Why everyone should read Steve Coll's review in the New Yorker: A point on Mary's side

Sandy Levinson

Anyone interested in the more ominous side of the Obama presidency, where it is reasonable, as Mary Dudziak has recently suggested, to focus more on the contingency of who is President than on the deep structures established by the Constitution, should read Steve Coll's review in the current (May 6) New Yorker of two recent books on the rise of targetted assassinations (and much else) by Mark Marzetti (The Way of the Knife) and Jeremy Scahill (Dirty Wars).  The single most depressing line is a (purported) quote of the President made during a Situation Room meeting in which a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff questioned the rise of a parallel airforce controlled by the CIA:  According to Marzetti, Obama said, "The C.I.A. gets what it wants."  (One assumes that this was a performative utterance, expressing Obama's own preferences, rather than a merely descriptive statement made by a man lamenting that he did not have the power, as President of the United States, to prevent the CIA getting "what it wants.")  Were this a statement of George W. Bush, I presume that many people would be up in arms (so to speak).  Coll suggests that the message of the two books, and much contemporary journalism, is that the Obama Administration, far more than its predecessor Bush Administration, has adopted a policy of  cold-blooded assassination without any public disclosure, save for the "White Paper," of even the general criteria, let alone the specifics, that have resulted in de-facto capital punishment for an undisclosed, by obviously non-trivial, number of America's enemies.  (At one point, the CIA claimed, preposterously, that there was no collateral damage in the drone attacks, that everyone attacked was in fact an enemy, a position similar to that taken in Vietnam during Operation Phoenix.)  The Obama Administration's position is ultimately "Trust Us" (and accept the fact that we're leaving a legacy of remarkably unconstrained powers, at least in conventional terms where we look to courts, Congress, or an informed press to supply some constraints). 

Coll ends his review with a discussion of the remarkable documentary The Gatekeepers, in which five former directors of the Israeli Shin Bet, certainly no shrinking violets when it comes to conducting wars on terror, all express their reservations about Israeli policy.  One hopes that Obama has seen the movie and has genuinely wrestled with its arguments.  If he hasn't, then that would even more justify the criticism directed at him by Mary, since, obviously, even I cannot possibly blame the Constitution should that be the case.  If he has seen the movie, then I would like him to assess it in his next news conference. 

Like Mark Tushnet, I find myself genuinely ambivalent about drone attacks.  I suspect that they are often less destructive of human life than conventional warfare.  But the Obama Administration simply has not encouraged or, more to the point, participated in the kind of systematic discussion that we need, as an ostensibly free people, before so enthusiastically adopting this new model of warfare.  I happened to listen to an NPR segment driving home about the history of the ban on chemical weapons.  From a coldly ratioonalist point of view, it is not clear why use of chemical weapons is so much worse than other weapons designed to kill and maim people.  But there does appear to be a strong international convention against their use, and we may find ourselves (unwisely, I think) intervening in Syria because that almost mystical "red line" has seemingly been crossed.  How, at the end of the day, do we decide what is acceptable and unacceptable as means of killing, maiming, and otherwise destroying the lives of people?  Cf. the Boston Marathon event, which certainly killed and maimed using very primitive weaponry indeed. 
Posted 7:50 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]