The legacy of Obama's drone wars
Who paved the road to Trump's war?
At this point, the two terms of the Barack Obama presidency, and their aura of feel-good liberal professionalism, are ancient history. But the Democratic Party is still chasing the feeling of those eight years, constantly hoping to escape the obvious repulsiveness of the current administration by returning to some pre-2016 normalcy. Democratic pundits seem to respond to each atrocity — including this year’s military operations against Venezuela and now Iran — by echoing the refrain that none of this would have happened had Kamala Harris been elected or had Biden still been in power. “Another forever war because people can’t bring themselves to vote for women,” declared Blue Missouri Executive Director Jess Piper on Bluesky after the attack against Iran. Harris might not have been a perfect president, according to liberal talk show host Brian Shapiro, but “she wouldn’t have started an ill-advised war, certainly not in Iran.”
Such counterfactuals are difficult to assess. (The official Democratic Party platform in 2024 criticized Trump’s “fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression.”) But the historical record is clear: devastating wars in the Middle East, then and now, must be reckoned with as part of Obama’s legacy, not a departure from it. For those who remember Obama’s drone wars, something so present in the public imagination that the president could joke about killing the Jonas Brothers with a Predator strike, nostalgic longing for mainstream Democratic governance has always been unseemly. But the precedent that Obama’s militarism solidified has only become more and more malignant as Trump has moved through his presidency.
In Obama’s time, the massive expansion of drone warfare (with more strikes in his first year than George W. Bush conducted during his eight) was justified by the president under the guise of avoiding the most high-profile downsides of the War on Terror as prosecuted under Bush: “more U.S. deaths, more Black Hawks down, more confrontations with local populations, and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars,” he said at the National Defense University in 2013. Drones, high in the air, targeted, precise, with supposed checks and balances in place, would allow the military to establish “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured” before authorizing any strikes.
Despite the insistence that everything was being done by proper, constitutional procedure, the Obama administration arrogated to the presidency immense power to attack other nations without oversight or legislative authorization. Responding to a question about a hypothetical strike on Iran while he was campaigning in 2007, Obama affirmed that “the president does not have power under the constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” and that it would be “always preferable” to obtain prior congressional authorization even in cases of self-defense. When, as president, Obama began drone strikes in Libya in 2011 to assist in the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi, the Justice Department wrote an internal memorandum declaring that in fact no congressional authorization was needed, because the actions under consideration did not amount to a “war.” The memo asserted that legal precedent secured for the president the authority to take military action abroad “for the purpose of protecting important national interests, even without specific prior authorization from Congress.” The permissible scope of such military activity, in the eyes of the Obama administration, was apparently vast, encompassing the overthrow of an entire government if it so desired.
Obama’s allies often scolded critics of his drone program — whether they protested strikes in countries like Pakistan and Somalia that we were not at war with, killing U.S. citizens without trial, or the many attacks that did in fact kill civilians, sometimes a dozen at a time — for their supposed ignorance and naivete. When Senator Rand Paul filibustered John Brennan’s CIA Director nomination in 2013 to speak about the threat posed by the expansion of drone strikes, he was derided by liberal commentators and Democratic senators alike: MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell lambasted his “paranoia” about the precedent Obama was setting, Senator Dianne Feinstein called one of his deliberately outlandish hypotheticals “stupid,” and Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones called Paul a racist for using filibustering tactics, as arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond had done.
Attorney General Eric Holder tried to reassure Paul that killing U.S. citizens outside of combat, on U.S. soil, would be unconstitutional. Holder had to split such hairs because he had argued a year prior that since “due process” and “judicial process” were not the same, no court action was needed to authorize the killing of U.S. citizens whom the government had deemed terrorists. That was how the Obama administration justified the killing of the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader within Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and his son, Abdulrahman, a 16-year-old from Denver who at the time of his own killing in a subsequent strike was having dinner with his cousin. The Department of Justice initially said that Abdulrahman was not the target of the strike in Yemen that took his life, which was instead aimed at a separate AQAP commander who happened to be nearby. U.S. officials then tried to claim that Abdulrahman had been a “military age-male” even though he was a minor, a categorization regularly used by the Obama administration to automatically designate potential combatants in a given area without knowing their innocence or guilt. When those deflections did not work, Obama adviser and former Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took to making comments that are indistinguishable from a War Department statement today: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children.”
Trump expanded the scale of American drone strike attacks even further in his first term, using them, as in the assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, to kill officials in the militaries of sovereign states. Trump vetoed congressional legislation meant to hinder his ability to strike Iranians unilaterally on grounds that echoed the Obama administration’s legal reasoning: attempts to demand prior authorization overlooked “the President’s need to respond to threats beyond imminent attacks on the United States and its forces.”
Trump’s second term has seen a major expansion of presidential war-making on multiple fronts, and the abandonment of any pretense to scrupulous legality in favor of a scorched earth policy that has finally demolished whatever checks and balances survived Obama’s presidency. The awesome power of attacks by air alone has become the defining feature of war under Trump: he wagers that no combat troops need to be deployed for regimes to be changed, for countless Iranians to die, and for America to deliver unbearable devastation. Trump’s supporters, like Obama’s before him, rationalize this method as a corrective to the excesses of the Bush-era War on Terror. “The president has found a way to change the world without putting boots on the ground,” representing an end to “forever wars,” according to one sycophantic Washington Post op-ed written by none other than the chief speechwriter for both Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
Bloviating about wanting to avoid alienating local populations has fallen by the wayside. Forget extrajudicial killings without congressional or judicial approval; now entire countries can be subjugated without jumping through such hoops. When questioned about drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean on December 2, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson hit back with an obvious response: “One of the things I was reminded of this morning is that under Barack Obama, President Obama, he had — I think there were 550 drone strikes on people who were targeted as enemies of the country, and nobody ever questioned it.”
Séamus Malekafzali is a journalist and writer primarily focusing on Middle Eastern affairs. His Issue Sixteen Drift essay, “Be Grateful,” examined Trump’s foreign policy and its roots in the War on Terror.
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