The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama?--A Legal & Moral Question for 2016! --Esquire Magazine
(Some of us will worry about U.S. War Policy in the Coming 2016 Election. This Article addresses our concerns)
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By Tom Junod--Esquire Magazine
Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The Obama administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives. They're careful because when it comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one
You knew, before you became president, that you could send soldiers to war. Like every president who came before you, you had to answer questions not just of competence but of conscience when you campaigned to become America's commander in chief.
Unlike your predecessors, however, you had to answer an additional question before you took the job. Other presidents had to decide whether they could preside over the slaughter of massed armies, and the piteous suffering of whole populations.
You had to decide if you could target and kill one person at a time.
Maybe it's an easy question, considering the difficulty of the others. Maybe killing one person isn't a burden; maybe it's a relief, in light of the alternatives. After all, you inherited three wars from George W. Bush: the two "hot theater" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the "asymmetrical" war against Al Qaeda. The Iraq war killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, maybe more. The Afghanistan war is a trap from which we struggle to extricate ourselves. The first was vain; the second, in vain. The war with Al Qaeda is, by comparison, a vision — a vision of how war could be, and never has been. It is a war of individuals instead of armies. It is a war of combatants instead of civilians. It is a war of intelligence instead of brute force. It is a war not only of technological precision but moral discrimination, designed to separate the guilty from the innocent. It is, indeed, war as an alternative to war: It saves lives by ending lives; it responds to those plotting mass murder by, well, murdering them.
And that is what makes the question so profound and so profoundly difficult. "For some reason, it's an unusual and extraordinarily grave thing when you have an individual person who's being singled out for targeting," says an administration lawyer who was instrumental in formulating its targeting policy. "It's not a distinction that holds up when you press it a bit — I mean, snipers target individuals, and they're still considered soldiers. And yet the distinction between shooting at armies and shooting at individuals is there. It's an intuitive thing, I think, in the human animal."
It's probably a hard-wired thing. It's certainly an ancient thing, fundamental to the creation of human conscience. The difference between shedding the blood of many for a cause outside yourself and shedding the blood of one for a cause of your own seems ineffable — and yet it's nothing less than the difference between war and murder.
Yet you are committing something that looks like murder in the cause of war. You are shedding the blood of one in order to spare the blood of many. You are not observing moral distinctions so much as you are inventing them, in the pursuit of what you regard as both a historic opportunity and a personal obligation. You have made a historic opportunity into your personal obligation, and in so doing you have made sure that no man can become president unless he knows that he has it within him to kill another man — one whose face he has probably seen, one whose name he probably knows.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a14627/obama-lethal-presidency-0812/
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