Do you think we’ll see headlines tomorrow calling him a baby killer?
Where’s the due process? Did we even try to bring our allies onboard, or did we act unilaterally?
Are you now opposed to the war on terrorism?
Oh no, not Pock-ee-ston! We haven’t even declared war on Pock-ee-ston. Someone call Amnesty International House of Pancakes or something.
“We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”
Barack Obama
On US troops in Afghanistan
August 14, 2007
Eat it, O man.
Obama had been consistently saying throughout his campaign that he would pursue a vigorous military strategy against Al Qaeda, so IMO it is no surprise that he is doing so - any American president has to.
To date, Obama has done pretty much what he said he would do, and I think it’s likely that will continue to be the case.
Foreign-policy “hawks” are likely going to be pleasantly surprised, social conservatives are going to be appalled but not surprised, IMO the only area where Obama is likely to do anything he’s not already announced he’s going to do will be if he finds that the centrist economic recovery program he’s currently pursuing (his economic advisers are from Wall Street, and so far Obama is trying to avoid such steps as overt nationalization of the banking system) isn’t working.
If so, he’s going to have to make some fundamental decisions about which direction he wants to take the country, and whatever choice he made would to be a substantial deviation from his position during the campaign.
The problem of how to balance the costs and benefits of various antiterrorism strategies is going to be with us across many administrations, Democratic and Republican, in many ways this is an issue that really does transcend partisanship.
Part of the difficulty in making these decisions is that while antiterrorism experts generally that certain kinds of actions end up recruiting more terrorist manpower and money than others - to the extent that some can actually be counterproductive- it’s only experience that teaches you how the international public will react to various kinds of strategies; it’s often difficult to determine in advance which will work in which won’t, especially when you really don’t have much experience on which to be sure judgments.
Thus it’s not surprising the Bush administration didn’t get it 100% right the first time around: the administration was attempting to react immediately to unknown threats, and was trying many novel techniques to deal with them.
With experience it’s become increasingly possible to make some such judgments: for example the Pakistani public will apparently tolerate this type of Predator strike a lot more willingly than armed incursions by US troops - even though the latter might allow more careful distinction to be made between legitimate targets and civilians.
It’s also become clear that long-term incarceration of foreign nationals on terms and for reasons that would not be tolerated in the case of US citizens is something you want to do very sparingly - it can presented in the Islamic world by militant propagandists as an example of US hypocrisy, so it’s a public relations nightmare and potent recruiting tool for terrorists and militant groups.
These questions need to be thought through very carefully because there really is an inherent conflict between two desirable ends in the campaign against terrorism: on the one hand military action against terrorist and militant groups frequently produces civilian casualties - the very result for which we are pursuing the terrorists themselves - so there will always be a certain level of inherent difficulty in demonstrating the morality of such acts and their moral ambiguity becomes a policy problem in a recruiting tool for terrorists, on the other hand if you are not willing to undertake such actions you are sometimes foreclosing any possibility of effective action.
What works in one situation may not work in another, and no policy is probably the best in all situations, and I expect that every one of the next few administrations will be learning from its predecessors and constantly adjusting its tactics as situations change.