war) without civilian oversight.
The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.
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The convergence of military and intelligence resources has created blind spots in congressional oversight. Intelligence committees are briefed on CIA operations, and JSOC reports to armed services panels. As a result, no committee has a complete, unobstructed view.
I think this goes toward supporting my general statement that Obama doesn't represent a sea change from the previous administration.
Nevertheless, for a president who campaigned against the alleged counterterrorism excesses of his predecessor, Obama has emphatically embraced the post-Sept. 11 era’s signature counterterrorism tool.
As I said, I'm not sure I think this is all bad, and I like force projection in an area of the world where we've seen our enemies gather and recruit. And where they do this we can't always put our physical military. And I'm not particularly bothered by the worry that some have about morality of an unthreatened combatant having a different feeling of lethality than his enemy. This is what humans have been attempting to achieve in every conflict in the history of the world.
I am interested in (again) my perception that Democrats are just as politically hypocritical as their Republican counterparts, but that hypocrisy just manifests differently, given the different cultural and political positions the two parties (and their media surrogates) hold.
Food for thought anyway.
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Oh, and I wanted to say that I think "Reaper" is a really cool name for a deadly stealthy aircraft.
3 comments:
Thoughts:
1. Yes, in this, Obama is certainly continuing/expanding on the Bush-era tactics. I suspect this is more driven my the military-intelligence community. Off topic, it's a funny thing that we give the executive lots of credit/blame/responsibility for the things government does under their watch -- rightly so -- but it's also true and insufficiently recognized that the various agencies have their own career staff and agendas and are pretty autonomous, and the president has limited control over much of what they do. As an analogy, I think of the DaVinci robot that surgeons now use. It's a great tool, but an imperfect one. It's under the surgeon's control, but the precision of that control leaves a little to be desired. On topic, Obama certainly bears direct responsibility for the drones because he personally signed off on their use, but I wonder how much the brass pushed for them, and how much they were used without explicit authorization...
2. MSNBC is not not not the liberal Fox. They air THREE HOURS of Scarborough every weekday and have as much conservative viewpoint/stenography as any other non-Fox network. Just because they allow a couple of liberals on air does not make them the liberal news avatar. Having said that, I don't think the liberal noise machine would have bitched about the droneness much at all. It's not much different than cruise missiles or other modern precision munitions which were used extensively by Bush & Clinton before him. There is a faction of the Left which is reflexively anti- any use of bombs, and there are pragmatic arguments against their use, but I doubt this would have been partisan. Bear in mind that most of the Left supported the Afghan war; it was only the BS pretext for the Iraq war that proved partisanly divisive.
3. On Hypocrisy -- I don't recall Obama campaigning on this point. Yes yes yes a million times he has rolled over and fucked us in the ass on the wiretapping, and to a lesser degree on Gitmo and tribunals (he tried to do the right thing, lost, and gave up on those), and the warrantless renditions I think too. And he failed to prosecute the Bush torturers. BUT. This in particular seems pretty in line with his campaign rhetoric. I remember him promising quite firmly that he would go into Pakistan and take out bin Laden if the Pakis were unable/unwilling to. McCain mocked him for that. So while I recall Obama making noise about wanting to be more bilateral and collaborative with other countries, I don't recall him repudiating this sort of thing. So while I agree with the larger point of Obama flip-flopping or failing or being a hypocrite on a number of civil liberty issues, whatever you want to call it, but I don't think this instance is an example of that.
...it's also true and insufficiently recognized that the various agencies have their own career staff and agendas and are pretty autonomous, and the president has limited control over much of what they do.
Did you really just make this point? Isn't this exactly precisely, nay, precisely exactly... umm.. I'm having trouble coming up with a more emphatic way of saying that this is EXACTLY EXACTLY EXACTLY what I said when you guys all came down on GWB's response to Katrina. I pointed out that his appointment of one guy at the top of FEMA 18 months prior to a natural disaster had NO NO NO repercussions on how that organization responded so soon after the appointment. The 99.99% of FEMA that is career bureaucrats were not influenced so quickly... they *can't* be, that's the nature of bureaucracy.
How drones are used in combat is, in fact, much more a reflection of the current, sitting president after three years than FEMA's response to a hurricane a reflection of the current FEMA head's incompetence after 18 months.
MSNBC is not not not the liberal Fox.
True, but 99% of my exposure to them is weekday evenings while I'm cooking dinner and that Maddow and that is definitely smart liberal commentary on the news. So that's my touchpoint and the genesis of the comment. She and her guests would have given Bush a harder time, a much harder time, than she's giving Obama.
On Hypocrisy -- I don't recall Obama campaigning on this point.
Well there's no question that in things like using the latest technology to go attack bin Laden in Pakistan, as well as keeping a tough, lethal combat-ready force in the area does not represent hypocrisy at all on Obama's part. He was quite clear about the extremely hypothetical point about this stuff, and funnily enough faced the exact question and did exactly what he said he'd be likely to do. Good for him, as I said, I am all for force projection, and I am not too troubled by the "un-dirty" way of remote-piloting deadly drones.
The hypocrisy is mostly on coverage, and I do think it's hypocrisy. It was nice to see the WaPo be part of the exposure of the drone thing, but it remains true that I read/consume more liberal media than conservative media and I just do not see the criticism of things like killing Americans without due process that I expected to see. When I reflect on that I can only assume that my expectations were set by the media's treatment of GWB's administration on the issue of things like Guantanimo. The non-due-process killing of Americans seems like a much bigger deal to me than the non-due-process detaining of non-Americans who were (at least nominally) fighting our army. Neither is good, but one is demonstrably less constitutional than the other.
WaPo, Slate (kind of the same thing), MSNBC, my friends, the NYTimes all seem less enthusiastic in their criticisms than they were 4 years ago over roughly the same infractions.
On liberal and/or media criticism of O vs B, this is an interesting phenomenon. I agree that 2002-2008 the civil liberties stuff was on the front page of the WaPo/NYT/Kos et al quite a lot, and when Obama became president that all just disappeared down the memory hole, even though many of the practices continued.
Why?
Here's my theory: it has to do with the stenographic role the media now plays. By which I mean they tend to simply report what people say, and if it's about the President, and if it's got some drama and confrontation, it leads. so 2002-8 if some Dem or some commission attacked Bush about something, that was the lead story, and since many of the controversies of the day were due process/civil liberty stuff, we saw a lot of it.
Nothing has changed, except that now the attacks come from the other side of the spectrum. The Rs are quite happy O is continuing the police state, so they don't attack him for that, but for being a socialist class warrior. So now that's the theme we see in the mainstream.
The other thing that minimizes liberal criticism of O is the rally around the flag effect. When you have nut balls calling him Hitler, and the big issues of the day are economic, it's natural (if lamentable) to set aside the other issues and come to his defense against our common enemy.
There is a fair amount of lefty criticism of O in certain quarters (Firedoglake, Glenn greenwald). Most libs, including me, feel pretty disappointed/betrayed by O on this front. Theres a sense of futility in going on about the issue when it seems we've already lost, and keeping up the drumbeat only weakens O and makes it more likely we'll wind up with someone even worse in 2013.
I often wish we lived in a parliamentary democracy. Then I see the chaos they regularly get. Sigh.
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