Drone-Court Advantage

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http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/drone-court-advantage/

Drone-Court Advantage

[ This couldn't have been funnier if it had actually been written
by Thomas Friedman. ]

By Charles Davis

With all the attacks on his leadership from the professional left, it's
all too easy to forget that Barack Obama is by far the most liberal
president in American history. From permitting gays to serve openly in
the military to saying they should even be allowed to get married, the
president has deftly tied his most progressive policies to America's
most reactionary institutions, upholding the long liberal tradition of
making the status quo more sustainable, its excesses more subtle. But
to the outraged left, helping Americans isn't enough. He's supposed
to concern himself with the lives of foreigners, too.

||| "I prioritize my vagina over drones." -- Imani Gandy,
||| Raw Story blogger Angry Black Lady

As progressive pundit Joy Reid wryly observes, the effeminate
anti-Obama purists are at such pains to attack this president that
they're forced to spend more time condemning what goes on outside
America than the reforms he's talked about instituting within it.
Indeed, Reid notes they're the sort that, at a loss to explain record
corporate profits -- bye bye, Bush recession -- turn to arguing "the
government's use of drones and waging of covert wars and the drug war
are the most pressing problems facing the planet."

||| "We've been able to prosper in these difficult times
||| by innovating," says Wells Fargo CFO Timothy Sloan.

If you can stomach the toxicity, just consider the implicit Birtherism:
that President Obama should be more concerned about non-Americans
than registered American voters, as if he's not even American himself.
And consider the classism and misogyny. Amid a GOP-led war on women, the

||| Lesley Stahl on the U.S. embargo against Iraq: "We have heard that
||| a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than
||| died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Secretary of
||| State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the
||| price -- we think the price is worth it." -- 60 Minutes (1996)

privileged far left would have us believe protecting the life of some
impoverished stay-at-home Buzkashi mom is as vital as safeguarding
a successful, independent American woman's access to subsidized birth
control -- that a Madeleine Albright or Hillary Rodham Clinton are no
more important than some willfully oppressed third-worlder in a burka.

Tritely declaring President Obama no different from George W. Bush,
these nominally left-wing suppressors of the vote even adopt the same
bigoted, "pro-life" language one would expect to find outside an
abortion clinic in Kansas, proclaiming our commander-in-chief a
"criminal" and "baby killer" all because he has killed a few
regrettable babies as part of wars that much of the world
considers criminal -- a privilege, mind you, never denied any of his
white predecessors. They even attack the president because he has had
the temerity to protect the lives of American servicemen and
women through the record-breaking use of drones, ensuring the greatest
threat they face is carpal tunnel, not a bullet from an angry
savage."

||| More than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the
||| [drone] attacks," wrote Brookings Institution senior fellow Daniel
||| Byman in 2009. "That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10
||| or so civilians also died."

Don't let the baby-killing rhetoric from the emo-left fool you, though:
drones don't just protect important people, they protect Pakistanis
and Yemenis too. Indeed, we know that because that's what those who use
them say. Repeatedly, the boss of country's advisors have assured us
that civilian deaths in his drone wars are "exceedingly rare" and that,
even when they do take life, it's only to protect it. Not even Glenn
Greenwald -- basically just a whiter, more privileged Anwar al-Awlaki
-- disputes these facts.

Yet the left, from Noam Chomsky to the Brookings Institution, persists
in talking about civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan and
wherever that have already been officially denied. That raises
the question: for what electoral purpose? Talking about innocent men,
women, and children killed by our way of life isn't going to bring them
back, but it will undermine support among President Obama's left-wing
base. Indeed, while some pacifists confuse their personal beliefs with
politically viable policy solutions -- thinking, as blogger Adam
Serwer puts it, that America should stick to "using banana creme pies
or wifflebats in its defense" -- President Obama is compelled to live
in the real world. And there he must confront real threats, like a
potential GOP takeover of the Senate, that require an active and
politically unassailable foreign policy.

||| "When Romney wins and he reduces this kind
||| of stuff [drone strikes], from my mouth to
||| God's ear, he reduces this kind of stuff, I
||| can't wait to hear what these clowns over at
||| MSNBC [say]." -- Glenn Beck

Instead of dwelling on dead foreigners and
arguing and bickering over which president
killed which child, the left would do well to
remember the huge advances in progressive
rhetoric we've made these last four years.
Instead of bashing the man who saved us from
Sarah Palin, we ought to rededicating ourselves
to addressing the most pressing problem the
planet faces right now: defeating Mitt Romney.

