The New York Times has a pretty
lengthy piece on the President’s role in the waging of a drone
war over Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, which serves to highlight
some of the differences between the way President George W. Bush’s
prosecution of the war on terror was perceived and how President
Obama’s continuation and expansion of that war on terror is
perceived today. George Bush, for example, got a lot of
grief for characterizing his job as being that of “the
decider.” Here’s the Times explaining how Barack Obama,
too, is a decider:

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned
against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving
every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist
suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre
“baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity
for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family
is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the
final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far
and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his
national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for
the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s
determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

The Times marvels at the president’s decision-making
abilities in the war on terror, drone edition:

When he applies his lawyering skills to
counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his
ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing
an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told
colleagues was “an easy one.”

The justification for ordering the assassination of
an American citizen is buried towards the end of the article:

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel
prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step,
asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process
applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the
executive branch.

Internal deliberations! How reassuring. This aggressive approach
in the drone war isn’t all sunny, though, even according to the
Times:

Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter,
has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive
American policy there, saying “he didn’t realize his main job was
to kill people,” a colleague said.

The Times explains President Obama’s deft
maneuvers immediately after his 2009 inauguration, and how the
president worded his executive orders on Guantanamo Bay and
extraordinary rendition to seem like they comported with campaign
pledges while leaving enough room for his policies to evolve back
to George Bush form:

A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the
government understood what the public did not. Without showing his
hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition,
military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been
targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist
attacks.

Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, the Times papers
over the very real “collateral damage” of U.S. drone strikes
overseas:

Just days after taking office, the president got word
that the first strike under his administration had killed a number
of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing,
and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ “ a top White
House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for
more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened
standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty”
that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama
wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.

The president’s directive reinforced the need for caution,
counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change
the program. In part, that is because “the protection of innocent
life was always a critical consideration,” said Michael V. Hayden,
the last C.I.A. director under President George W.
Bush.

As a reminder, President Obama has already ordered
5 times the drone strikes George W. Bush did in eight years in
office Only after official assurances of utmost protection of
innocent life and “near certainty” of no civil deaths in any
planned drone strikes does this get mentioned:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting
civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect
counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants,
according to several administration officials, unless there is
explicit intelligence posthumously proving them
innocent.

Guilty until proven innocent. The CIA even has the
authority to target mere likely suspects. Salon’s
Glenn Greenwald noted even before that new authority the CIA was

already targeting rescuers and mourners of previous targets.
It’s just “simple logic.” The Times again:

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one
of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or
found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.
 

The
doctrine sounds remarkably like the one espoused by Mayor Bloomberg
to justify the
NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics, where police officers enter largely
minority neighborhoods to stop largely young black and Latino males
and frisk them for guns (pretty much illegal in New York City).
Though the left may deny the connection between foreign policy and
domestic civil liberties it made to critique President Bush’s war
on terror, that connection undoubtably remains. As then Senator
Barack Obama wrote in
2007, “the security and well-being of each and every American
depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our
borders. The mission of the United States is to provide global
leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a
common security and a common humanity.” Despite that:

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief
take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon,
the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to
reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice
between our safety and our ideals.” But he has found that war is a
messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound
by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that
his speeches did not envision.

The Times explains, too, how the kill list is
fashioned:

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week
or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national
security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore
over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president
who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama
administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint
slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected
members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s
Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees
strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to
call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations
of ties to Al Qaeda.

“What’s a Qaeda facilitator?” asked one participant, illustrating
the spirit of the exchanges. “If I open a gate and you drive
through it, am I a facilitator?” Given the contentious discussions,
it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and
names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an
imminent threat, the official said. A parallel, more cloistered
selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where
that agency conducts strikes.

The Times goes on to explain how Congress’ reticence on
closing Guantanamo Bay caught the president off-guard:

Walking out of the Archives [after a May 2009 speech on
national security], the president turned to his national security
adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had
never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the
[Guantanamo] prison.

“We’re never going to make that mistake again,” Mr. Obama told the
retired Marine general…

It was not only Mr. Obama’s distaste for legislative backslapping
and arm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an
administration official who has watched him closely: the president
seemed to have “a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will
happen — without his really having thought through the mechanism by
which it will happen.”

Apparently Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder were willing to go to
Capitol Hill to defend the closing of the prison at Guantanamo, but
Rahm Emanuel nixed it, placing healthcare reform first. Now the
president just says
he can’t wait for Congress, and when it comes to the war on
terror, or war in
general, he just doesn’t ask.

And, finally, your obligatory Vietnam comparison:

Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence
until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside
the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were
sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in
the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me
of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who
began his Navy service during that war.

Reason on the drone wars