As Bush was the Guantanamo president, so Obama is the drone president. This switch, whatever Obama hoped, represents a worsening not an improvement in America's image in the world. But it follows a compelling logic. Under Bush, the US justified holding enemy combatants by classifying their captivity as law-of-war detention. But law-of-war detention presupposes that the war in question will end and that the detainees will then be released. Once Obama concluded that this war will never end, he presumably drew the sensible inference that traditional law-of-war detention is wholly inapplicable to the unconventional conflict in which the US is now engaged. That is when he made his fateful choice: the moment when he turned to the only form of incapacitation appropriate to a war without end. In so doing, he has bequeathed to us not a war that will be easier to contain, but one that is borderless and self-sustaining and that shows not a single discernible sign of burning itself out.
Stephen Holmes, "What's in it for Obama?" a review of Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife, Penguin, 2013, London Review of Books, 18 July 2013, page 18.
