Terms of Engagement
James Traub
•
Friday, May 24, 2013
Men and women on the street of the Islamic world often say
that they feel helpless in the face of American power -- but in President Barack
Obama's decision to restrict the use of drones they won a victory which the administration's
domestic critics could never have achieved. As Obama pointed out in his speech,
drones do an incredibly effective job of killing America's adversaries, do not
violate the laws of war, and -- a fact he didn't adduce -- enjoy the
overwhelming support of the American people. Obama was reacting to public
opinion -- but less in the United States than in Pakistan or Yemen. And the
fact that this is so tells us a great deal about the changing face or war, and
of statecraft.
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POST
Thomas E. Ricks
•
Friday, May 24, 2013
By Emile Simpson
Best Defense White House correspondent
I thought President
Obama's speech at NDU on Thursday was a conceptual car crash -- a collision
between two incompatible desires to aggregate, or disaggregate, threats.
He spent half the speech saying he wants to end a war, not have endless conflict, and not
blur boundaries. But he spent the other half of the speech veering from
identifying the enemy as al Qaeda, then its franchises, then just terrorists in
general, and saying these terrorists hide at the ends of the earth.
Seems to me completely muddled: If you want to target networks
and disaggregate threats, fine, I agree with that, but one would be forgiven
for thinking any jihadist under the sun is still the enemy here, which is
plainly aggregating threats to the extent that one will never narrow an enemy
down enough to defeat militarily, so cannot therefore "end" the war.
For me this wasn't a speech about drones, but about war, and
despite, ironically, agreeing with what I think Obama was trying to say (i.e.
disaggregate threats, move away from endless war), the way in which the concept
of war here is (mis)applied seems to me to do the opposite.
The reality is
that the administration is locked in to using the concept of war as a legal
idea to justify the use of force in self defense, but that the legal concept of
war today doesn't match the military concept.
It just seems to me that it simply does not
make sense for Obama to want to move away from a global war on terror, and then
describe what he wants to do as an alternative precisely as a war against
terrorists all over the world.
And
this is in the major counterterrorism speech of the second term, regarding a
conflict whose conceptual deficiency has been glaringly clear for 10 years, and
yet nothing changes. Really quite disappointing.
Emile Simpson
served in the British Army as an infantry officer in the Gurkhas from 2006 to
2012. He deployed to southern Afghanistan three times and is the author of War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century
Combat as Politics (Columbia,
2012).
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Argument
Suzanne Nossel
•
Thursday, May 23, 2013
The investigation and
potential indictment of investigative journalists for the crime of doing their
jobs well enough to make the government squirm is nothing new. It happens all
over the world, and is part of what the Obama administration has fought against
in championing press and Internet freedom globally. By allowing its own
campaign against national security leaks to become grounds for trampling free
expression, the administration has put a significant piece of its very own
foreign policy and human rights legacy at risk.
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By Other Means
Rosa Brooks
•
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Yesterday, I posed five questions I
hoped President Obama would address in his speech. Here are some quick
reactions. (I don't yet have an "as delivered" transcript, so everything here
is subject to correction.)
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By Other Means
Rosa Brooks
•
Thursday, May 23, 2013
I'm a law professor, but I generally avoid
mentioning this to casual acquaintances, since they're apt to flee upon
discovering it. They fear, I suppose, that I might at any moment launch into a
tedious exegesis of the Uniform Commercial Code, or begin to elaborate on the fine
distinctions between the law of armed conflict and the law concerning the use
of force in national self-defense. So I try not to be the female law professor
equivalent of "that guy." I try, in
other words, to keep from boring everyone to tears with legal analysis.
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