John Bellinger is the last person in Washington you’d expect to criticize President Barack Obama for making too many drone strikes. It was he who drafted the (rather unconvincing) legal justification for targeted drone killings when he was legal adviser to the Secretary of State in George W. Bush’s second administration, and he still supports them. But he went ahead and criticized Obama anyway.
Speaking at a conference in Washington on May 1, Bellinger said: “This government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaeda (at Guantanamo), they are going to kill them.”
Weirdly, this accusation has a certain plausibility.
President Obama wants to close the US prison camp in Cuba where hundreds of suspected supporters of al-Qaeda have been held without charge, some for more almost a decade. There are still 166 prisoners at Guantanamo and Obama, having been thwarted by Congress in his first-term pledge to close the place, recently announced his intention to try again with the new Congress.
Why did John Bellinger, of all people, then accuse Obama of using drones too often? The US president certainly does seem to like them: the vast majority of the 370 US drone attacks, killing an estimated 3,500 people, have been carried out on his watch. According to Bellinger, it’s because Obama knows that if he can’t send the evil-doers to Guantanamo, his only alternative is to kill them with drone strikes.
So what we actually have here is an unusually subtle Republican argument: if you don’t like the drone strikes (because they kill lots of innocent people), then you should keep Guantanamo open. But subtle is not the same as valid.
There are two unstated assumptions at the heart of this argument. One is that the US could just capture the people it suspects of being al-Qaeda supporters by conventional means and lock them away in Guantanamo. No fuss, no muss and no innocent victims.
That’s ridiculous: the United States cannot arrest alleged al-Qaeda supporters in the wilds of Yemen or Afghanistan and spirit them away to Guantanamo. If it doesn’t target them with drones, then most of them will go on living. But you can’t just leave such dangerous people alive, can you?
This brings us to the second unstated assumption: that if all those dangerous people had been allowed to live, then there would have been hundreds of terrorist attacks against the United States. Or at least dozens. OK then, how about a couple?
Probably not even one. After all, there were no drone strikes for the first three years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 because the technology was not yet available. Yet even then there was not one further terrorist attack on the United States. The link between drone strikes and possible terrorist attacks on the United States is purely rhetorical.
Never mind. The whole argument is moot. Obama won’t get the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to go along with closing Guantanamo this time either. And he won’t stop the drone strikes because he needs to be seen by the American public to be doing something “positive” as he brings the American troops home from another needless and lost war.
There is not one iota of strategic thinking in any of this. It’s all about American domestic politics, as the response to 9/11 has been from the beginning.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.