Damn the lawyers anyway!
We say we are "at war" so that we can invoke wartime authorities to do things that would not be allowed if we were "at peace" and operating under law enforcement authorities. Not only would we not be able to do these drone strikes, but arguably would have to pack up our tent in Afghanistan and go home from there as well.
Yet logic tells us that we are not really at war. If we were in the beginning, the ends that justified that status have long been met. So while we open ourselves up to the tremendous strategic risk of "losing a war," we don't dare call it over for concern over the tactical risks of losing wartime authorities....
Hmm. We've made a sticky mess of this.
Personally, my vote is drop the war facade. We really don't need it. Anyone who really needs killing will still get killed, and we will have set the legal and strategic framework for moving on to a broader approaches that are less likely to violate the sovereignty of others in ways that tend to validate the very points that AQ makes about the US to fuel acts of terrorism against us in the first place.
Constraints can be good. It was the lack of constraints in Iraq and Afghanistan that got us so deep in those two theaters, and it was the presence of constraints that kept us from overreacting in places like the Philippines and Indonesia. Constraints help one to make the right decisions, while the lack of constraints often enables poor decision making. The US has been operating without effective restraint for too long now. Since about 1989, in fact.
I remember when it was a big deal when the U.S. violated another nation's airspace, or dropped a bomb on some sovereign nation or another. We should make it a big deal again.
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