Writing for Commentary, Seth Mandel ponders President Obama’s efforts to restrain future chief executives’ ability to use unmanned drone aircraft for targeted killings.

The use of drones to target anyone the Obama administration decides poses a threat has been effective, though it comes at the cost of the deaths of civilians the administration considers collateral damage. And it is in this aspect of Obama’s national security policy that he appears to believe that what he is doing is problematic but doesn’t particularly care. The New York Times reports on a cartoonishly cynical approach to targeted assassination coming from the White House:

The attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes. Though national security officials insist that the process is meticulous and lawful, the president and top aides believe it should be institutionalized, a course of action that seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency.

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Obama wants to curtail the power he has accumulated for future presidents, believing as he does in accountability for everyone but him. When it looked like Romney might win the election, the White House feverishly undertook efforts to constrain his power. Now that Obama gets four more years, that effort “will now be finished at a more leisurely pace”–a phrase one hopes was typed out with a modicum of shame.

Will there be a liberal outcry? No, there won’t. What differentiates the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era and the left-wing Democrats of today is that the former believed what they said. Today’s left is an operational arm of the Democratic Party, and thus opposition to national security projects like Somali hell-prisons or drone warfare is simply a matter of partisan politics.