EDMUND BURKEAnother of my family’s traditions this time of year is debating who should be named Time Magazine's “Person of the Year.” Originally, Time’s selected the person who – for good or evil – most influenced the course of history during the year. That’s the criterion my family sticks to in our discussions, though Time has modified its formulation to the person who “most influenced the news” for better or worse. Last year, focusing on the popular uprisings in the middle-east, Time gave it to “The Protester.”
My own choice this year is for the head of our predator drone program. This program is certainly changing history. It used to be that American armed forces went after our nation’s enemies, putting their lives on the line in battle to do so. They still do, of course. But now we increasingly kill our enemies – sometimes along with innocent bystanders – with unmanned drones. It’s so much easier. The human who carries out the attack does so by working a joy stick miles away in safety, even at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
But is it too easy? I don’t presume to know the answer to that question. I certainly don’t want to put American lives needlessly at risk. Yet I am deeply troubled by this new reality. Our predator drone program is not a small. Since 2009, we have carried out 300 drone strikes, killing thousands of people. Increasingly other nations, including Israel, are doing the same thing.
Moreover, identifying enemies used to be uncontroversial. Our armed forces went to war – more or less approved by Congress, if not by a formal declaration of war then through a resolution empowering the president to take military action – against the uniformed armed forces of hostile nations. Now the president, in secret, often signs assassination orders against individuals who do not wear uniforms, and those orders are executed not by our armed forces following the rules of war but by our espionage agency.
Is this how a democracy should operate? How much damage are we doing to ourselves by becoming technological assassins? Are the deaths of innocent bystanders – which are inevitable in such a program – causing so much blow-back that we create more enemies than we eliminate? By what standards does the president decide whom to kill? What checks are there on his power? What oversight does Congress provide? What's the line between war and murder? How do we know if that line is crossed? Are we giving too much power to the CIA?
The New York Times reported that the Obama administration worked frantically to draft rules for the program to constrain a new administration, should Romney have won the election. Clearly the president himself is troubled about how this program might operate. We all need to remember that in a democarcy even those of us who trust the president should never trust him too much.
I don’t know the answers to the questions I’ve posed. But I do know that we aren’t discussing the questions enough. Our predator drone program has changed history. We'll never put this genie back in the bottle. Civilized warfare (if that term isn't an oxymoron) has permanently changed; and even if, in some ways, the changes are good, surely they are evil as well.