John Brennan: American drone strikes are “ethical and just," "wise," and "surgically precise”

the exceptionalism of the united states...

tom engelhardt...

[C]onsider as Exhibit One a recent speech by the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,” John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  According to his own account, he was dispatched to the center by President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to the administration’s secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the drones and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone operations generally.

Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to North America, “a city upon a hill” has caught something of at least one American-style dream -- a sense that this country’s fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest of the world, an exception to every norm.  In the last century, it became “a shining city upon a hill” and was regularly cited in presidential addresses.

Whatever that “city,” that dream, was once imagined to be, it has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first century.  It has become -- even in our dreams -- an up-armored garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state.  So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first “shining drone upon a hill” speech, which also qualifies as an instant classic of self-congratulation.

Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so -- if not peacefully -- at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for the gods.  American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are “ethical and just," "wise," and "surgically precise” -- exactly what you’d expect from a country he refers to, quoting the president, as the preeminent “standard bearer in the conduct of war.”

Those drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are based on staggeringly “rigorous standards” involving the individual identification of human targets. Even when visited on American citizens outside declared war zones, they are invariably “within the bounds of the law,” as you would expect of the preeminent “nation of laws.”

The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone known to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid anyone who is even the most mediocre of the mediocre.  (Forget the fact that, as Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, the CIA has recently received permission from the president to launch drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed “patterns of suspicious behavior” of groups of unidentified individuals, as was already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)

Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if unbelievably rarely -- and for that we couldn’t be more regretful.  Such deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our actions. “This too,” Brennan assured his audience, “is a reflection of our values as Americans.”

“I would note,” he added, “that these standards, for identifying a target and avoiding... the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed what is required as a matter of international law on a typical battlefield.  That’s another example of the high standards to which we hold ourselves.”

yes, we are truly exceptional as a nation, ever mindful of the highest principles of accountability, the rule of law and international humanitarian conventions... no other country can lay claim to such lofty moral standards...

but wait, there's more...

In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had.  But mention drones and they light up.  They’re having a love affair with those machines.  They just can’t get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.

What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision.  It’s hell.  And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.

we should feel so very proud...

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Glenn's back with a roar

this is only glenn's second post since being released from the hospital after a bout with dengue fever, not something you just bounce back from... in any case, the episode didn't dampen glenn's piercing insight one bit... he's literally on fire here as he rails against the ceaseless hypocrisy demonstrated so consistently in the u.s. news media, in this case an article in today's nyt, pointing out egypt's corrupt "intersection of money, politics and power"...

One would never, ever find in The New York Times such a sweeping denunciation of the plutocratic corruption and merger of private wealth and political power that shapes most of America's political culture. Just like "torture"-- which that paper has no trouble declaring is used by Egypt's government but will never say is used by ours -- such systematic corruption can exist only elsewhere, but never in America. That's how this genre of Look Over There reporting is not just incomplete but outright misleading: it actively creates the impression that such conditions are found only in those Primitive Foreign Places, but not here.

it also fosters the completely bogus notion of american exceptionalism, a notion that so many in this country have been spoon-fed since birth, a notion that is best dispelled by spending time outside u.s. borders, not in a bubble that replicates the coddled home environment, but actually living day-to-day like the locals...

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A Thursday puzzler: find the missing piece in this Robert Kagan essay

in all the gobbledegook about democracy, power, influence, military supremacy, ideological convictions, freedom, oppression, catalyst for change, unique abilities, and unique responsibilities, there's one major - actually HUGE - underlying motive to america's foreign policy that is only faintly touched on, if it can be said to be touched on at all... see if you can guess what it is...

End of Dreams, Return of History
By Robert Kagan


Robert Kagan

Since the end of World War ii at least, American presidents of both parties have pursued a fairly consistent approach to the world. They have regarded the United States as the "indispensable nation" and the "locomotive at the head of mankind." They have amassed power and influence and deployed them in ever-widening arcs around the globe on behalf of interests, ideals, and ambitions, both tangible and intangible. Since 1945 Americans have insisted on acquiring and maintaining military supremacy, a "preponderance of power" in the world rather than a balance of power with other nations. They have operated on the ideological conviction that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government and that other forms of government are not only illegitimate but transitory. They have declared their readiness to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation" by forces of oppression, to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend freedom, to seek "democratic enlargement" in the world, and to work for the "end of tyranny." They have been impatient with the status quo. They have seen America as a catalyst for change in human affairs, and they have employed the strategies and tactics of "maximalism," seeking revolutionary rather than gradual solutions to problems. Therefore, they have often been at odds with the more cautious approaches of their allies.

[...]

So long as Americans elect leaders who believe it is the role of the United States to improve the world and bring about the "ultimate good," and so long as American power in all its forms is sufficient to shape the behavior of others, the broad direction of American foreign policy is unlikely to change, absent some dramatic -- indeed, genuinely revolutionary -- effort by a future administration.

[...]

Six decades ago American leaders believed the United States had the unique ability and the unique responsibility to use its power to prevent a slide back to the circumstances that produced two world wars and innumerable national calamities. Although much has changed since then, America's responsibility has not.

didja figure it out...? if you did, post it in the comments... extra points to anyone who figures out what it is AND goes to the full 11,835 word essay and finds i'm wrong and that it's actually discussed in any detail there...

p.s. it's people like robert kagan and his ilk that are providing the "intellectual" underpinning for united states foreign policy... if you have the stomach to read the entire piece, you will clearly see why we are in the mess we're in today...

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"Americans cannot acknowledge their 'complicity' " in the crimes of the Bush administration

gary kamiya in salon makes a case for why we are not already impeaching our president...

"To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we're not ready to do that."

Analogizing the relationship between President Bush and the American people to a failed marriage that is fighting against the inevitability of divorce, Kamiya says that most Americans cannot acknowledge their 'complicity' in the policies of the Bush administration.

i think it's more than that... from the time we were all little nippers, we've been soaked in a belief of united states exceptionalism*, that the u.s. is something unique and special in history, that we are on the side of goodness and truth, and, most importantly, that our elected and governmental officials are dedicated to the common good... beyond facing what kamiya believes we are avoiding - "our national core of violent self-righteousness" - we will also have to face that we are no longer the "shining city on the hill," nor have we been for quite some time...

otoh, kamiya gives voice to what i quietly pray for every day...

The culture of spin is also the culture of spectacle, and a sudden, theatrical event -- a lurid accusation made by a former official, a colorful revelation of a very specific and memorable Bush lie -- could start the scandal machine going full speed," Kamiya writes. "If everything happens just so, the downfall of the House of Bush could be shocking in its swiftness.

(thanks to raw story...)

* American exceptionalism (cf. "exceptionalism") has been historically referred to as the perception that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its unique origins, national credo, historical evolution, or distinctive political and religious institutions. The difference is typically expressed as some categorical superiority, to which is usually attached some rationalization or explanation that may vary greatly depending on the historical period and the political context. As Ross (1991) has argued, there are three generic varieties of American exceptionalism:

1. supernaturalist explanations which emphasize the causal potency of God in selecting America as a "city on a hill" to serve as an example for the rest of the world,
2. genetic interpretations which emphasize racial traits, ethnicity, or gender, and
3. environmental explanations such as geography, climate, availability of natural resources, social structure, and type of political economy.

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