by Tyler Cullis
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that January was the first month without a U.S. drone strikein the Pakistani tribal areas since 2011. The Washington Post argues that this is the result of a request from Pakistan’s government after ongoing peace talks with the Taliban, though some suggest [...]]]>
by Tyler Cullis
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that January was the first month without a U.S. drone strikein the Pakistani tribal areas since 2011. The Washington Post argues that this is the result of a request from Pakistan’s government after ongoing peace talks with the Taliban, though some suggest that President Obama’s new rules on targeting, released simultaneously with his National Defense University speech in May 2013, have limited the range of actors that would have earlier been targetable by the CIA and Defense Department.
It is likewise unclear whether this development will continue in the months ahead. Good reasons, however, suggest so as the war in Afghanistan draws down and the U.S. (potentially) loses access to bases in the country and to human intelligence. Below I detail some key issues we will need to pay attention to in the days ahead to see whether the White House will tilt away from the war-everywhere posture that the United States has assumed since Sept. 11.
Will the Afghan War come to a close?
It is becoming increasingly clear that President Hamid Karzai will not sign the U.S.-Afghan Bilateral Security Agreement before presidential elections in April. This poses a major dilemma for the White House, which must decide whether to make contingency plans for a small residual force should Afghan approval be forthcoming at a later date or plan a full withdrawal. But the implications run much deeper as to both the U.S.’s legal rationale for its war on al-Qaeda and the U.S.’s ability to carry out drone operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
If the White House is forced to commit to a total withdrawal by the end of 2014, the U.S. will lose its last remaining zone of active hostilities in its war with al-Qaeda. In this way, the legal rationale for drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia will be completely untethered from any traditional war theater. This bodes ill for the continued ability of the Obama administration to wage drone warfare without incurring massive reputational damage to the United States.
Moreover, as the New York Times reported, a total withdrawal would mean the loss of basing operations in Afghanistan and thus the loss of staging grounds for CIA drone flights into Pakistan’s tribal areas. Without good options elsewhere, U.S. drone operations in the tribal areas will be seriously circumscribed, if not altogether curtailed.
How will the White House interpret its own policy guidelines?
During his May speech, President Obama outlined new targeting rules to be effective outside areas of active hostilities. These rules provide that “the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” In the absence of such a threat, the U.S. will forgo the use of lethal force (i.e., drone strikes).
However, a leading human rights lawyer, Sarah Knuckey, caught a discrepancy between the President’s policy guidelines and the justification provided by an administration official for last week’s drone strike on an al-Shabaab commander in Somalia. Instead of posing a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” as is mandated, the U.S. official said that Ahmed Abdi Godane, the target, posed an “imminent threat to U.S. interests in the region.” Intended or not, the switch in the operative language is cause for concern, as “U.S. interests” could be stretched indefinitely to render a much wider swath of individuals targetable for drone strikes.
What is important, however, is whether the administration adopts an expansive or narrow interpretation of its own policy guidelines. With such elastic concepts as “imminence” and “U.S. interests” determining who is targetable, the White House can opt to keep the U.S. on permanent war footing long past the Iraq and Afghan Wars if it so chooses. Transparency in how the U.S. targets individuals and conducts drone strikes will be crucial to determining which of the two paths the President has chosen.
Will the U.S.’s traditional allies continue to cooperate on intelligence?
In a major policy speech at the Harvard Law School in 2011, CIA Director John O. Brennan argued that “when the [U.S.] upholds the rule of law, governments around the globe are more likely to provide us with intelligence we need to disrupt ongoing plots.” However, U.S. allies, especially in Europe, have long castigated the U.S. for its “global war on terror” and parted ways with successive White Houses over the applicable legal framework. Nonetheless, NATO allies have continued to share intelligence regarding foreign terrorist organizations, up to and including locational data for U.S. drone strikes.
Last week, however, a leading UK barrister published legal advice for a British parliamentary group concerning the legality of GCHQ surveillance, as well as intelligence cooperation with the United States. This legal advice included the striking conclusion that should a UK person share intelligence with the U.S. with the knowledge that such intelligence could be used for a drone strike, that person might be criminally liable as an “accessory to murder” under UK law. Already, a case was pressed on such grounds (though it failed for different reasons).
This was well-publicized in the British press and received much attention in U.S. legal circles. What effect it will have on intelligence cooperation is unclear, but the implications of “business as usual” have been rendered transparent. The White House can put forth dubious legal justifications for its drone operations, but that will not prevent close allies from risking criminal liability should they continue to cooperate with the U.S.
]]>How the White House Flung the Door Wide Open
by Tyler Cullis
It is a trope among foreign policy elites that the Obama administration lacks a coherent strategy for dealing with conflict and chaos in the Middle East and South Asia region. Few meanwhile seem to appreciate the most consequential of the [...]]]>
How the White House Flung the Door Wide Open
by Tyler Cullis
It is a trope among foreign policy elites that the Obama administration lacks a coherent strategy for dealing with conflict and chaos in the Middle East and South Asia region. Few meanwhile seem to appreciate the most consequential of the administration’s policies there — the U.S. targeted killing program and the way it is changing the rules of the game in war.
