Barack Obama and the Pitfalls of Priestliness

At the president's side is his chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, who -- despite his past support for torture, extraordinary rendition, and illegal wiretaps -- is described by an official in the piece as "a person of genuine moral rectitude," likened even to a "priest"suddenly charged with leading a war."

The bevy of current and former administration officials interviewed for the Times piece suggests that the administration actively cooperated with its release, purposefully cultivating an election-season portrait of a president willing to make tough calls about the use of force. Yet the desired impact is not merely to convey hawkish bluster. As a nod to voters who may harbor qualms about the implications of "kill lists" and armed drones that freely trespass international borders, the administration presents a picture of a president who labors carefully over every act of violence, weighing the value of a target against the risk of slaughtering innocents.

The entire program, notes the Times , "appears to reflect Mr. Obama's striking self-confidence" in his own judgment. Indeed, the president seems confident not simply that he can order strikes that inflict maximum damage on America's enemies with minimal risk of civilian casualties -- though certainly he feels assured of this, albeit with some specious restrictions on who counts as a "civilian." But more fundamentally, by carefully presenting every decision as a matrix bounded by unique circumstances and constraints, the president seems to believe that he can exercise his prerogative to kill without setting troublesome precedents or triggering the inevitable blowback. And perhaps most importantly, the president is confident that he can do it on his own.

Such an approach might resonate in the classrooms where the erstwhile constitutional law professor once strode. But in the more dangerous and violent world of politics, it borders on reckless. Unlike the carefully contained vacuums of legal thought experiments, the Obama administration's decisions about when, where, and how to use deadly force have eroded longstanding norms, set dangerous precedents, and provoked a host of very real unintended consequences from North Africa to the Middle East and beyond. And, with an assist from a Republican Party whose own priests sermonize about "American exceptionalism" and little else, they have helped move the U.S. discourse on national security and foreign policy inexorably to the right.

The administration has adamantly asserted the legality of its targeted assassination program, repeatedly dispatching top lawyers and advisers to defend the program against critics who say the operations defy longstanding constitutional norms of due process.

But the administration's notions of "due process" are troubling at best, amounting essentially to the assertion that an internal government review is sufficient to decide whether an alleged terrorist suspect should live or die -- even if, as in the case of the New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, the suspect is an American citizen. When Attorney General Eric Holder publicly declared that --Due process' and "judicial process' are not one and the same," he demarcated a particularly insidious innovation of the Obama era: Whereas the Bush administration argued that due process didn't apply to terrorist suspects, the Obama administration has rendered the whole concept meaningless. --Due process,' deadpanned the satirist Stephen Colbert, "just means there's a process that you do ."

The administration has furthermore declined to make public the substance of these deliberations even after the strikes have taken place. Since one can assume that future presidents will be less astute students of Aquinas and Augustine, it is possible to imagine that future deliberations could be dispensed of altogether -- and Americans would be none the wiser.

Worse still, such precedents are scarcely confined by the water's edge. When ABC's Jake Tapper asked White House spokesman Jay Carney if the administration had considered the possibility of Russia or China mimicking America's behavior with respect to drones, the fumbling Carney demurred on discussing such "sensitive issues," merely assuring the press corps that the White House takes "very seriously the decisions that are involved in the effort to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda."

But no amount of "seriousness" can stem the contagion. As of late 2011, according to The New York Times, more than 50 other countries had assembled or purchased unmanned aerial vehicles, presumably confident that if the United States can send drones across international borders to assassinate targets of interest, so can they. "Is this the world we want to live in?" wondered a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Because we're creating it."

And what does the administration have to show for such risky behavior? Supporters contend that drone strikes have disrupted the short-term operations of localized terror cells abroad, and at far less domestic political cost than conventional military operations. But as The Washington Post reported in May, drone strikes have proven an exceptionally potent recruiting tool for extremist organizations: since the United States stepped up its attacks on Yemeni targets in recent years, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has more than doubled its membership. Indeed, the group seems more audacious than ever, recently killing nearly 100 Yemeni soldiers in a stunning attack on a military parade drill in Sanaa.

Nor is the radicalization unique to the socially dispossessed or the religiously fanatic. As Human Rights Watch researcher Letta Tayler reports at Salon , Yemen's educated secular urbanites are equally appalled by the strikes and their apparent disregard for civilian life, regardless of Washington's assurances to the contrary. The revelation that the United States presumes all adult males killed in a given strike to be "combatants" only adds fuel to fire -- particularly since, with the advent of so-called "signature strikes," the administration may not even know the identities of the intended targets in the first place.

Even some U.S. conservatives seem to understand the outrage, at least when it comes to their own turf. In response to the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles by U.S. police forces, the prominent neoconservative Charles Krauthammer confessed to "going ACLU" and called for a ban on drones in U.S. air space. Closer to the tea party fringe, Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano predicted that "The first American patriot that shoots down one of these drones that comes too close to his children in his backyard will be an American hero."

Surely there is a growing pool of such aspiring heroes in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and even the Philippines now too -- new conscripts eager to redress the iniquities of the "just war" being waged by the president and his advisers.

The toxicity of the drone war, then, cannot be confined to a vacuum in the West Wing, no matter how much consideration the president and his priestly advisers may give to its execution. But on other matters, too, the Obama administration has executed supposedly unique responses to special circumstances that in reality set treacherous precedents and trigger unintended consequences.

Foremost perhaps was the war in Libya, for which the administration was never able to offer compelling evidence of a manifest U.S. interest. Instead, President Obama cited an international mandate to protect Libyan civilians from the late Muammar Gaddafi's resurgent crackdown on the country's rebel forces. "The United States should not -- and cannot -- intervene every time there is a crisis somewhere in the world," Obama said in a radio address. But "when the international community is prepared to come together to save many thousands of lives, then it's in our national interest to act." However, this mandate was rapidly exceeded as Obama and NATO leaders made clear their intention to remove Gaddafi from power, in effect enlisting NATO as the Libyan rebels' air force and turning it from peacekeeper to combatant.

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