Obama Needs to Assert The Legal Justification For Predator Drone Attacks

Kenneth Anderson has got his piece published on the need for the Obama Administration to hurry up and start making the legal case for our increased Predator Drone attacks. This piece is in the Weekly Standard. You can find the link here as well as a link to a very readable PDF of it which is nice. See Predators over Pakistan, My New Weekly Standard Essay. It is very excellent.

I really agree that Republicans and Conservatives that agree with the Obama administration on their use of Predator Drones did to urge the powers that be to move on this legal question and quick.

What appears to to be relative silence of domestic opposition on this issue we are hearing now is not only misleading and temporary but very dangerous to make wrong assumptions about if you think the Obama administration is correct. In fact by not making the case now in a forceful manner a important ability of the United States to defend itself might be hampered in the future.

It is well worth the read.

He makes these points

(1) The Predator drone strategy works

(2) Drone strikes need an aggressive defense
against increasingly vocal critics who are moving to create
around drone warfare a narrative of American wickedness.

(3) The Obama Administration has so far failed to provide a robust affirmation of the propositions
that underwrite Predator drone warfare

(4) Republicans and centrist Democrats need to make common cause in defending these
propositions.

(5) That this defense will be the American view of domestic and
international law for future administrations, Democratic and Republican.

(6) That while Obama administration increasingly relies on Predator strikes for its counterterrorism strategy, the international legal basis of drone warfare (more precisely, its perceived international legal legitimacy) is eroding from under the administration’s
feet—largely through the U.S. government’s inattention and unwillingness to defend its legal grounds, and require its own senior lawyers to step up and defend it.

(7) The Obama administration appears remarkably sanguine about the campaign gearing up in the “international law community” aimed at undermining the legal basis of targeted killing
as well as its broad political legitimacy, and ultimately at stigmatizing the use of Predators as both illegal and a coward’s weapon.

(8) The Obama administration is complacent about this emerging “international soft law” campaign against the Drone warfare and it's use

(9) Obama’s opponents in this country, for their part, likewise underestimate
and ignore the threat such a campaign presents to
national security. That’s apparently because many on th eright find it hard to imagine that mere congeries of NGOs, academics, activists, U.N. officials, and their allies could
ever overcome “hard” American national security interests, particularly when covered by the magic of the Obama administration

(10) That the defense and justification of this policy needs to be based in
the traditional international legal doctrine of self-defense.

A good read that is not dry at all.

I will perhaps try to do the Catholic Social Justice angle on this later. Trust me the forces that try to portray Just War Theory and other matters as now absolute Pacifism have NOT BEEN QUIET on this. More on that later