How Obama Gave Trump the ‘Military-Age Males’ Talking Point
Immigration hawks want you to believe that men are a threat by default. Figures like former President Donald Trump and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) argue that immigration is really an “invasion” because many migrants lined up at the border are “military-age males” from “adversarial nations.” The implication isn’t that these people work for any specific army or militant organization, but that any young man from the wrong country is guilty until proven innocent.
Conservatives and liberals alike might be surprised to learn that this idea was written into U.S. policy by former President Barack Obama. During drone campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration counted any “military-age” men in certain areas as enemy fighters, even if the U.S. government didn’t know who those men were. The policy allowed Obama to lowball the number of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes.
Of course, the category of military-age or fighting-age men is much older than the drone program. But, as political scientist Micah Zenko pointed out in an article for the Council on Foreign Relations, the term “military-age male reentered the lexicon of American warfare” during the Obama-era debate over the drone program.
“Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in,” The New York Times revealed in 2012. “It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
Even more dystopically, the CIA had inherited a policy known as “signature strikes” from the Bush administration. Drone pilots were allowed to fire on armed men “associated with suspicious activity even if their identities were unknown,” according to The New Yorker.
Obama expanded the definition of “suspicious activity” to include almost any man in the wrong place at the wrong time, overseeing ten times as many drone strikes as Bush had. Obama administration officials told the Times that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”
The phrase “military-age males” jumped from U.S. military and intelligence circles to American politics during the Obama era, too. In late 2015, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, Republican politicians including Trump began claiming that the Obama administration was importing an “army” of fighting-age Syrian men. Radio host Rush Limbaugh, who had previously covered the Times revelations about Obama’s targeting of “military-age males,” was a major figure pushing this narrative.
One of the first uses of the specific term “military-age males” in the immigration debate came from Allen West,
Article from Reason.com
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