We recently learned that the leader of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had just been killed in Afghanistan by a missile fire from an American drone. This news, made public by a very proud President of the United States, made the headlines of most major international media, without prompting much comment.
This execution of the leader of al-Qaeda nevertheless raises many questions. Moreover, it represents only the mediatized tip of the iceberg constituted by the campaign, secret, or at least discreet, of targeted assassinations that the United States has been carrying out for nearly twenty years in the name of the “war on terrorism”. .
Even if its victims are in principle terrorists (I say “in principle”, because one cannot completely exclude that there are sometimes mistakes, not to mention the so-called “collateral” victims), such extrajudicial executions practiced by a State which presents itself as the “guardian” of democracy in the world cannot appear otherwise than as problematic.
On the one hand, because they flout all the rules of international law. These strikes indeed take place on the territory of sovereign States, mainly Pakistan and Afghanistan. On the other hand, because they do not even respect the basic principles of law, in particular that of a fair and equitable trial.
From this point of view, what to think of this threadbare formula used by Joe Biden during his speech? “Justice has been served,” he said. We are far from justice when the president of the world’s leading military power thus arrogates to himself the right of life and death with regard to his enemies, even the most radical.
Remote-controlled assassinations
Of course, everyone will agree that Islamist terrorism constitutes a serious threat for all Western countries and that it forces them to wage an unprecedented form of asymmetrical warfare, and to do so, to adopt muscular and extraordinary methods. . In these matters, we must not err on the sidelines.
However, there is nothing to confirm that this low-intensity war waged, at least potentially, everywhere on the planet, and using drones, will in the future be limited to the elimination of proven terrorists. The 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani even suggests the opposite.
Beyond all these legal questions (which are however crucial, because they have as their stake the border between the state of war, which legitimizes certain forms of lethal violence, and its opposite), this campaign of assassinations carried out from the air by means of remote-controlled drones also poses a more general problem, which is both moral and historical.
Indeed, it is more than likely that as these remote-controlled weapons multiply (we know that this is not science fiction and that the armed forces of all major countries have in their boxes of more or less advanced projects for robots for military use), the reluctance and scruples of the leaders of these countries to use violence will diminish, since the risk of loss of human life inherent in sending soldiers on the ground and with it the political cost that may result for the leaders in question.
Moreover, the effect of distancing generated by the use of these machines guided from a control screen derealizes and dehumanizes “targets” which no longer appear to the eyes of the human operator except in the form of a more or less blurred set of pixels. Now, what retains a little of its humanity in war is that combat brings human beings face to face, both of whom run the risk of being killed. Despite the ferocity of the clashes and the hatred that sometimes opposes the combatants, they can nevertheless, for this very reason, perceive themselves as equals.
When death is inflicted from a distance, from the other side of the world, by the simple gesture of pressing a button placed in front of a screen, there is no longer really an enemy, and war, strictly speaking , also disappears. For the worst. It is indeed changing, as Günther Anders writes in Hatred, into a “herring fishery, where the fish have no chance of defending themselves and even less of going on the counter-attack”. In other words, there is no longer any equality or common humanity between the combatants.
The “war on terrorism”, which is only a war in name, is of this kind. We “treat” a target there, as we would spread insecticide in a field. Without pity or hatred for the beetles. Without the slightest state of mind. Without even the awareness that this death inflicted by machines carries with it the risk of a terrible dehumanization.