Killing Machine (28 page)

The death of Awlaki, said the president, was “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates.” Speaking later at the retirement ceremony for Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president said Awlaki “took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans,” such as the attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010. The killing of Awlaki was a tribute to the U.S. intelligence community and the efforts of leaders in Yemen. He also said that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains “a dangerous but weakened terrorist organization.”

The mixed volley of celebrations, justifications, and warnings continued all day: “Make no mistake, this is further proof al Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven in Yemen or anywhere around the world,” Obama said. But in a radio interview the president declined to say whether he gave the order to kill Awlaki, saying he could not discuss operational details. “This is something that we had been working with the Yemeni government on for quite some time,” he said. “There’s been significant cooperation at the intelligence levels with a lot of countries in the region. We are very pleased that Mr. Awlaki is no longer going to be in a position to directly threaten the United States homeland, as well as our allies around the world.”

When he finally finished with the Tony Blair-like evasions that everyone knew were false, Obama got to what, for him, was the heart of the matter: “The fact that he is now no longer around to initiate the kind of propaganda that also was recruiting people all around the world to that murderous cause I think is something that’s very good for American security.”
⁶³

Many Republicans praised Obama’s action, while criticism from Democrats was mostly centered on the awkwardness of defending a secret memorandum. The only politician of note to bring up the Constitution and due process was Ron Paul, who said, “Al-Awlaki was born here; he’s an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes.” But Paul was dismissed, wrote Richard Cohen, “as a constitutional kvetch.” Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey put it the bluntest possible way, noted Cohen: “These militants were killed because the Obama administration, having ruled out harsh interrogations, had no use for them.”
⁶⁴

On a Sunday talk show,
State of the Nation with Candy Crowley
, former vice president Dick Cheney called on Obama to apologize for his past criticism of Bush administration policies. He had no problem with killing Awlaki, of course, but what he resented was the way Obama’s OLC had claimed that the cleric was not entitled to normal legal protections because he was a combatant. That reasoning “rankled” Cheney, who said, “They, in effect, said that we had walked away from our ideals, or taken policy contrary to our ideals, when we had enhanced interrogation techniques. . . . Now they clearly have moved in the direction of taking robust action when they think it is justified.”
⁶⁵

Democrat Jane Harman, the former chair of the House Intelligence Community, appeared on the same CNN program. She called on the White House to release the legal memorandum. “The Justice Department should release that memo,” said Harman, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee. “The debate on the legal grounds for that strategy should be more in the open.” The “targeted killing of anyone should give us pause,” she added, but Awlaki was a “good case” of someone posing an imminent threat.
⁶⁶
A White House official dismissed all criticism of the strike on legal grounds—or anything else: “If Anwar al-Awlaki is your poster boy for why we shouldn’t do drone strikes, good fucking luck.”
⁶⁷

Two weeks before sending a drone to kill Awlaki, the president sent John Brennan to Harvard University to give a talk called
“Strengthening Our Security by Adhering to Our Values and Laws.” Brennan acknowledged that he was not a lawyer, but he said he had developed a profound appreciation for the roles that American values played in keeping the nation safe. The administration was committed to strengthening “our national security by adhering to those values.” He then went on to say that the administration was not “rigid or ideological,” but pragmatic. In the context, this was a phrase to explain how the administration was “pragmatic” when it came to deciding what was due process under the Fifth Amendment. When the U.S. government upheld the rule of law, then governments around the globe would be more willing to provide the United States with intelligence needed to “disrupt ongoing plots.” The guiding principles of the administration, again, were “pragmatic—neither a wholesale overhaul nor a wholesale retention of past practices.” Where they had been effective and enhanced security, they had been retained. Where they had not, “we have taken concrete steps to get us back on course.”
⁶⁸

Two weeks after the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, another raid on a barbecue site killed his son, sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a cousin of the same age, and six or seven other boys. At first U.S. officials claimed Abdulrahman was twenty-one—even as it still claimed not to be responsible for specific antiterrorist operations with drones. Then his grandfather produced his birth certificate. Senator Carl Levin, who received a classified briefing as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said about the death: “My understanding is that there was adequate justification.” How? “It was justified by the presence of a high-value target.” Well, so much for Brennan’s defense that there were no confirmed collateral deaths in drone warfare. Probably the most sensitive, the most perceptive writer on the lethal presidency, Tom Junod, in a long exegesis on the meaning of all that the administration’s defenders have written and said, finally concludes, “There is the fog of war, and then there is the deeper fog of the Lethal Presidency. What is certain is only this: that a drone crossed the moonlit sky,
and when the sun rose next morning, the relatives of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki gathered his remains—along with those of his cousin and some teenaged boys—so that they could give a Muslim funeral to an American boy.”
⁶⁹

At the height of the 2012 presidential campaign, former press secretary Robert Gibbs delivered a shocking reply to a reporter’s question about Abdulrahman al-Awlaki: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father,” he snapped, “if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children.” Gibbs seemed to be saying that all children who had jihadist fathers were fair game for drone hunters. Even worse, he seemed not to know that the strike that killed the boys occurred two weeks after the elder Awlaki’s death on September 30, 2011. He had elaborated by saying that Awlaki had renounced his citizenship, and had to be reminded that the boy had not. Aside from Gibbs’s resentment that he was being asked these questions, what comes through so clearly was disinterest in the consequences of American actions—except that they hit their targets. No one asked the 2012 presidential candidates, Obama and Mitt Romney, about the incident during the presidential debate season, even as a writer in the
Atlantic Monthly
, Conor Friedersdorf, said of Gibbs’s performance, “Killing an American citizen without due process on that logic ought to be grounds for impeachment.”
⁷⁰

