David Ignatius seems somewhat concerned about the legal footing of drone attacks, but he’s much more concerned about the implications of the administration publicly admitting that they are occurring. The headline of his piece (Politicizing the drone debate) may not have been his own choice, but he does say this:
[White House counterterrorism chief John] Brennan made some laudable points in his speech but also some puzzling ones, as I’ll discuss later. But what troubles me about the speech is that it further politicizes this realm of national-security policy — making it easier for President Obama’s team, and the president himself, to talk publicly about the drone war in the coming campaign.
Since the program is no longer secret, Obama’s surrogates can now brag about it all they want. Not only did Obama authorize the raid that killed bin Laden, his campaign advisers can say. Thanks to Obama’s aggressive drone attacks, “the core al-Qaeda leadership is a shadow of its former self,” to quote Brennan’s words.
I agree with all of the questions Ignatius poses about the legal standards of the drone attacks, but if he wants those issues clarified, I want something different cleared up.
How can the administration explain and defend their performance against al-Qaeda without politicizing the issue? If they gave us a list of drone attacks and said that these three terrorists were killed in this one, and these four terrorists were killed in that one, and this al-Qaeda leader died in this other one, and so on, would that be politicizing the issue? If they provided us with a family tree of al-Qaeda leadership and showed us that only a few members remain alive, would that be bragging or merely explaining the reason for the drone program.
Personally, I have long wanted the administration to provide some evidence that their drone attacks are decimating al-Qaeda, as they claim. It’s the absence of this kind of evidence that makes it impossible to defend an assassination program.
It is admittedly a difficult kind of thing to prove without disclosing information that might be properly classified, but I don’t think it is politicizing the issue to explain its effectiveness is some detail.
And, in fairness, I don’t think it would be politicizing the issue for Congress or Republicans in Congress to call the administration’s claims into question and demand facts to back up their assertions.
I haven’t noticed the Republicans questioning the legality or wisdom of the drone attacks, so I don’t see how defending them is a purely political act.
If all the administration is doing is saying that they’ve done a good job of destroying the al-Qaeda network and that the drone program has been instrumental in that effort, that does not seem to me to be politicizing national security. If the Republicans chose to dispute those facts, I don’t think that would be politicizing national security either. But they’re not doing that. It would be healthier if they would.
