Killing Machine (29 page)

Come forward to our time and to new claims that the military “rolled” President Obama along a primrose path by convincing him
against the judgment of some “old hands,” including Vice President Joe Biden, to send thirty thousand more troops into Afghanistan in December 2009. When former senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam vet, was nominated by Obama after his reelection to succeed Leon Panetta at Defense, the debate over the “lessons” of Vietnam and America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came back to the front pages as Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam and Republican presidential candidate, grilled the nominee about his opposition to the surge. McCain tore into Hagel at confirmation hearings about a January 2007 statement declaring that President George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq was “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder . . . since Vietnam.” McCain now asked Hagel, “Were you correct in your assessment? . . . Were you right or wrong? . . . Yes or no?”

Hagel refused to answer in one word, saying, “I think it’s far more complicated than that.” As to whether he was right or wrong, he said, “I’ll defer that judgment to history.” McCain thundered, “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you are on the wrong side of it.”
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The obvious personalization of the issue between two Vietnam vets forecasts a struggle to control the history of the Iraq and Afghan Wars in years yet to come. Neocon convictions about counterinsurgency as a successful American policy to avoid defeat in the new longest wars have been badly shaken, as they face the reality of perpetual war for perpetual peace. Whenever the question comes up of accelerating American troop withdrawals, their pundits warn that such haste would endanger the “progress” being made. But they no longer command the attention they once did when General Petraeus was being hailed in the
Wall Street Journal
as deserving of the first five-star general rank since World War II.

The U.S. war against terrorism is now the longest war in U.S. history, and Gen. Petraeus has clearly distinguished himself as a leader worthy of the rank held by Gens. MacArthur, Marshall and Nimitz. A promotion would properly honor his service—and
it would also honor the troops he leads and has led. Today’s soldiers have fought as valiantly as any in American history, and they deserve recognition of their leaders. Congressional approval of a fifth star would demonstrate the nation’s commitment to their mission.
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Depending on one’s point of view, the surge either completely altered the outcome of the Iraq War or offered a “decent interval” to glue in a government in Baghdad that had a chance of survival—if everything fell into place. Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell’s trusted adviser, commented in 2011 as the last American troops were leaving that experts in and out of government had believed it really did not matter how long the United States stayed in Iraq, whether it was one year or twenty years—the outlook was for a civil war before everything was settled.
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The surge built Petraeus’s reputation to outsize proportions but did nothing to save Bush’s. The most interesting line in the
Wall Street Journal
article quoted above was “Congressional approval of a fifth star would demonstrate the nation’s commitment to their mission.” In fact, Obama was already backing away from the “mission” as defined in the article and rushing toward drones. Barack Obama won the 2008 election promising to end the Iraq War and had pledged to seek closure to the trauma of 9/11 by bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Along the way, however, counterinsurgency became devalued, and drones were elevated to the weapon of choice. What Bush’s administration had called the “global war on terror” became truly global in Obama’s first administration.

The Secrecy of Presidents

The Vietnam War and Watergate had brought about a congressional rebellion against the imperial presidency. Nixon’s claims to extralegal powers in wartime were summed up famously in one quotation he gave during an interview with David Frost in 1977.

       
FROST:
Would you say that there are certain situations—and the Huston Plan was one of them—where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?

       
NIXON:
Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

       
FROST:
By definition.

       
NIXON:
Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.
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Among the articles of impeachment that were being prepared at the time of his resignation, the House Judiciary Committee rejected a proposed Article V:

In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, on and subsequent to March 17, 1969, authorized, ordered, and ratified the concealment from the Congress of false and misleading statements concerning the existence, scope and nature of American bombing operations in Cambodia in derogation of the power of the Congress to declare war, to make appropriations and to raise and support armies, and by such conduct warrants impeachment and trial and removal from office.

Instead, the committee settled on obstruction of justice, from the Watergate cover-up. In a tentative foray into the war-making provisions of the Constitution, Congress fought shy of taking on the matter of whether the president’s imprimatur protected both himself
and his “agencies” (military and civilian) from prosecution for actions later deemed illegal. It could be argued that if the congressional committee had retained that count in its indictment, future presidents could not extend legislation such as the 2001 AUMF to encompass a broad theater of war Congress never intended to create when it approved President Bush’s authority to chase down the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. One could well understand the White House’s reluctance to undertake a time-consuming, emotional enterprise to punish the guilty, who had acted in the belief that they had sufficient authority for their actions—a presidential imprimatur. There is always the argument, too, that such actions would put the presidency on trial in ways that would weaken national security forevermore. Had Congress followed its original intent in the articles of impeachment, however, there might very well have been a different order of priorities facing the new administration.

