Looking back, there's no doubt about the eloquence of his words, which fit well with my 16-year-old dreams. Unfortunately -- for him, for me, and for the world -- he didn't take his own advice. Instead of preserving the peace, he quickly embraced the latest instruments of war, like drones, and so helped usher in a new era of warfare that, as the latest drone strike in Baghdad makes clear, is likely to haunt us for decades to come.
Obama's Legacy
A large part of Obama's speech was dedicated to America's adherence to the laws of war and the importance of protecting civilians when using force. As he put it,
"Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct... And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard."
For those not familiar with those "laws," the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols specifically protect people in areas of armed conflict who are not taking part in the hostilities (civilians, health workers, and aid workers in particular) and those who are no longer participating in the hostilities, including the wounded, the sick, and prisoners of war.
Unsurprisingly, nowhere in Obama's 36-minute speech did he mention that he had already authorized more drone strikes than his predecessor, George W. Bush, approved during his entire presidency. Nor did he mention that those strikes had already killed dozens, if not hundreds, of civilians in countries ranging from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia.
On January 23, 2009, for instance, just three days after Obama's inauguration, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan ripped through a house filled with friends and family sitting down to dinner. Nine civilians were killed. As Faheem Qureshi, a teenager who barely survived the attack, told the Guardian, "I am the living example of what drones are... They have affected Waziristan [the district of Pakistan where he lived] as they have affected my personal life. I had all the hopes and potential and now I am doing nothing." More than a decade later, Faheem has still not been given an explanation for what happened to his family, even though the president was told almostimmediately that a mistake had been made and innocent civilians had been killed.
Six months later, a U.S. drone strike took out a mid-ranking Taliban commander in Pakistan. At his funeral, attended by 5,000 people, another drone fired missiles into the crowd in an attempt to kill Baitullah Mehsud, the founder of the Pakistani wing of the Taliban. Forty-five civilians would die, but not Mehsud who was targeted seven times before eventually being killed on August 5, 2009. The drone pursuit of him would leave at least 164 dead, including eight-year-old Noor Syed who was playing in a house near one of Mehsud's suspected hideouts when a piece of shrapnel hit him.
Throughout Obama's presidency events like these occurred with alarming frequency. A pregnant woman in Yemen died while driving with her children. A 4-year-old girl was left without an eye, nose, or lower lip in a rural province of Afghanistan. Rescue workers in Pakistan were killed while trying to retrieve bodies after an airstrike. Even American military personnel weren't spared. In 2011, for instance, Marine Staff Sergeant Jeremy Smith and Navy corpsman Benjamin Rast were unintentionally killed near Sangin, Afghanistan, by a drone strike while on their way to rescue Marines pinned down by Taliban gunfire. According to outside monitoring groups, by the end of his second term, President Obama had authorized 528 strikes with a death toll reaching somewhere between 380 and 801 civilians in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen alone. And that's believed to be a conservative estimate.
The "Precision" of Drone Warfare
In 2013, when discussing the high number of civilian casualties from drone strikes, the president defended them by claiming that "conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage." That same year, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared, "You can far more easily limit collateral damage with a drone than you can with a bomb, even a precision-guided munition, off an airplane." Or, as former CIA Director Leon Panetta put it, "I think this is one of the most precise weapons that we have in our arsenal."
If it sounded too good to be true, that's because it was and still is.
When political scientists Micah Zenko and Amelia Wolf did a careful analysis of this claim for the Council on Foreign Relations, they found that "the White House is deeply misleading about the precision of drone strikes. They are, in fact, roughly thirty times more likely to result in a civilian fatality than an airstrike by a manned aircraft." A deeper dive into the technology used for military drones showed that it's prone to significant error. After analyzing documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act related to drones, previously unpublished court documents, dozens of engineering and technical studies, and contract data, CorpWatch's Pratap Chatterjee and Christian Stork came to a similar conclusion: "Planning for drone operations was handicapped by a fog of numbers and raw data derived from flawed technology marketed by contractors, the military, and the intelligence agencies."
The false notion that drones are more precise and effective -- and so less dangerous -- to civilians gained special, if grim, traction in the Obama era. During the Trump presidency, it would only become more of a given. In the years since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, in fact, the U.S. military has only expanded its use of artificial intelligence, or AI, in warfare in order, as the Pentagon's chief information officer Dana Deasy puts it, to maintain America's "strategic position and prevail on future battlefields."
Unfortunately, as my colleague Emily Manna and I have pointed out, this is a development that's anything but relegated to those "future battlefields." The military is already hard at work making its existing weapons systems, including drones, ever more autonomous. This process is sure to accelerate, even if the American public will hear little about it, thanks to the secrecy surrounding the application of AI and the fact that private companies with no commitment to public accountability are deeply involved in creating the technology.
Under the circumstances, one thing is predictable: ever more civilians are going to die in America's wars.
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