Barack Obama: Drone Warrior

By Charles Krauthammer
Published: May 31

A very strange story, that 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant.

The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release.

Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. And why now? Because in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s G-8 and NATO summits.

The Obama camp thought that any political problem with foreign policy would be cured by the Osama bin Laden operation. But the administration’s attempt to politically exploit the raid’s one-year anniversary backfired, earning ridicule and condemnation for its crude appropriation of the heroic acts of others.

A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed, “the downside would have been horrible for him. “ Outraged vets released a response ad, pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs.

That ad also highlighted the many self-references Obama made in announcing the bin Laden raid: “I can report . . . I directed . . . I met repeatedly . . . I determined . . . at my direction . . . I, as commander in chief,” etc. ad nauseam. (Eisenhower’s announcement of the D-Day invasion made not a single mention of his role, whereas the alternate statement he’d prepared had the landing been repulsed was entirely about it being his failure.)

Obama only compounded the self-aggrandizement problem when he spoke a week later about the military “fighting on my behalf.”

The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror, there are practically no captures anymore. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being — surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We do kill terror operatives, an important part of the war on terror, but we gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.

But that will cost us later. For now, we are to bask in the moral seriousness and cool purpose of our drone warrior president.

At least Illy has the courtesy to post Krauthammer's name on the top of the copy/paste so I don't have to bother reading any of it...you should take a cue from Illy on that one, Hank.

Fish on...

Todd

no achievements?

osama bin laden - dead
us auto industry - alive
27 months of job growth
repeal of don't ask, don't tell
gaddafi - dead
fair pay act
affordable health care act
troops leaving iraq
record corporate profits
donald trump - made irrelevant
not appointing corporate activist judges to supreme court

making republican lunatics crazy for 3+ years...... priceless

and then we have the republican nominee - who has experience in.....

eight years of campaigning

For a dude who actually reads and agrees with something...anything...that Charles Krauthammer has to say should not go around talking about anyone else having their head up anyone's arse...

Fish on...

Todd

"Thinking conservative"...?

Are you kidding?

Why think? You can just watch Fox, and read Krauthammer.

Fish on...

Todd

Kinda funny. Odds so envious of Krauthammer that he cannot even
stand to read his byline. He says.
Krauthammer is worth the read if nothing else than he creates so
much rectal trauma in the liberal's thought processes. I know, I was being polite.

Hank is a thinking conservative.

The only problem is that he does his thinking with an old, misfiring brain.



Yeah, everyone envies Krauthammer.

Are you stoned, or just stupid?

Your mind is like a steel trap that somebody left out in the back yard for 10 seasons. It's all rusted shut, and not good for anything except a trip to the dump.

Yeah..........Alzheimer's, dementia, strokes..........all diseases of the young. I bet you're glad you're old and crusty rather than being in your 40's again.

Truth hurts, huh?



Don't blame me for pointing out the obvious.

As usual, the right wing fruitcakes are projecting their own rectal malfunctions upon someone else...I don't envy an angry old man like Krauthammer any more than I envy an angry old man like Illy...I do, however, find amusement that a man can be so wrong about so much and still have so many followers.

Aunty, Romney's "fix" for the economy is more of the same...supply side economics that has never worked, and that is mainly the system we have been working under since 1981. It's not going to start working all of a sudden if Romney does it, even if they come up with a catchy new term like "job creators" to define it.

Fish on...

Todd

uh.....things got better with O?

I mean, reality must exist in some tiny bit of gray matter......open the door and look. O can't lead......can't lead......can't lead.....hello?

1. There is no such thing as a "free market"...it's a myth.

2. I never mentioned Obama, or Ed Schultz, or anyone other than Krauthammer, and a bit about Romney being more of the same failure as he and supply side economics have always been.

3. I never mentioned Pelosi.

4. I never mentioned government jobs.

That's just more projection from you fools.

Fish on...

Todd

Yeah, saving the auto industry sure was a stupid move, not to mention killing that nice man, Osama bin Laden...which, incidentally, are two things that Romney said he would not have done.

What he would have done is continued the same economic policies that siphon off the nation's money to a very select few, the same policies that have been utter failures for the past 30 years.

You guys would have voted for Santorum, or God forbid even Gingrich, had he got the nomination...at least admit that your selection has nothing to do with policies or logic, but are entrenched in that "R" after Romney's name...he's got nothing to offer but utter failure.

Fish on...

Todd

P.S. Since you tools on the right accept Krauthammer, Limbaugh, Hannity, and those other windbags as bastions of truth and the 'Merican way, you assume that we on the left accept their left wing analogs in the same way...which, obviously, we don't.

You guys are the masters of projection. You act like total asswipes, and assume that everyone else does, too.

How often do you see us copying and pasting up Ed Schultz, or Rachel Maddow, here?

How often do you wingnuts post up Krauthammer, Ollie, and the like?

Owned.

Todd's got the cons by the short and curlies today.

I'll most likely vote for Obama. Not because he is saving the nation; he isn't. However, he is saving the nation from more Reaganomics and Bushco policies. So despite Obama's shortcomings, which are numerous, having him in the Whitehouse prevents additional destructive Republican policies, as Todd noted above.

When the Republican platform works for the national interest instead of the <1%er's interests, that's when I switch. Meanwhile Illy and Hank and anyone else who imbibes the swill of Krauthammer, Ollie, etc., are the ones suffering from extreme cerebral rectal inversion.

Hank,

I don't even know who Schultz or Rachel or Reich or Krugman are, let alone read them. Ergo, I am real. How about you; have you ever had an original thought?

Hank, there's a reason why progressives, liberals, and Democrats have a lot of similarities, and a lot of disagreements, too...as a group we tend to think for ourselves, and have lots of different opinions. We don't get our talking points from a handful of media outlets.

There's also a reason why some dipshit redneck in Kentucky talks about "job creators" in exactly the same way as some x-ray tech from San Francisco does...they get their "thoughts" from the same place.

Right wingers will always have an inherent advantage over Democrats in that trying to unify them under a common banner is like herding cats...unifying Republicans under a common banner, even if that banner works directly in contravention to 99% of their own well being, is easy...more like herding sheep.

I know it's more fun to assume that we watch two or three tv/radio personalities to get our information like right wingers do, but we don't...and it doesn't matter one whit if you like it or believe it or not...just be aware that I will continue to point out not only the hypocrisy and lunacy of the right wing information machine (of which you are a part), but I will also continue to point out the child like projection that you it and you constantly engage in to somehow raise your own level of intellectualism by saying "they're just like us"...even when we are not, not by a long, long length.

Fish on...

Todd

Of course you do. Independent thinking isn't in your repertoire. I may or may not agree with Reich or Krugman, but you'd have to tell me where to find them.

Hank,

You do make an interesting, if unintended point: "Taking from the poor and middle class so that the rich can have it all;" now why is it we can't all get behind this platform policy?

Absolutely SS and Medicare are presently flawed and leading the nation to the precipice. But neither party is willing to do anything beyond ineffectual tweaking, because sufficiently addressing any of the serious national fatal flaws, like corporate personhood even, will get the powers that be unelected at the next election. Why? Because the beneficiaries of welfare, both social and corporate, won't accept the "pain" of redress. So onward we march toward the edge, pretending that BS like gay marriage, abortion rights, and extending the Bush tax cuts are the real national interest.

Sg