When it comes to war, are drones the most ethical option? Philosopher Bradley Strawser might say so: he argues that there's no downside, or moral dilemmas, when it comes to drone strikes. Strawser is employed by the United States military, having recently obtained a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California."I don’t see the ethical problem," says Carroll. "What matters to me is whether the cause itself is justified. Because if the operation is justified and is the right thing to do – and by the way I’m not claiming all US military strikes are – then asymmetry doesn’t matter."Of course Carroll's defense of drones comes equipped with a barrage of caveats: he is not saying every American strike is justified and he is not saying they are all legal, he is just saying, were this all to be true, drones are morally superior alternative. Furthermore, he is worried that some of his arguments may be implemented in the wrong way, which is to say, they would be taken seriously in the real world; a place where the President of the United States has a kill-list and the Attorney General who perceives Due Process as a putty-like suggestion that can be readily bent at will.Civilian casualities and America's frayed geopolitical relationship with Pakistan also don't seem to register in Strawser's philosophical daydream. As for the possibility of drone strikes reducing war to little more than a videogame and sanitizing death, he points out that people who control them frequently suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, an odd fact to cite as a reason for drone strikes. The hypothetical construct that surrounds his defense conjures up images of the thinkers who defended torture after the horrific events of 9/11 within the context of ticking time-bomb scenarios only witnessed during broadcasts of the television program 24.These same kinds of insular defenses were trumped out by many during the lead-up to the Iraq War, with the evils of Saddam Hussein's regime and the perpetually existential issue of National Security cleaved entirely from the subsequent occupation of a people. I recall a passage from George Packer's Assassins at the Gate, in which the New Yorker staff writer and vocal Iraq War enthusiast, gushed over Paul Berman's quest to articulate the precepts of effective liberal interventionism, struggling to develop a soundproof academic theory which could maintain the appearance of being anti-Bush administration while simultaneously supporting all its major foreign policy objectives.This was around the same time that the late Christopher Hitchens was, essentially, arguing that an invasion of Iraq merely boiled down the noble struggle of his Kurdish leftist pals, completely negating the prospect of plunder that motivated many in the "Regime Change" camp. A few weeks before the the first air strikes in Baghdad, Hitchens was saying we should start thinking about what a "non-imperial occupation" might look like. We never did find out, however, the issues that these, and other, intellectuals ignored are subjects we know quite a bit about. According to a report released earlier this year by International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, there's been a 4-fold cancer increase in Fallujah since Operation Phantom Fury and a 12-fold cancer increase in children under the age of fourteen.As for Strawser's preoccupation with The Cause surrounding the White House's possibly illegal drone strikes, one could do worse than revisit "Protocols of Machismo", an essay by political theorist Corey Robin that tackles the subject of Just War high-mindedness, "Many critics have protested against Abu Ghraib, but none has traced it back to the idea of national security. Perhaps they believe such an investigation is unnecessary. After all, many of them opposed the war on the grounds that US security was not threatened by Iraq.And some of national security's most accomplished practitioners, such as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as theoreticians like Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, even claimed that a genuine consideration of US interests militated against the war. The mere fact that some politicians misused or abused the principle of national security need not call that principle into question. But when an idea routinely accompanies, if not induces, atrocities – Abu Ghraib was certainly not the first instance of the United States committing or sponsoring torture in the name of security – second thoughts would seem to be in order. Unless, of course, defenders of the idea wish to join that company of ideologues they so roundly condemn, affirming their commitment to an ideal version of national security while disowning its 'actually existing' variant"The philosophical defense of drones rests squarely on this ideal version of national security and the nuanced scenarios spun by Strawser, bodies pile up while hypothetical situations are explored. To believe that drone strikes are moral is to inhabit the world of the armchair bombardier where the phrase “collateral damage” is codified and disseminated. The United States’ drone strikes are immoral.
Advertisement
Advertisement