“I want to ask a question,” said Yemen’s president Saleh on the day Awlaki was killed by a drone strike. “I am addressing the American public. Are you still keeping your commitment in continuing the operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda?” If so, he went on, then Washington should stop pressing him to turn over his power to those protesting his rule. “We know where power is going to go. It is going to al-Qaeda, which is directly and completely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
⁷¹

Osama bin Laden’s death was supposed to bring closure, and something of the same was said about the death of Anwar al-Awlaki as the elimination of al Qaeda’s most dangerous, most charismatic recruiter. But Saleh’s question captured the mood better. Now there
was a mechanism for continuing operations with proven results—unlike all that had happened before or since 9/11. And that mechanism seemed to be the Office of Legal Counsel’s newly acquired ability to amend the U.S. Constitution to suit the current occupant of the White House’s interpretation of national security needs.

7

A BETTER WAR?

As we end today’s wars and reshape our Armed Forces, we will
ensure
that our military is agile, flexible, and ready for the full range of contingencies. In particular, we will continue to invest in the capabilities critical to future success, including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; counterterrorism; countering weapons of mass
de
struction; operating in anti-access environments; and prevailing in all domains, including cyber
.

—President Barack Obama, January 3, 2012

If there had been any remaining questions about it, the death of Anwar al-Awlaki settled the matter: the drone had replaced counterinsurgency. The Department of Defense’s 2012 strategic guidance document,
Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership
, flatly asserted midway through the document, “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”
¹

“Stability ops” was a relatively new Pentagon phrase to describe counterinsurgency objectives in Afghanistan, a somewhat scaled-down ambition from the nation-building dreams of the “new world order” era. What strikes one going through the 2012 Defense Department document besides a repudiation of even those lowered sights, however, is how many points read like an elaboration on Richard Nixon’s 1969 “Guam Doctrine,” introduced during an ad hoc press conference on that tiny outpost of American power in the Pacific. It was called “Vietnamization,” and Nixon offered it as the way out of the tiger trap that had consumed the nation’s energies. The situations were not exactly parallel, of course, but there were some significant (and surprising) similarities in the answers called forth by America’s two “longest wars.”

In 2012 the nation was still suffering the aftereffects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Afghan War’s costs on top of what Iraq had cost were estimated at over $3 trillion and counting, reaching higher than the Hindu Kush. The original aspirations for ensuring a government in Afghanistan that would pass muster as an evolving democracy were cast aside as Washington looked at the balance sheets. The parallel with Vietnam was obvious: by 1968 the Vietnam War had caused a serious gold drain that eventually forced the United States to stop selling its gold reserves for dollars and led policy makers to reconsider their options—and their nation-building goals. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson, the gray eminence of Cold War statesmen, had warned Lyndon Johnson about the growing economic threat to American global leadership, and insisted the president not do anything to make matters worse, such as sending hundreds of thousands more soldiers into Southeast Asia, as the nation couldn’t afford it. On top of that, its European allies had become dismayed and too independent-minded—all because of Vietnam. The military had led the president down a primrose path, said Acheson, one that ended in rain-soaked jungles and rice paddies.
²

The 1968 election was not simply a referendum on the costly way the Vietnam War had been fought, of course, but while a variety of social issues loomed in the background, bringing that kind of war to an end was a top priority. So long as it appeared Nixon was seeking a “decent interval” during which U.S. troops could be withdrawn gradually while responsibility for combat operations was transferred to the Vietnamese, the nation fretted but its patience held out. What Nixon promised at Guam was a steady reduction in American forces combined with heavier support for creating a large, modern army and air force for the Saigon regime, aka the Republic of Vietnam. He assured Washington’s doubting Vietnamese allies (really dependencies) that they would have all they needed, backed up by American airpower on an even higher scale of destructiveness than ever before in the war. He promised he would force Hanoi to cry uncle if it sought to overthrow the Saigon government.

Then on July 25, 1969, Nixon was asked at the Guam press conference about the future of counterinsurgency, and answered, as Obama could have in explicating the 2012 strategic guidance document, “Well, there is a future for American counterinsurgency tactics only in the sense that where one of our friends in Asia asks for advice or assistance, under proper circumstances, we will provide it. But where we must draw the line is in becoming involved heavily with our own personnel, doing the job for them, rather than helping them do the job for themselves.”
³

So the war ended for America in 1973, not with a bang but with a peace agreement that speeded the return of American prisoners of war but was so porous that North Vietnam could pour troops and tanks through it. Saigon fell two years later. But the debate over how Vietnam had been lost had only begun. Long after the war ended, a new spin was put on the Vietnam experience by authors who claimed that Washington had found a leader, General Creighton Abrams, who fought a better war that incorporated tried-and-true counterinsurgency tactics pioneered by the French and British in Algeria and Malaya. Had Americans only been a little more patient, the argument went, they would have seen the light at the end of the tunnel become a bright new day.
⁴

These were the opening gambits in the effort to change the American style of war according to a different template of counter-insurgency than the one Nixon described in the Guam Doctrine. And it required a legend that held out General Abrams as the model for future leadership if the U.S. Army was to meet the challenge. When the key moment arrived in Iraq, according to the legend, a great new general did arrive to lead the counterinsurgency-inspired surge in Iraq: David Petraeus, the principal author of Field Manual 3-24, the guide for success in post-Cold War encounters in what used to be called the “Third World.” The legend continues that the Iraq “surge” actually worked because of Petraeus’s shrewd leadership, but once again there looms the danger of a lost victory because of America’s undue haste to leave.