Anwar al-Awlaki

I admit this is hardly the most important story of the day, but it won't seem to go away, so I thought I'd comment on it.

Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen.  He joined a group at war with the United States, but a group that is not itself a state - that is Al Qaeda.  He was targeted several times and finally killed this past week.

This has led to a lot of hand wringing on the Left (and presumably the Glibertarian Planet of Freedonia) because the President just basically killed an American citizen with a drone strike.

While we all might hope that he would do this to the Kardashians at some point, let's stipulate that the conditions under which this might happen are very limited:

First, the individual has to declare their allegiance to an entity at war with the United States.

Second, that individual has to be outside the US or a country with whom we have extradition agreements that are actually enforceable.

If those two conditions are met, that would seem to close the case for me and most people, but if you are truly principled about civil liberties and due process, I get the consternation.

However, under this logic, Abraham Lincoln was responsible for tens of thousands of extra-judicial killings during the Civil War.  I think we can all agree that this is nonsense.  If you can kill a Confederate soldier, but not al-Awlaki, where are you drawing the line?  The Confederacy was a state?  Lincoln explicitly denied the constitutionality of secession.  He never acknowledged Confederate independence, yet he still sent armies to kill the soldiers of the Confederacy.

If the distinction is that Bull Run was a battlefield in state of conflict, whereas al-Awlaki was just driving down a road, that denies the fact that Al Qaeda has expanded the battlefield to include "anywhere, anytime".  To NOT meet your enemies on equal terms is folly.

The Global War On Terror is a terrible formulation.  The Global War on Al Qaeda is not.  If you identify with that group and you plot to kill Americans and urge on violence against the people and state of the United States then you are war with the United States, and the absence of a flag or a capitol does nothing to protect you.

Sorry.