In The Price of Assassination, Robert Wright reflects on the pitfalls of President Obama’s policy of so-called targeted killing.
Wright comes closest to hitting the right target when he says:
Terrorists are nourished ultimately by a grass-roots sense of injustice.
And one good way to stoke a sense of injustice is to fire missiles into cars, homes and offices in hopes of killing terrorists, while in fact killing no few innocent civilians. Estimates of the ratio of civilians to militants killed are all over the map — 50 to 1 or 10 to 1 or 1 to 2 or 1 to 10 — but the estimate of the Pakistani people, which is all that matters, tends toward the higher end.
The higher end is actually off the scale that Wright cites since he only looks at American sources. And since it seems reasonable to assume that the Pakistanis count their own dead more carefully than Americans do, the high end, as reported by Dawn newspaper, may also be a more accurate count and measure of the accuracy of Obama’s targeted killing program: 140 innocents civilians killed each time an al Qaeda or Taliban “target” was hit in 2009.
Any policy of targeted killing — whether conducted by the US or Israel — faces an obvious problem that must surely have given rise to the name, targeted killing. These actions result in a significant amount of indiscriminate killing, yet indiscriminate killing is, we are constantly reminded, the province of terrorism.
So how does a state counter the charge that its methods mirror those of terrorists? By claiming — without much foundation — that the carnage it causes is precise. We are highly discriminating killers who hit our targets with pinpoint accuracy — pinpoints that often turn out to be occupied by an unfortunate number of untargeted people.
But to turn to another of Wright’s points — that terrorists are nourished by a grass-roots sense of injustice — here he glides over the issue that the very term terrorism is designed to conceal: that just causes very often spawn acts of violence and that those engaged in this violence are genuinely dedicated to those causes, not merely being nourished by them.
In other words, by invoking the word terrorism we refuse to look at its political roots. And even in those cases where a just political cause is widely acknowledged — such as with the Palestinian national movement — we imagine that its violent manifestations can be legitimately marginalized rather than seen as a compelling gauge of the depth of the grievance.
The P.O.T.U.S. may be a smart individual, but he’s following in the same foot steps as his predecessor, GWB. I suppose that holding the office is the biggest high anyone could have, but apparently not all can handle it. This sure looks to be playing out that way today. By saying those who don’t agree with us are terrorists, but we are the good guys, is hypocritical, to say the least, but also verges on playing GOD, or thinking such. Indeed, it’s a sad day when the P.O.T.U.S. sinks into giving the go ahead to contract murder.
Targeted assassination is an evil that tarnishes not only every American citizen, but also the citizens of every country than allies itself with such actions.
Yes it’s a very convenient way to side step the rule of law and creates a very real precedence that a government, a so called democratically elected government can kill anyone it deems an unacceptable threat.
Just recemtly this was directed, by the US, at foreign nationals however the US has now crossed another boundary by proclaiming it has the right to extrajudicial execution of its own citizens.
Not being a US citizen I can only shake my head in wonder that the US public can allow this blatant trampling of their rights and tremble that the government of my country may take the US’s lead in this, as they have in so many other cases, and instigate this course of action themselves.