by Daniel Luban
Earlier this year, William Saletan published a typically contrarian piece titled “In Defense of Drones”. The subtitle — “they’re the worst form of war, except for all the others” — gives a good indication of the general line of argument; Saletan suggested that the collateral damage of the [...]]]>
by Daniel Luban
Earlier this year, William Saletan published a typically contrarian piece titled “In Defense of Drones”. The subtitle — “they’re the worst form of war, except for all the others” — gives a good indication of the general line of argument; Saletan suggested that the collateral damage of the drone war has been far smaller than in past US military campaigns, and that drones remain a necessary evil far preferable to conventional bombing.
This view of drones as comparatively precise and surgical may be too optimistic; one recent study of the war in Afghanistan by a US military adviser suggested that drone strikes were actually “an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per engagement” than attacks from manned aircraft. And there is also some evidence to suggest that drones exact a psychological toll on civilian populations over and above conventional bombing that is not reflected in raw casualty statistics.
But for all that, I think there’s something to Saletan’s argument. That’s not to say (as he seems to) that we should be okay with the way the US is waging the war on terror. It’s merely to say that we shouldn’t attribute all the evils of the war on terror to one specific weapon (drones) in a way that implies that conventional bombers or cruise missiles or commando raids would somehow be gentler or more humane. (In fact, all of these remain key parts of the US repertoire.) Similarly, we should be wary of insisting on the unprecedented brutality of the drone war in ways that minimize the far greater tolls exacted by conventional military actions in the past.
Any critique of the war on terror, in other words, should focus less on means and more on ends. The key question is whether the US should be engaged in assassinating large numbers of suspected militants around the world; the weapons by which it does so are of secondary importance. Public discomfort with drones makes it tempting to put them at the center of the debate — but if the upshot is simply that the US should stop killing targets with Predators and double down on killing them with special forces, this would be a hollow victory or even a Pyrrhic one.
I get into these issues in more depth in a recent review essay for Dissent, where I tried to put the war on terror in a somewhat broader historical perspective by examining three very good recent books: Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, and Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife. A brief excerpt:
[T]here is some risk of fetishizing The Drone at the expense of a wider view of the American War on Terror. The visceral creepiness of the new technology has been crucial in raising awareness of the human consequences of this war, but it can distract us from the fact that Predators and Reapers are simply one type of weapon by which it is being waged. Americans may shiver at the thought of Hellfire missiles falling out of a clear blue sky, but most continue to thrill to the exploits of Seal Team Six, and the latter is just as fundamental a feature of the new American way of war as the former. So, too, are the Kalashnikov-wielding militiamen on the payroll of U.S.-backed warlords in Somalia and the programmers conducting cyber-sabotage against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. As the books under review make clear, we might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints—both of law and of public scrutiny—imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another. A wider view of the War on Terror may be necessary, but it is by no means more comforting.
Those interested should read the whole thing.
]]>]]>The most important intelligence documents used to argue that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons research and development programme in 2003 – a set of technical drawings of efforts to fit what appears to be a nuclear payload into the reentry vehicle of Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile, the Shahab-3 – turn out to have a fatal flaw: the drawings depict a reentry vehicle that had already been abandoned by the Iranian missile programme in favour of an improved model.
The reentry vehicle or warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar “dunce cap” shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, an IPS investigation has confirmed. But when Iran had flight-tested a new missile in mid-2004, it did not have that “dunce cap” warhead but a new “triconic” or “baby bottle” shape, which was more aerodynamic than the one on the original Iranian missile.
The development of the new missile and warhead had already been under way for years by that time, according to the author of the most authoritative study of the Iranian missile programme.
The schematics are dated March and April 2003, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report of May 2008. But according to Mike Elleman, lead author of the study published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last May, Iran had been introducing the new warhead shape, along with other major innovations in the design of the medium-range missile, over a period of two to five years.
Elleman confirmed in an interview with IPS that the redesign of the reentry vehicle must have begun in 2002 at the latest.
The former head of the Safeguards Department of the IAEA, Olli Heinonen, who managed the IAEA investigation of the intelligence documents on Iran, confirmed in an interview with IPS that the schematics depicted in the documents were of the old No Dong Missile rather than the new missile that was tested in mid-2004.
Heinonen, now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, explained the anomaly of an outdated warhead being shown in the schematics by suggesting that the group which had done the schematics had no relationship with Iranian missile programme.