Glen Ford: Obama's DronesThreaten World Civilization

President Obama's vast escalation of drone warfare is "a declaration of war against international law, as it has evolved over centuries." He systematically wages war against peace, the highest international crime. More than "just another 'war president' he is a destroyer of world civilization, the terms by which humans deal with one another as states, social groupings and individuals." When Barack Obama was running for president, in 2008, he vowed to increase the use of drones against al Qaida elements in Pakistan and Afghanistan. His surrogates roamed the talk shows, advocating a "smarter" and cheaper kind of robotic war, allowing the US to avoid pouring more troops into the "Af-Pak" theater of conflict. Vastly increased deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's), the argument went, would jettison George Bush's "dumb" approach to warfare in favor of a cheaper and more humane use of US technological resources, saving both American and South Asian lives. What the "peace" candidate was actually proposing, was a qualitative leap in the US drive for "full spectrum dominance" over the planet. The US would elevate to a strategic principle its self-arrogated entitlement to use whatever technical means at its disposal, mainly drones, to target and kill designated adversaries at will, anyplace on the globe, at any time, accountable only to itself. It was a declaration of war against international law, as it has evolved over the centuries. This administration has expanded the Air Force inventory of active drones to at least 7,500. Drones have joined Special Operations forces as the "tip of the spear" of US power projection in the developing world, the "front lines" of the current imperial offensive. Virtually all of the drones' lethal missions are, in legal terms, assassinations, with or without "collateral damage." They are also acts of terror, certainly in the broad sense of the word, and intended to be so.