In the aftermath of September 11th, however, the targeting and killing of individual Al Qaeda members without juridical process has come to be seen within the Bush Administration as justifiable military action in a new kind of war
I hate to say it, but on this I agree with the Administration.
I'm not yet all the way there, Steven. At the level you sketch the argument, you are indisputably correct. But I have one large problem with it. That is the argument Hersh offers which is that these kinds of ventures can and often do have consequences that are worse than the policy. His invocation of the Phoenix operation in Vietnam was telling to me. My guess is that, and it's definitely only a guess, these operations are done with great care in their early incarnations. And then, if things go reasonably well, mistakes are not too bad, the policy makers and, for that matter, the ones doing the actions, get careless; if the scale increases, that carelessness gets magnified. At those points, the medicine can easily get worse than the disease.
Much of this is future forecasting, always an impossible business; and some of it is reading the past dynamics of US government actions of this sort. |
