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Chait: When you hear critics on the left express what they don’t like about your presidency, the word drone might come up more than anything. Is that something you anticipated from the beginning?
Obama: No, and you know, I … I mean this sincerely: I’m glad the left pushes me on this. I’ve said to my staff and I’ve said to my joint chiefs, I’ve said in the Situation Room: I don’t ever want to get to the point where we’re that comfortable with killing. It’s not why I wanted to be president, to kill people. I want to educate kids and give people health care and help feed the hungry and alleviate poverty. So do I think that the critiques are fair or fully informed? Not always. Sometimes they are. Much of the time they’re not. To give you the most basic example: People, I think, don’t always recognize the degree to which the civilian-casualty rate, or the rate at which innocents are killed, in these precision strikes is significantly lower than what happens in a conventional war. One of the places where this came up actually, interestingly enough, is [the raid to capture Osama] bin Laden. We had the option — which was the less risky option — of just firing a missile into that compound. I made the decision not to do so primarily because I thought it was important, if in fact it was him, that we be able to identify him. But depending on how you define innocents, a couple people in that compound that were not bin Laden and might be considered innocent, including one of his wives, they were killed. As a percentage, that could be counted as collateral damage that might have been higher than if we had just taken a shot when we knew that the compound was relatively empty.
What I will say, though, is that the critique of drones has been important, because it has ensured that you don’t have this institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies. I will say that what prompted a lot of the internal reforms we put in place had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this. And it troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions with authorizations that were written really broadly, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.
But I will say that having these nonprofits continue to question and protest ensured that, having made that initial decision, we kept on going and that it got pushed all the way through. And it’s not — as I announced when we released our best estimates of the civilian casualties — it’s not a perfect solution. I think America will continue to have work to do in finding this balance between not elevating every terrorist attack into a full-blown war but not either leaving ourselves exposed to attacks or, alternatively, pretending as if we can just take shots wherever we want, whenever we want, and not be answerable to anybody. What I’ve tried to do is to move the needle in the right direction, to set some trends in the right direction. But there’s gonna be a lot more work to do.
I’ll make this last point. On all the issues we’ve discussed, but certainly on these issues of war and peace, the need for a more effective Congress and the desirability of legislation as the best solution to most of these problems remains.
Chait: When you hear critics on the left express what they don’t like about your presidency, the word drone might come up more than anything. Is that something you anticipated from the beginning?
Obama: No, and you know, I … I mean this sincerely: I’m glad the left pushes me on this. I’ve said to my staff and I’ve said to my joint chiefs, I’ve said in the Situation Room: I don’t ever want to get to the point where we’re that comfortable with killing. It’s not why I wanted to be president, to kill people. I want to educate kids and give people health care and help feed the hungry and alleviate poverty. So do I think that the critiques are fair or fully informed? Not always. Sometimes they are. Much of the time they’re not. To give you the most basic example: People, I think, don’t always recognize the degree to which the civilian-casualty rate, or the rate at which innocents are killed, in these precision strikes is significantly lower than what happens in a conventional war. One of the places where this came up actually, interestingly enough, is [the raid to capture Osama] bin Laden. We had the option — which was the less risky option — of just firing a missile into that compound. I made the decision not to do so primarily because I thought it was important, if in fact it was him, that we be able to identify him. But depending on how you define innocents, a couple people in that compound that were not bin Laden and might be considered innocent, including one of his wives, they were killed. As a percentage, that could be counted as collateral damage that might have been higher than if we had just taken a shot when we knew that the compound was relatively empty.
What I will say, though, is that the critique of drones has been important, because it has ensured that you don’t have this institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies. I will say that what prompted a lot of the internal reforms we put in place had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this. And it troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions with authorizations that were written really broadly, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.
But I will say that having these nonprofits continue to question and protest ensured that, having made that initial decision, we kept on going and that it got pushed all the way through. And it’s not — as I announced when we released our best estimates of the civilian casualties — it’s not a perfect solution. I think America will continue to have work to do in finding this balance between not elevating every terrorist attack into a full-blown war but not either leaving ourselves exposed to attacks or, alternatively, pretending as if we can just take shots wherever we want, whenever we want, and not be answerable to anybody. What I’ve tried to do is to move the needle in the right direction, to set some trends in the right direction. But there’s gonna be a lot more work to do.
I’ll make this last point. On all the issues we’ve discussed, but certainly on these issues of war and peace, the need for a more effective Congress and the desirability of legislation as the best solution to most of these problems remains.
The president shares with Jonathan Chait a very early draft of his memoirs.
nymag.com|By Jonathan Chait
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