Some thoughts about drone strikes and detention

It is high time I sorted out my thinking (and feeling) about U.S. drone killings and other targeted killings of those deemed to be terrorists. It's a duty to myself if no one else. The charge that liberals who were up in arms about Bush's torture and detention policies are unjustifiably silent about Obama's secret and unaccountable killings has some merit in my case, though I have on occasion expressed unease or disapproval of various aspects of Obama's conduct of the ongoing covert war. This will be an essay in the original sense, in that I am figuring out what I think (and recalling what I have thought at various stages) as I go along. The questions: what policies are effective (or likely to cause blowback), what policies are legal (or pose a lasting danger to our civil liberties), what policies are ethical (or likely to save more lives than they take).

Beautiful speech, but...

I am troubled by my tribalism.

I am susceptible, in case no one has noticed, to Obama's rhetoric.  I see myself, as I once noted, in the self-mocking confession of an old graduate school classmate (I give the provenance, because grad students in the humanities are likely to be of this tribe):

I love Obama...Every time he speaks I emit a small sigh of joy, love and delight.  I know, perhaps my eyes are clouded, but he seems so completely appropriate each time he speaks, that he could be singing the national anthem in Swahili, and I wouldn't care.

So when I read Obama's historic address to the students of the University of Yangon, Burma's principal university, my heart naturally swelled in my breast,  and tears welled up. It was, as you might expect (if you're so susceptible), a beautifully constructed speech -- opening dazzling prospects of freedom and prosperity to the Burmese, applying subtle pressure at all the right points on their leaders (as I heard no less tough a judge than Human Right Watch's Tom Malinowski affirm last night), honoring Burma's dissidents, making a cogent case, as Obama always does, that America's best values are or ought to be universal values, softening the paternalism by acknowledging past American error (i.e., in Foxspeak, "apologizing").