At the time of the Nixon/Frost interview the imperial presidency had a very bad name. It denoted secrecy, illegal wire taps, illegal bombings, et cetera. But 9/11 turned things around again, and a strong-willed George W. Bush had no difficulty getting through Congress the kind of authorization for wiretaps Nixon would have envied, a blanket authorization to use force against the attackers, and a series of Justice Department authorizations to go outside the Geneva Conventions when dealing with terrorists taken captive. Only when the Iraq War threatened to become a dismal replay of Vietnam did attention return to the issue of presidential usurpations of power in the name of national security.
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Obama’s initial efforts to achieve greater transparency in government speeded up Freedom of Information Act requests for documents and caused the Office of Legal Counsel “torture memos” to be made public in April, three months after his inauguration. At the time Obama issued the following statement:

While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security. I have
already fought for that principle in court and will do so again in the future. However, after consulting with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and others, I believe that exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release.
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It was a carefully measured statement, calling the memos an “exceptional circumstance” and leaving open nearly any other question. Soon enough the question of what to do about individuals who had acted under Bush’s direct or implied instructions arose. In fact, Obama had spoken to that point in postelection interviews, saying he was unlikely to open a broad-gauged inquiry into Bush administration programs such as eavesdropping or treatment of terrorism suspects. Prosecution would proceed only if the Justice Department found that “somebody has blatantly broken the law.”
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Some commentators approved of, for reasons of pragmatism, Obama’s reluctance to get out all the dirty linen and wash it in public. A Harvard classmate of Obama’s who had represented Bush administration figures said, “The last thing a new administration wants to do is spend its time and energy rehashing the perceived sins of the old one.” But former CIA official Mark Lowenthal approved Obama’s stance for another reason: “If agents were criminally investigated for doing something that top Bush administration officials asked them to do and they were assured was legal, intelligence officers would be less willing to take risks to protect the country.”
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“We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth,” Obama told the ABC News program
This Week
, “and obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”
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There is not a lot of space here between Obama’s statement on taking office and Richard Nixon’s postpresidential comment to David Frost that presidential approval of an action in the interest of national security enables subordinates who carry out that action to do so without violating any laws. Nixon’s resignation, which allowed him to avoid impeachment and trial in the Senate, prevented an open discussion of that contention. But if that view prevails, as it has, then no president can ever be held accountable for anything done in the name of national security. And each president gets a blank slate on the day he or she takes the oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, allowing the new chief executive to design plans without fear of interference from the other branches of government. By not challenging fundamentals of the Bush heritage, wrote critic Tom Engelhardt, Obama accepted the premise of Bush’s “global war on terror”: “a ‘wartime’ with no possible end that would leave a commander-in-chief president in the White House till hell froze over.”
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In other words, as presidents continued to refuse to confront the past, the name of the occupant of the White House did not matter: there would always be a commander in chief exercising special war powers in perpetuity.

Obama’s embrace of the drone and his reliance on longtime CIA Middle East specialist John Brennan for advice in developing a targeting strategy nevertheless mystified many supporters. The bond between Obama and Brennan was formed during the same weeks when Obama decided against any broad investigation of Bush administration practices. Brennan led Obama’s intelligence transition team, and he wanted the job as CIA director—a job Obama was inclined to give him. Leaks to the press about his role in the Bush enhanced interrogation policies produced a furor, however, and Brennan withdrew his name from consideration. He wrote a bitter letter to Obama in which he stoutly denied any role in decision making about waterboarding or “many” of the other enhanced interrogation activities. His critics had ignored his record of honorable service in the CIA, he insisted, including his opposition to the “preemptive war” in Iraq. When he withdrew his name, it appeared for a moment that Obama wanted to make a clean break with the
Bush administration. The moment passed, and the president appointed Brennan to be his special adviser on counterterrorism—with an office in the White House basement.
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The Doctrine of Silence

From his White House office Brennan wielded immense powers over drone decisions. He was called the czar of drone warfare—even as the government denied it was waging drone warfare. The American public learned most of what it knew about drone strikes from foreign governments’ reactions. Seven weeks after Awlaki was killed, an American-Afghan bombing attack killed twenty-five Pakistani troops at two military outposts. In response Pakistan ordered the CIA to end drone strikes from a base in western Pakistan—putting the United States in a position of having to offer an apology. Pakistan held up shipments of military supplies into Afghanistan as well, but it was the shutdown of drone strikes that caused the most concern.

General Martin Dempsey, chair of the Joint Chiefs, telephoned his counterpart in Islamabad to express regrets, and President Obama was said to be looking into the “tragedy.” But Dempsey refused to say there was anything to apologize for. He did agree that “from the outside,” it looked like the relationship with Pakistan was “the worst it’s ever been.” The issue was not simply the Raymond Davis case, nor even the raid that killed Osama bin Laden without Pakistan’s knowledge, but the American posture of secrecy and self-justification. It infused Obama’s foreign policy about drones and everything else. The Pakistani prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, said his country was reevaluating its relationship with the United States. Asked by a CNN reporter if there was mutual respect, Gilani said, “At the moment not . . . If I can’t protect the sovereignty of my country, how can we say that this is mutual respect and mutual interest?”
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