What about named versus anonymous killing? It looks like assassination-sneaky, underhanded, and prohibited. But the government holds that wartime killing of the enemy is not the same as assassination, and that includes targeting the enemy commander whose name you know. That sounds right.
Perhaps what really troubles us is the suspicion that if U.S. forces know so much about the target and his location, they could capture him rather than killing him. This worry originated among those who believe that the struggle with al Qaeda should be a criminal justice matter, not a military one. But it has also become a taunt from the pro-torture, pro-Guantánamo right: Obama went soft on detention and torture, so now he has to kill them. In fact, there is no evidence that any of the people targeted by drones could have been captured. Realistically, dropping special forces into Yemen to try to capture an al Qaeda leader (who in any case will have moved on by the time the SEALs arrive) poses greater risk to innocent civilians than a drone strike, given the possibility that the special forces would have to shoot their way out.
There are also legal issues. Starting with the least important, the drone program is run by the CIA, not the military, and that makes the program less accountable and the operators unprivileged combatants. This issue is a legalistic sideshow. Would we really think differently about the drones if they were piloted by uniformed military? Surely not. As for accountability, military combat operations and the rules of engagement that govern them are hardly models of transparency, and are not meant to be.
Other issues are harder. Drone strikes can violate other nations' sovereignty. Reportedly, Yemen and Pakistan have both consented to drone operations, but I am not convinced that human rights law permits a state to consent to the killing of its own citizens on its territory. There is also the difficult question of what makes Yemen a war zone. Lawyers debate these questions vigorously. All the more reason for the Obama administration to release its detailed legal reasoning.
Then there is the drone killing of American citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki. The U.S. debate about drone strikes has focused obsessively and almost exclusively on whether, in the words of the ACLU's Anthony Romero, "President Obama is allowed to execute American citizens without judicial review and outside the theater of war." It sounds terrible, doesn't it? Of course, calling the killings "executions" assumes that targeted killings cannot be legitimate acts of war. But leave that vexed issue to one side and focus on the phrase "American citizens." Is it worse, in Mr. Romero's eyes, to kill American citizens than to kill foreigners? Hopefully not.
From the point of view of just war theory, the nationality of casualties is irrelevant. If they are enemy belligerents, they can be targeted, regardless of their nationality; if they are not enemy belligerents, they can't be, regardless of their nationality. (AP I to the Geneva Conventions, articles 51 and 57) To focus only on the lives of Americans is parochial in a way that the morality of war is not.
Among this welter of arguments about targeted killing, the genuine issues of principle are whether self-defense requires it and proportionality permits it. The question of where the zone of combat ends and civilian rules begin is important, but it is a question of line-drawing, not of moral principle. If self-defense is a just cause of war, and if killing is necessary for self-defense (a big if), then targeted killing is permissible-provided that it targets only enemy fighters, keeps civilian casualties low, and actually does more good than harm in defending ourselves.
But whether targeted killing by drones does more harm than good is far from a settled question. Just a day after the Times article, the Washington Post reported that drone strikes in Yemen are infuriating and radicalizing Yemenis, turning them into Al Qaeda sympathizers, and enabling Al Qaeda to expand its membership and the territory under its control. The Post raises the terrible thought that the president and his advisors, focused on their Power Point presentations and "baseball cards" of suspected militants, are missing something vital and conducting a campaign that may undermine national self-defense rather than secure it. That would be a moral failing, not merely a failure of self-interest. One of the classical criteria of just war, dating from the seventeenth century, is the requirement of reasonable likelihood of success. A counterproductive campaign is an unjust campaign, because it sheds blood and shatters peace to no good end. Whether the president's strategy satisfies this criterion remains to be seen. He has a heavy reckoning to make.