After all, if you don't like that Barack Obama possesses the unilateral
ability to decide who lives or dies, imagine how insufferable that
power would be in the hands of
the former Massachusetts governor. Instead of laughing with the
president as he jokes about drone striking the Jonas Brothers, we
would probably be stuck listening to an awkward Romney make dated quips
about offing the Allman Brothers.

||| "Jonas brothers are here, they're out there
||| somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but
||| boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you:
||| Predator drones. You will never see it coming.
||| You think I'm joking?" -- President Obama at
||| the WHCA, 2010

Rejecting the Gnostic, all-war-is-evil left, liberals also need to push
back hard against those who would neglect the nuanced differences
between a radical right Republican killing innocent men, women
and children as part of a unilateral war for oil, and a center left
administration doing the same under the auspices of a limited defensive
action or long-term military occupation condoned by the Western
European world community. And we need to recognize that in many ways
anti-imperialism is just another form of cultural imperialism,
insisting as it does that each and every nation of people must abide by
the same strict moral or international legal code. If we're accepting
of cultures that hunt whales, there's no reason we should turn around
and condemn our own just because it prefers to hunt Muslims.

We liberals also ought to quit patronizing the innocent victims of our
wars by portraying them as innocent victims of our wars. As I learned
on a recent trip to Pakistan, often times these "victims" -- or rather,
their survivors -- will tell you they don't feel victimized at all:
they feel empowered. Indeed, many say they're just happy to be taking
part as some of the first proud people of color to be warred upon by a
proud American emperor of color.

||| "[I]n reality Pakistanis are deeply torn
||| about the drones. For every anti-American rant
||| . . . there is also a recognition that these
||| strikes from the sky have their purpose." --
||| Pir Zubair Shah, Nieman Foundation for
||| Journalism at Harvard University

"My family, they were not terrorists," one man who lost his wife and
three sons in a drone strike told me in an interview. "But," he added,
wiping tears of what were presumably joy from his face, "now they are
history." The man, whose name I have forgotten, was probably called
Mohammad.

We should be extremely wary of claims to innocence by any "victim" of
the Obama administration. We know Republicans will stop at nothing to
undermine his presidency, so when confronted with hundreds of children
burned to death by Hellfire missiles under his watch, one must ask, Who
does it benefit? If their charred remains will be used to undermine the
left's enthusiasm for the president, depressing voter turnout -- a
classic tactic of Karl Rove -- can they really be said to be innocent
at all?

During my time in Waziristan, I found the people of Pakistan understood
this better than most self-styled progressives. For instance, I met a a
young couple whose 9-year-old daughter, their pride and joy, had her
life cut short because she made the mistake of hanging around men
between the ages of 10 and 85. But her father -- let's call him
Mohammad II -- recounted to me that the real tragedy of his daughter's
death would be if it undermined President Obama's political
capital, and with it his ability to expand Americans' access to
quality, affordable health care.

"My daughter was a precocious child," he explained to me. Insisting I
refer to her as "Lilly Ledbetter," her father recounted how she cried
as much the day Obama was inaugurated as the day he had her killed. At
the tender age of 7, she even had a blistering letter to the editor
concerning the solvency of the Social Security trust fund published in
The Washington Post, leading to a regular guest-blogging gig for Mother
Jones's Kevin Drum. Far from bitter, he said she would have accepted
her own death as the unfortunate result of GOP intransigence,
knowing the man who brought mandated health insurance to the masses had
no choice but to dramatically escalate the drone war in her country
lest Republicans argue he had not dramatically escalated the drone war
in her country. This piece appears in TNI Vol. 6 "Game of
Drones," [18]subscribe here for $2 and get the full issue

Lilly's father then told a story that has stuck with me ever since. As
she lay dying in a pool of her own blood and vomit, the overpoweringly
putrid scent of death wafting in the air as her father cupped
the intestines spilling out her mangled abdomen, the littlest Ledbetter
faintly breathed her final words. And like the laudable columnist Ezra
Klein, she was on message.

"It's so cruel," she said, whimpering as tears fell from her bloodshot
eyes to her blood-smeared cheek, "what Mitt Romney did to that dog."

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