Drone Warfare

"Both Kreps and Kaag are political theorists, and they are very interested in the implications of drone warfare for democracy. They go back to Immanuel Kant , who argued that autocrats could go to war whenever they felt like it without restraints, because they owed nothing to their citizens, but in a situation where the ruler is accountable to the citizens, and can be removed by the citizens, then they worry about spending too much of the national treasury on warfare in case it goes wrong, and they worry about getting too many of their own citizens killed in warfare. “They make possible perpetual war without costs” So according to Kant, in a democracy there is an inherent restraint on the temptation rulers feel towards war. What Kreps and Kaag argue is that drone warfare potentially erases that restraint, because no Americans come back in body bags and drones are relatively cheap to operate. The US can keep using drones in places like Yemen and Pakistan indefinitely, and the American people really won’t care – or the British people won’t care if it is British drones as well. I find that argument troublingly plausible. Yes. We saw in the case of the Iraq war that the American people were largely happy to invade Iraq until the war went really wrong – until Americans started coming back in body bags – and then they turned against it and said that George Bush had been an idiot to invade. The same with Blair. We wouldn’t have the Chilcott report, and the turning of American opinion against the war in Iraq, if it hadn’t been for those 4,000 Americans who died there. They are the hostages of the democratic war-making process, in a sense. But drones have broken that link in the chain. They make possible perpetual war without costs. Even if drones do seem to be getting us nowhere, it really doesn’t matter because the American people don’t feel it. Exactly. We haven’t had anything approaching a public discussion about how drones should be used. I don’t think people have thought it through, including the standards that we should accept. I’ll tell you my own standards: I have no problem at all using drones in legitimate war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, I prefer the use drones than of other military technologies there precisely because they have the promise of being more discriminate. But I think that it should be absolutely clear that you cannot attack people in countries with which you are not at war. If American operatives went to Yemen, placed a car bomb in the capital and blew something up, everyone would recognise that as an act of international terrorism because the US is not at war with Yemen. I think we should see drones in exactly the same way. Instead of planting a car bomb they are attacking someone with a bomb from the sky, but it is basically the same thing. So I think we need a reminder of common international norms that you cannot kill people in countries with which you are not at war. It is not the technology that is the issue, it’s the boundaries of how it is used."