America Applauds, Europe Sits on its Hands

U.S. President Barack Obama has increased the use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists. While use of the remotely controlled drones is highly popular in America, Europe sits uncomfortably on the sidelines and makes itself complicit with its silence.

Americans like it. When President Obama approves another unmanned drone attack on suspected terrorists, America responds almost universally with applause. Zap! and another one bites the dust — and all without risking a single soldier’s life. In a nation where carrying weapons and supporting capital punishment are matters of national pride, such enthusiasm is only logical.

Obama, currently campaigning for reelection, eagerly takes advantage of this public mood. He dispatches drones with increasing frequency and increasingly leaks details of how the strikes are planned and carried out. That’s how we all know that he personally decides every death sentence after studying the victim’s biography and photographs. The American people also approve of the fact that he sits in judgment of the wicked.

The website pakistanbodycount.org lists 2,836 deaths by unmanned drone since 2004. According to Pakistani intelligence services, the most recent attack even took out number two in the al-Qaida chain of command, Libyan Abu Yaya al-Libi. That makes it Obama’s biggest success since the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — good reason to celebrate, even though it may take months to identify the victim beyond doubt.

Europe’s Silence

Obama’s national security advisor, John Brennan, held an important and very interesting meeting a few weeks ago to convince skeptics concerning the legality of the targeted killings. That would have been superfluous for most Americans. They don’t even object when Obama publicly says that any male victim old enough to serve in the military is counted as an enemy — unless the opposite can be proven posthumously.

So much for America. What about us?

Europe distinguishes itself in the drone debate principally by its silence. No European nation takes active part in the long distance killing, but neither does any nation publicly object to it. The closest anyone has come to that was German Minister of Defense Thomas de Maizière, who described it as a “strategic mistake” in early May. He feels it is unwise that American pilots carry out such attacks without ever having been personally engaged in the theater of operations.

That’s How it Was with Guantanamo, Too

De Maizière’s criticism was reported only by Tagesschau.de and went unreported elsewhere. Neither did he make the statement in public, but rather at a meeting of the Association of Reservists. Chancellor Angela Merkel has thus far failed to even address the subject despite the fact that two German citizens have already been killed in unmanned drone attacks.

This official silence is an unpleasant reminder of the early days of America’s war on terror when, on George W. Bush’s orders, special forces rounded up suspects in Afghanistan and Pakistan and incarcerated them at Guantanamo. It took years for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s government to raise even the slightest criticism.

The reason then was the same as it is today: Discomfort with this particularly aggressive method of fighting terror may be great, but the relief that America has taken it upon itself to remove people who are truly dangerous from the world stage is even greater. Obama even does it better than Bush did; after an unmanned drone attack, there’s nobody left to bother the world’s conscience.