Andrew Sullivan responds to my post on the legality of drone strikes in Yemen:
There must come a point, however, when you are not targeting a one-off specific figure or cell, but launching round after round of drone missiles into a country, as into the Af-Pak border. The drone attacks into Pakistan are mighty close to warfare, it seems to me. There comes a point, in other words, at which a military kinetic action becomes a war. Drones are particularly dangerous instruments in this respect. They allow a president to pick war at will, and placate the public with no military casualties. This is precisely what the Founders were scared of. We have created a King with an automated army, and no Congressional or public check outside of elections, when the damage may have already been done.
[...]
But at least we did have a debate and vote with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no Congressional debate over Libya or now the escalation in Yemen. The administration's argument on Libya, as revealed yesterday, is that the conflict is too constrained and limited to be called a war. Please. Tell that to those hearing shells and missiles explode in military installations around their neighborhoods in Tripoli. Thousands of air raids and sorties have occurred since this not-war was not-declared.
This sounds a bit like the "self-defense" justification for targeting Anwar al-Awlaki, which is an argument State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh has made implicitly before. While I disagree with Sullivan on al-Awlaki, we're in agreement that the American people deserve some kind of actual debate in Congress with regards to military operations elsewhere. In 2001, it was clear that the U.S. was going to be at war in Afghanistan. Less clear was the idea that authorization was going to extend to operations ten years later in Yemen against a group that didn't even exist when the Twin Towers fell.
