Last week, the State Department’s top legal adviser laid out the administration's case for using drones to fight al Qaeda and its allies. Now the drone war is starting to generate some real legal debate.
In the new issue of Joint Force Quarterly, Amitai Etzioni, professor of international relations at The George Washington University, has a piece that outlines a moral and legal case for using drones to attack what he terms "abusive civilians" (his term for unlawful combatants). "To negate the tactical advantages abusive civilians have and to minimize our casualties, we must attack them whenever we can find them, before they attack us," he writes. Drone strikes, he adds, "are a particularly well-suited means to serve this goal."
Etzioni's article is a response, in part, to New Yorker correspondent Jane Mayer, who has documented the perils of what she calls the “push-button” approach to combating terror. But he also appeared in a fascinating discussion of the legal issues surrounding robotic warfare that aired yesterday on NPR's Talk of the Nation.
The JFQ piece is worth reading in full: It raises some of the larger questions about how adequately the current laws of war have kept up with the rise of terrorism. To make a provocative point, Etzioni cites his own personal experience as a member of the Palmach. "One day, we attacked a British radar station near Haifa," he writes. "A young woman and I, in civilian clothes and looking as if we were on a date, casually walked up to the radar station’s fence, cut the fence, and placed a bomb. Before it exploded, we disappeared into the crowd milling around in an adjacent street. All the British could do was either indiscriminately machinegun the crowd—or let us get away."
Of course, I'll show my own bias here: I think Noah's reporting on this subject has already raised many of the ambiguities and (the dangers) of drone warfare. And for good background, Wired for War by Danger Room pal Peter Singer (who gets approving quotes from Mayer) is a worthwhile read.
[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]
