Article Image

IPFS News Link • Trump Administration

Does it Matter Who Pulls the Trigger in the Drone Wars?

• http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org


We're allowing a mindset of "anything Trump does is wrong" coupled with lightening-speed historical revisionism for the Obama era to sustain the same mistakes in the war on terror that have fueled Islamic terrorism for the past 15 years. However, there may be a window of opportunity to turn the anti-Trump rhetoric into a review of the failed policies of the last decade and a half.

A recent example of "anything Trump does is wrong" has to do with his changing the rules for drone kill decision making. In May 2013 President Obama self-imposed a dual-standard (known as the "playbook") for remote killing. The White House, including Obama himself reviewing a kill list at regular meetings, would decide which individuals outside of the "traditional war zones" of Iraq and Afghanistan would be targeted.

Meanwhile, in America's post-9/11 traditional war zones, military commanders then made, and now make, the kill decisions without civilian review, with the threshold for "acceptable civilian casualties" supposedly less strict. Of course the idea that any of this functions under "rules" is based on the bedrock fallacy that anything militarily done by the last three presidents has been legal under the never-updated 2001 authorization for war in Afghanistan. For perspective, remember Islamic State never existed, and Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen had stable governments at the time Congress passed that authorization.

In sum: since 2013 the military can kill from the air at will inside Iraq and Afghanistan (the status of Syria is unclear), as well as other areas designated unilaterally by the U.S. government as "traditional," with allowances for less regard for the collateral damage of innocents slaughtered. It is the president himself who plays judge, jury, and executioner across the rest of the globe, including in several acknowledged cases, ordering the deaths of American citizens without due process.


PurePatriot