What goes around

There is a welcome new discussion in the USA about drones and their legality. Until this year, most Americans did not really know what drones were doing in their name, and were certainly not encouraged to question it. Now, Obama has made some speeches and indicated his wish to form a stronger framework for drone attacks by appointing John Brennan to head the CIA. This has led to some relatively thoughtful articles on the subject, including one in Time a couple of weeks ago.

 

There is no doubt that this discussion is overdue. The USA has quietly been using them as the weapon of choice for some years now. They are quite cheap and don’t place servicemen at risk. They can target enemies with only limited damage to non-combatants. As a result Obama now has a regular Tuesday meeting at which he signs off who can be killed and where. Time also made clear that the CIA has its own drones, its own list, and does its killings without regular sign off by the president.

 

Now, isn’t that frightening? If the USA wants to invade a country, nowadays it faces massive public pressure, costs and international consequences (even though war has not been declared since 1945). Obama is wont to do so, as his stance in Syria shows only too clearly. Yet why bother, when you have drones? They seem to offer all the intended consequences with none of the problems.

 

A Republican congressman, Rand Paul, made himself famous by forcing Obama to answer a question saying he would not use drones to kill Americans abroad or at home. The response he received was slow and underwhelming. Like all quick fixes, drones have now become part of the establishment, and will be hard to regulate. At least with Obama and Brennan, we have a better opportunity to reach a reasonable solution than with Bush and Cheney at the helm.

 

Time focused on the risk to Americans, and on narrow US legal questions. Apparently, the drone programme is justified at home using sweeping legislation passed in 2001 after 9/11. People now find it increasingly tenuous to justify a killing in, say, Yemen, with the need to round up 9/11 perpetrators or to stop a re-occurrence. But it is messy, as congress is grid-locked and getting anything through is tough just now.

 

But what about the bigger picture? How can it possibly be justified that people, any people, are summarily executed without any trial or meaningful judicial process? Basically, Obama and his generals are asking everyone else to trust their own judgement about who should live or die, not just in exceptional circumstances but on an industrial scale. Surely this is an outrage, and it only goes to show how toothless global institutions are nowadays that there has been so little outcry outside the targeted Muslim states.

 

It is sad that Time felt it could not make this simple point. Americans are so brainwashed by the concepts of good and evil liberty and terrorism, still so traumatised by 9/11, that they are no ready to accept any argument about the human rights of any foreigner. Obama no doubt sees the problem himself, but is hemmed in by the political need to appear strong. The brave move to address the narrow legal question is the best he can do to insure against another cowboy in the White House four years from now.

 

But there is another argument which could be used and which might even work. What happens when everyone has drones?

 

Drones are not all that difficult to copy, and the USA has been deploying them for some years already. Surely the Chinese will have a drone programme? And the Russians. What about Pakistan? Iran? 9/11 required breath-taking audacity and execution, combined with a lot of complacency on the American side. It doesn’t sound so tough to send a few drones to take out some targets across the USA. But it would be as devastating politically, and of course tragic for the victims and their families.

 

So the argument could be based on imagining what would happen when the tables are turned. There has been plenty of practice to learn this lesson. Short-term considerations led the USA to dropping the nuclear bomb, to adopting client states, accepting torture, weakening the UN, and even some economic bullying.

 

The most recent example has been cyber-warfare. Stuxnet is software which went a long way to disabling the Iranian nuclear programme. Americans have not been asked to think about the ethics or the legality of such action, nor even of the killing of Iranian scientists. But China is already just as good at this sort of hacking. Only last month we read a report about how Chinese are infiltrating companies and agencies worldwide. But what right has the USA got to complain, when they do the same themselves?

 

This is all a sad consequence of the emergence of a single. Dominant, global power. When communism collapsed, many of us hoped for an era of peace and human development. The need for client states disappeared, and indeed, slowly, true development has come to Africa as a result. Of course the eventual impact for those in Russia and its orbit has been mainly beneficial. But sadly many other opportunities have been lost.

 

One possible root cause is the CIA itself. A massive organisation with few checks on its behaviour suddenly found itself with not much to do. We should not be surprised to learn that they invented new threats to keep themselves in business. Clinton has an excellent legacy overall, but it would have been so much stronger if he could have found the will to take a giant axe to the secret services. For me, it remains the scariest part of the Time story on drones that there seem to be two weekly kill lists, largely independent of each other, one signed off by an elected politician but the other one not. How we all so meekly accept our own nations’ covert activities is a mystery to me.

 

While we have nation states as the dominant political structures, the temptation will remain for those seeking power to play up to a storyline of superiority. What are our best hopes, to achieve some balance in the world without having to suffer another world war on the way? A bi-polar world did not work, and a unipolar one doesn’t seem to work well either. When China has overtaken the US, I don’t hold out many hopes that they will behave better, indeed it may be worse, given the politics there and the history of China.

 

But that is why this argument about what goes around comes around could be so powerful. The only deterrent to any bully is the fear of a bigger bully. Everyone can see that the US power is a transient thing. This creates an opportunity to use fear as a weapon to turn public opinion around against abuse of power. Rand Paul did a good job, but how wonderful if he could have incorporated this argument into his speech? For, as I see it, only this argument has a chance of making the world’s leading power behave more responsibly, from the bottom up.

 

Of course, bringing a fear factor in can backfire. 9/11 itself proves that, as the USA public immediately succumbed to the urge to fight back. The Norwegian response to Brevik is so laudable, and remarkable for how it went against modern norms. Somehow, we have to learn to be more like Norwegians, so we can enable our leaders to refrain from a power response to fear. Come on, Obama, time to sort out your legacy. Come on, US journalists, time to start helping rather than hindering. Come on, so called allies, time to be heard. Drones is a great place to start.