![]() Unfortunately-for him, for me, and for the world-he didn’t take his own advice. Looking back, there’s no doubt about the eloquence of his words, which fit well with the dreams of my 16-year-old self. At the same time, he defended his continued use of military force in the Middle East, arguing that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” even if we “must also think clearly about how we fight” war. ![]() Noting the absurdity of receiving the prize while still “the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he laid out his ideas on how to build a just and lasting world of peace. While accepting the award, he made a moving speech about war and peace. If you remember, as 2009 ended, President Barack Obama went to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. With the world veering into unprecedented territory, I realized that it was time for me to take off those rose-colored glasses, reflect on what our world really looked like 10 years ago and how oblivious I was to so many of the darker parts of it. I wrote about my desire not only to see the world but to help make it a better place. In 2010, when I was still an idealistic high school student in Tennessee, I wrote about the democracy movement I saw rising in the Middle East (what we came to know as “the Arab Spring”) and how hopeful it made me that global peace might be achieved in my lifetime. One entry in particular caught my attention. So I decided to indulge myself by looking through old journals of mine. In fact, over the holiday season, I found myself with time on my hands and that same sort of sentimentality creeping up on me. It’s the beginning of a new decade and nostalgia is in the air. Until that strike in Iraq occurred, it seemed like every time I opened Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram in the new year, I was inundated with sentimental reflections about how far we’ve come in the last 10 years and where we’re going next. New decades afford us a chance to take a good, hard look at what transpired in the years past. But when this world-altering news broke, I immediately started thinking about how I got here, as well as how my country could continue to recklessly breed chaos and destruction throughout the Greater Middle East. When I first started writing this piece, I was simply reflecting on a decade of US drone warfare and the problems it had spawned. Everything we thought we knew about drone warfare-and America’s wars more broadly-is about to be thrown out the window. Even though there is still so much we don’t know, one thing is for sure. In the wake of the assassination, we’ve seen: The Iraqi parliament vote to expel American forces from their country all the Democratic presidential candidates make statements condemning the strike thousands of protesters around the world take to the streets and both chambers of Congress introduce resolutions aimed at curbing the president’s expanding war powers. Bossert, who helped oversee interagency development of the Trump-era rules in 2017 when he was a top counterterrorism adviser to Trump, said he was proud of them and argued that the policy "should not be dismissed or replaced without careful consideration and an examination of the results it produced.Among the thousands of ignored American drone strikes since the 9/11 attacks, this was not one of them. While it kept that rule for women and children, it permitted a lower standard of merely "reasonable certainty" when it came to civilian adult men. The review, officials said, discovered that Trump-era principles to govern strikes in certain countries often made an exception to the requirement of "near certainty" that there would be no civilian casualties. At the same time, the Biden team began a review of how both Obama- and Trump-era policies had worked - both on paper and in practice - with an eye toward developing its own policy. The Biden administration suspended the Trump-era rules on its first day in office and imposed an interim policy of requiring White House approval for proposed strikes outside of the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The Biden administration inherited that case and sought a delay but has now complied, providing a copy to both plaintiffs late Friday.Īlso read | Oversight Board delays decision on Donald Trump's Facebook ban In October, Judge Edgardo Ramos of the Southern District of New York had ordered the government turn over the 11-page document in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by The New York Times and by the American Civil Liberties Union.
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