Anwar al Awlaki – Engaging Peace

By guest contributor Ian Hansen

For those of us who are not financially invested in the expansion of war and the national security state, Fallujah’s siege by Al Qaeda does at least offer us a teaching moment.

The U.S. government, which says it is opposed to terrorism, is both manifesting terrorism in its policies and creating reactive terrorism among the people we pretend to be concerned with saving and protecting.

Reactive terrorism–often from groups with horrific oppression-supporting ideologies that are eerily reminiscent of the predominant militarism and dominionism in our own culture–allows our government to justify an even more extended campaign of terrorism that is both lucrative and sociopathically gratifying for a powerful subset of our ruling elite.

As we reflect on the fall of Fallujah to our enemies-like-us, we should reflect also on the violence-advocating and influential cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was once widely known as a “moderate,” even Bush-supporting, Muslim U.S. citizen, and his turn to an ideology of violent hatred was also a product of U.S. ham-handedness and indiscriminate brutality in the name of fighting terrorism.

In assassinating the person al-Awlaki turned into, and doing so without charge or transparent evidence of his involvement in any crime (other than hateful and irresponsible free speech and friendly associations with Al Qaeda propagandists and other figures), the U.S. has set ominous legal precedents that cannot now be easily undone.

With his assassination, that of U.S. citizen Samir Khan, as well as of Awlaki’s clearly noncombatant and unaffiliated 16 year old son, the U.S. has symbolically tainted its War on Terror with the blood of Absalom.

When we fight wars, we believe are fighting against some Other, but there is no Other. All acts of violence are ultimately carried out against oneself, because the chain is unbroken.

And since our government will not cry tears of remorse, we must be the ones to weep, “O my son Absalom–my son, my son Absalom…O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

Since the first attempts to develop moral or legal standards for warfare and the consequent killing and destroying of war, technological developments have invariably come along.

Drone missile launched from aircraft carrier. Image in public domain.

These technologies confound painstakingly agreed-upon attempts to limit and contain the lethality of an essentially lethal activity.

Anomalies abound. Why is tear gas a chemical weapon in the laws of war but napalm is not? Who, exactly, is a lawful target of warfare?

These questions have arisen most recently and most strikingly in regard to missile-carrying drone aircraft.

A debate of sorts is now underway about the morality of drone attacks, especially as used by the Obama administration. A New York Times July 15 op-ed piece cites the judgment of Bradley J. Strawser of the Naval Postgraduate School that there is a moral case for these kinds of attacks.

Essentially it is that the amount of collateral damage (to civilians) is far less than it has been for any other kind of attack. This principle conforms to both legal and moral norms of proportionality.

In a very long and detailed article in the August Esquire, “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” Tom Junod argues that these attacks are definitely not moral, certainly not legal and have opened a Pandora’s box that invites havoc.

Junod accuses Obama and his aides of inventing moral distinctions rather than observing them in order to justify the attacks. These attacks:

Take place in many countries with which we are not at war
Kill American citizens without anything remotely resembling due process, and
Do indeed kill the innocent.

Case in point: American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was targeted and killed while in Yemen on the sole authority of the President. In a later follow-on attack, his 16 year-old son was also among those killed.

This from a president Junod claims to have admired. What happens, he concludes, if a “cruel or bloodthirsty” president gets this capability? One might further ask, what happens when others bent on destruction acquire this capability, as they surely will?

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part 3

New technologies, new moral questions (Drone warfare, Part 1)