On Jeremy Scahill

Last week The New York Times published an interview with Jeremy Scahill publicizing his new documentary "Dirty Wars," investigating the same topic as his book of the same name on the Obama Administration's targeted killing campaign against al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

For a scathing rebuttal of Scahill's oeuvre in general, see Bruce Bawer's review of the book in The Weekly Standard last month.

Without having read the book yet, nor seen the movie (look, I still have The Avengers sitting on my DVR, so I'm a bit behind cinematically-speaking), my quick take comes closer to Bawer's. While since the Boston Marathon bombing Scahill has been careful to cast his opposition to the "Drone War" in terms of strategy ("We are encouraging a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are making more new enemies than we are killing actual terrorists"), he still repeatedly describes it perjoratively as an assassination campaign.

At best, Scahill is poorly informed about the types of operations that target individuals, or more likely, is just being dishonest in order to skew the debate before it has even started. Targeted killings, whether successful or not, are a form of decapitation strategy in which strikes are directed against an adversary's key leadership in hopes of rendering that country/organization's forces operationally ineffective. Assassination, on the other hand, targets a specific individual during peacetime in hopes that whoever succeeds him will alter the adversary's policy. Whether one is for or against the Drone War, it is grossly inaccurate to conflate it with assassination, since al-Qa'ida is indisputably in a declared state of war with the United States, one that preceded the advent of drone strikes by half a decade.

Although Scahill is an occasionally interesting reporter (i.e. the details about the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki in this piece from The Nation), he would be a fairer reporter if he actually noted how intractable the jihadists enmity towards the West predating the Drone War genuinely is (i.e. Sayyid Qutb wrote the most vicious jihadist tracts while U.S. foreign policy was tilted against Israel in the 1950s; Osama bin Laden conceived of al-Qa'ida at a time when we were supporting the mujhaddin in Afghanistan) and showed the victims -- American and Muslim -- of the attacks that precipitated the Drone War.

Furthermore, although he is correct that we can't strictly "kill our way to victory," this is a straw man, since even supposed hard-liners such as Donald Rumsfeld famously asked in October 2003 whether we were creating more terrorists than we are killing and, just as in any war, clearly there are some al-Qa'ida leaders and operatives who won't stop trying to attack us unless they are killed. Right, Mr. Scahill?

Unfortunately, as Bawer points out, Scahill never seems to articulate this basic point, instead preferring to excoriating the side that is trying not to kill civilians (whether we are doing a good enough job is open to debate, of course) rather than the side that deliberately targets them.