Trump strikes echo Obama’s lethal legacy; drug boat war renews partisan split on counterterrorism

President Trump may be the alleged drug boat destroyer, but he has a long way to go before he tops the drone warrior.

Mr. Trump’s campaign against those he says are drug couriers is garnering headlines, but it’s also sparking comparisons to President Obama’s drone mission to kill people he identified as terrorist targets, including an American citizen overseas.

Mr. Obama’s death toll, figured to be in the high hundreds or even low thousands, is well above the 83 presumed kills from strikes on suspected drug boats, though Mr. Trump is quickly adding to his numbers.

Untroubled by the deaths, Mr. Trump said he is certain that those on the boats deserved to be killed.

“We know everything about them,” he said.

Mr. Obama also privately celebrated his death toll.

“Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine,” Mr. Obama told senior aides in 2011, according to the book “Double Down” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

The comparison has put a spotlight on members of Congress who either defended or were largely silent about Mr. Obama’s strikes in the Middle East but are now harshly critical of Mr. Trump’s actions in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Congressional Democrats say the chief difference is that Mr. Obama was acting as part of the global war on terrorism. In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the president to use military force too root out al Qaeda.

“They were all tied into the 9/11 war authorization, where Congress voted to go after non-state terrorist organizations. So the drone strike on a boat — it’s a similar use of a kinetic activity, but it’s not congressionally authorized. And I just feel like anything like this that’s not congressionally authorized is legally suspect,” Sen. Tim Kaine, Virginia Democrat, told The Washington Times.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump are part of a long line of presidents who have kept Congress at arm’s length while leading military action. In addition to the drone strikes, Mr. Obama sent U.S. forces to conduct airstrikes on Libya and placed troops on the ground amid Syria’s civil war.

“Those who appear ‘troubled’ by videos of military strikes on designated terrorists have clearly never seen the Obama-ordered strikes or, for that matter, those of any other administration over recent decades,” said Rep. Rick Crawford, Arkansas Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

“I call upon them to remember their own silence as our forces conducted identical strikes for years — killing terrorists and destroying military objectives the same as in this strike — and ask themselves why they would seek to attack our forces today,” Mr. Crawford said.

Charlie Dunlap, a law professor at Duke University and a former Air Force deputy judge advocate general, pointed all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who sent warships to attack the Barbary pirates without first obtaining congressional approval.

Jefferson later sought approval retrospectively.

Mr. Dunlap said not enough information is known about Mr. Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats.

“We do not have sufficient public information to definitively conclude, one way or another, on the legality of the boat strikes,” he wrote on social media.

Other legal scholars question the actions of both Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump.

“Our country has become much too ready to conduct operations without the clearest congressional authorization than it should be and when there was no direct and imminent danger to the homeland,” said Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School.

Still, he said any comparison to Mr. Obama shouldn’t be seen as a justification for Mr. Trump.

“The fact that prior administrations may have engaged in questionable uses of force is water over the dam and should not distract the country from the continuing current operation.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign against drug traffickers came under heightened scrutiny after reports, now confirmed, of a Sept. 2 “double-tap,” killing two crew members who survived the initial missile strike on their boat.

The White House said Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, correctly issued the order for that second strike.

“[Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth authorized Adm. Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “Adm. Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”

Sen. Mark R. Warner, Virginia Democrat, told The Times that the administration is simply passing the blame to Adm. Bradley.

“The administration seems to be throwing him under the bus, and I think that’s pretty despicable,” Mr. Warner said.

Mr. Obama had a crisis moment after a drone strike in 2011 assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki, an American Yemeni cleric. The Obama administration said he was a legitimate target because of his association with al Qaeda.

Courts dismissed lawsuits, including one from the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging the administration’s authority to kill U.S. citizens without due process.

Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat who has been critical of the Trump strikes, told The Times he was unaware of al-Awlaki.

Yet he was firm in his belief that the double-tap strike in September crossed the line.

“When you have shipwrecked crew members, there is a duty to rescue them, and that if you restrike them and kill them, that is against the law,” said Mr. Kelly, a retired Navy captain.

Mr. Kaine defended the Obama administration’s al-Awlaki kill by saying it was “pursuant to a congressional authorized war against non-state terrorist groups.”

“He was an American citizen, but he had chosen to associate himself with terrorist groups against whom Congress had declared war,” he said.

Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism for the Center for Security Policy, saw little difference from a tactical standpoint between how the U.S. “would approach striking drug boats, versus how we would approach striking a caravan of known or suspected jihadist terrorists.”

He said drone strikes were alternatives to capturing terrorism suspects, which was not attractive to the Obama administration. It was rushing to empty the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“They had a policy where they did not want to take a terrorist prisoner because that would require sending them to Guantanamo, which they were trying to close,” Mr. Shideler said.

“So they went away from capture missions, which would have required them taking somebody prisoner, and then you could send them to Guantanamo, get interrogation and get intelligence from them. And in order to further their effort, they went almost wholly to ‘We’re just going to do drone strikes.’”

He added, “Now [Democrats] are complaining that the U.S. military didn’t pick up some narco-terrorists after a strike.”

Mr. Shideler said there is a “difference in the sense that there was an authorization for the use of military force to go after any entity associated with the 9/11 attacks,” but the Trump administration has implied that “they believe this is an inherent part of their Article II powers of the president.”

Brenner Fissell, who teaches military and national security law at Villanova University, said the 2001 authorization to use force against terrorists around the globe didn’t excuse all the strikes.

“The only difference is Obama had some congressional authority to fight Al-Qaeda through the AUMF. But the drone strikes were illegal in a number of cases because they killed U.S. citizens, as in Al-Awlaki, without due process, or they killed an excessive number of civilians who should not have been targeted, or who should have been taken into account when making the targeting decision.”