OBAMA NEEDS LAWS TO FOLLOW

The discussion of “targeted killings” is building. This morning on Chris Hayes’ program UP on MSNBC, Jeremy Scahill, usually an out of control radical left wing advocate of “everything about the government is bad” seemed strangely muted. In fact, all of the discussion was muted. They still condemned Obama for targeting a 16-year United States citizen in Yemen (see my Feb. 6 blog post) and touted the inflated figures showing the number of drone attacks and the number of people killed while emphasizing how many "innocent people" they consider “collateral damage”. They  ignored the subtly that if there were innocents killed there must have been some that were killed who were guilty of something. It was all slanted rhetoric and very gruesome. Still, there were lawyers there that were asking some serious legal questions and expecting some well thought out answers. There are no laws that apply. What became clear to me is that Obama is actually calling for answers to these questions—laws to follow—in doing so he is asking the United States to become a leader in rewriting an entirely new set of law that pertains to modern forms of belligerent conflicts. The president cannot follow the law if he does not have laws to follow. This is not a trivial thing.

We will no longer have massive armies moving through landscapes but rather individuals and sometimes-small groups while at other times large groups carrying out terrorist style attacks not only within a country (gun ownership  laws are involved) but across international boundaries. Terms like “soldier” and ‘prisoner of war” no longer apply. Establishing a charge of “enemy combatant” is based only on what the accused political believes supported by the individual’s proposed (pre crime) or past actions and not by the uniform he or she wears or membership to an army. Terrorists are intermixed with people, who are not involved, some of whom share the same sentiments whole other do not. The treatment of international boundaries with impunity renders such time-honored traditions obsolete; such things as the president having the power to respond to acts of war and congress giving the peoples blessing to that decision with a “declarations of war”. Hundreds of drone attacks in multiple countries reduce this procedure to the ridiculous.

I can imagine Obama setting in the oval office pondering how best to protect American citizens at home and abroad—with think-tank representatives, editors and reporters as well as people on the Chris Hayes show second guessing his every move—not an enviable position. The opposition party is taking every opportunity to criticize him for what he is doing for cheap political gain. For example, they create great problem but not solutions for the “kill or capture” debate by preventing the closing of Guatanimo Prison and bringing “enemy combatants to trial in New York, etc. However, Obama is not trying to blame someone else for lack of a solution. He has fully accepted the responsibility for “his” kill list and acted as president the only way he can act but recognizes that a greater solution has to come from all 193 countries in the world. What he is doing is asking Congress to stop the empty complaints and act as a world leader in formulating a new legal paradigm to handle the situation as it exists; to create the laws he can follow. If he can oversee this formulation of laws, he will leave a legacy that affects not only world history but also the natural history of man.