Barack Obama’s “Drone Speech” and the Meaning of “Just War” After 9/11

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. A separate campaign in Northern Afghanistan, codenamed Operation Haymaker, was also indicative. When whistleblowers provided a cache of secret documents to The Intercept, it was reported that “between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90% of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets” (Devereaux).2. A January 2015 issue of The Nation reported, “During the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2014, US Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries—roughly 70% of the nations on the planet—according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises.” (Turse)3. On October 5, 2013, for example—some four months after the President’s May 23rd Drone Speech—U.S. Navy Seals launched a “lightning amphibious assault on the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab,” with the specific intent of “capturing, not killing” senior commander Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadi. The mission was aborted, according to Pentagon officials, when an urban firefight threatened to cause high civilian casualties (Ahmed et al.). In another famous mission, Special Ops troops in August 2014 attempted but failed to rescue journalist James Foley from his ISIS captors in Syria (Goldman and DeYoung).