On my Google Reader feed, I’ve recently noted my agreement with voting for the Obama administration even if you have a variety of legitimate critiques against them on foreign policy militancy or war on drugs grounds.
Four quick reasons: the President has respected our status of forces agreement with Iraq and withdrawn from that nation, the President opposes waterboarding and Gov. Romney does not, the President is far less likely to launch and ill-advised strike against Iran, and on domestic policy grounds while Obamacare, which Gov. Romney has promised to gut, needs to go much further it is still the greatest advancement of the U.S. social safety net since the sixties. On top of this, I’d add that I am unaware of any civil rights issue on which the Republican candidate is better than the President.
Nonetheless, this should not to be taken as a statement of support for our drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. Similarly, I’d favor working out a status of forces agreement that could pass muster in the Afghan parliament, and if that means accelerating our withdrawal or reducing the amount we operate outside of bases before that withdrawal, so be it. Obviously, there are many on the left that are more vehement on these issues and I respect that. I’d encourage the American citizens among them them to vote for the President, eyes wide open, but I respect if they wish to criticize U.S. policies and withhold/retarget money/labor from campaigns as a means of applying pressure. The lesser of two evils argument just applies to voting, trying to use it to squash reasonable foreign policy criticisms is illiberal.
Towards that end, here’s a Kevin Drum post on some of the civilian deaths that inspire that criticism. He calls attention to one particular poor practice that is escalating the number of these casualties.
It appears that drone activity has declined in 2012, although that may be an artifact of the time it takes to gather data. Aside from the raw numbers, though, Glenn draws particular attention to this passage from the report:
The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals.
…There's no question that fighting a counterinsurgency is hard. And it's fundamentally different from fighting a conventional war because it's difficult to separate militants from civilians — something that insurgents explicitly count on. But even if you accept drone strikes as a legitimate part of counterinsurgency, and even if you accept that civilian casualties are an inevitable part of that, "double tap" strikes are simply heinous. They're also far more likely to turn the indigenous population against you, which makes them counterproductive as well as immoral. After all, it's not as if top al-Qaeda leaders are the ones likely to be conducting rescue operations. At best, you might get a few foot soldiers but nothing more.
Again, the whole post is well worth reading and brings more data to bear (go to Greenwalt or the recent drone report for even more). So I support dropping the ‘double tap’ strike immediately and moving away from a war model. Obviously, the criminal justice model failed to prevent 9/11, but the best response there is to improve the model rather than adopt a military one. The initial military approach cost more American lives, let alone hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, than were lost to Al Qaeda. The drone war approach does have far fewer deaths associated with it than the occupation approach, but Osama Bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is not the force it once was, and it’s time to end our wars. As Drum notes this is hardly a popular position, but it is not going to get more popular unless we talk about it.
Usual caveat, speaking for myself, and not my employer.
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