Liberals Forget Their Own Talking Points

Sam Stein at Huffington Post wrote a dispatch from CPAC rejecting Republican criticisms of Obama's increased emphasis on killing enemy combatants. But it wasn't that long ago that liberals were arguing that it was better to capture our enemies than kill them.

Sam Stein on Huffington Post writes a dispatch from CPAC mocking former Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh.

Under the headline, “Bush Official Criticizes Obama For Killing Too Many Terrorists” Stein jeers: "Just how unpopular are President Barack Obama's anti-terrorism policies with his Republican critics? Even when he's killing terrorists they find flaws."

But as Stein's own report goes on to confirm, Viet Dinh was making a very true and important point:

"Why have executions increased?" asked Viet Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the authors of the USA Patriot Act. Citing a recent Washington Post article on the increased targeted killing of terrorists, Dinh complained that "the president and vice president expound this fact as a fact that they are actually successful in war."

"That doesn't mean I think they are not illegitimate," he added. "No, we have every right to kill the other side's warriors. But at what cost? When we do not have an effective detention policy the only option we have is to kill them before we can detain them. And if we don't detain them, we don't know what they know and what they are up to."

Revert to your old pdf copy of Kalev Sepp's classic article, "Best Practices in Counterinsurgency."

When this article first appeared five years ago, it was often cited againast the Bush administration by liberal critics. (I see three citations of the article at Huffington Post itself.)

The key bad practice is an emphasis on killing enemy combatants and the assignment of Special Forces to raiding.

The key good practice? An emphasis on intelligence collection.

Killing enemies does look like progress. But it's very rare that any enemy leader is irreplaceable. Usually they come with deputies who can step into their jobs. It's better to capture enemies than to kill them - and even better that they surrender themselves. But as Viet Dinh notes, capture is valuable because it is the predicate to questioning. And if the Obama administration cannot detain them, it cannot question them. The year-long chaos in the Obama administration's detention and interrogation policy will exact a very real price.

Administration supporters used to know that. But their partialities have dimmed their memories.