While the U.S.’s targeting guidelines have been a continuing source of controversy, not least among human rights advocates, the fact that the administration’s use of killer drones in Pakistan and Somalia are changing the rules on when force can be deployed in the first place has largely flown under the radar. However, it is this development that might prove most troubling, as dozens of States stand prepared to acquire killer drones in the coming years.
As reported in The Washington Times, the U.S. intelligence community estimates that 87 countries are in possession of drones, and 26 of those have either purchased or are in the process of developing a drone akin in scope to the Predator. It is expected that a dozen or so of these countries are seeking to weaponize their drones and will succeed in short order. Further proliferation like this is a striking concern, but even more disturbing is the fact that States will be deploying lethal gadgets in a legal order undergoing dramatic flux and change, largely thanks to the novel conceptions of law the White House has employed to justify its drone program in Pakistan.
Unable to rationalize the cross-border use of drones while toeing the line of the law, the Obama administration at first ignored the legal repercussion of its drone policy. When pressed, it took an ad-hoc approach to the legal concerns underlying its targeting killing program, without careful consideration of the costs of upsetting and throwing into turmoil the rules and regulations that have governed the use of inter-State violence for more than six decades.
Last month, the United Nations released two draft reports on drones and drone warfare, which spoke to this problem. Following a recitation of the law governing the use of force and implying, but not finding, that the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan fell afoul of this law, the Emmerson report noted that the U.S. had taken the position that the law of self-defense provided far greater scope for States to undertake cross-border action against non-State armed groups than commonly believed.
Under the U.S.’s preferred approach, the use of killer drones in Pakistan’s tribal areas would be a legitimate form of self-defense so long as Pakistan proved “unable or unwilling” to combat the non-State armed groups within its own borders. This contrasts with the traditional rule that self-defense can be triggered only after an armed attack by the State itself, and that cross-border incursions of the American kind in Pakistan can only be warranted upon the consent of the Pakistanis. Needless to say, the U.S. position has not proven popular amongst other countries.
However, the U.S. rule is one ripe for adoption, especially as other countries acquire the drone technology to make cross-border attacks relatively cost-free. In arguing for a more permissive legal regime, then, the Obama administration has opened the door wide for other countries to pursue their own “counter-terrorism” policies under the stamp of law. It is entirely unclear whether the administration intended this result, or whether it is simply a by-product of the White House’s race to defend its drone program from legal attack. Regardless, the legal argument is ill-considered.
Nowhere will this prove to be a more of a problem than in the Middle East and South Asian region. With the U.S. set to depart Afghanistan by the end of next year, there will soon be an intensified competition over the country’s future from regional neighbors, including Pakistan, India, China, Russia, Iran, and Tajikistan. More than a few have or are at present developing weapons systems for their drones and will not be hesitant to use Afghanistan as training ground for their new gadgets, much in the same way the U.S. did. This bodes ill for the future stability, if not integrity, of the war-torn country.
Drones could see especial use in a number of low-intensity, inter-State conflicts as well. India, which has a limited set of armed drones at present but is looking to purchase vast fleets of them, might well be inclined to deploy drones on its border with Pakistan in order to target hostile groups in Kashmir. Pakistan’s response to this, which it would almost certainly regard as a provocation, is yet to be seen, but it takes little imagination to see how the appeal of the drone — as a limited, low-intensity weapon — could incite a much larger and much deadlier conflict.
These are just two examples, but they demonstrate the point that, absent a more restrictive legal regime governing the use of force, killer drones will be deployed by more countries, and more often, than at present, with unforeseeable consequences. It is thus unfortunate that the Obama administration has pushed the law to evolve in just the opposite direction.
When asked early in his first term whether the war in Afghanistan was winnable, President Obama replied:
I think about [the Afghan War] not so much [as] do you lose a war…? I think about it more in terms of, do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end of it?
It is ironic, then, that the linchpin of the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan — the targeted killing program — might well invite a world that is more conflict-ridden and chaotic than the one that preceded it.
– Tyler Cullis is a law graduate specializing in international law and U.S. foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter.
]]>via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against [...]]]>
via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad will be carried out under substantially more limited conditions than during his first term in office.
He also renewed his drive to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which currently only holds 166 prisoners.
In particular, he announced the lifting of a three-year-old moratorium on repatriating Yemeni detainees to their homeland and the appointment in the near future of senior officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon to expedite the transfer the 30 other prisoners who have been cleared for release to third countries.
In addition, he said he will press Congress to amend and ultimately repeal its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al-Qaeda and others deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks “(in order) to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.”
The AUMF created the legal basis for most of the actions – and alleged excesses — by U.S. military and intelligence agencies against alleged terrorists and their supporters since 9/11.
“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core Al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” he declared. “Groups like AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.”
“Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states,” he warned.
His remarks gained a cautious – if somewhat sceptical and impatient – welcome from some of the groups that have harshly criticised Obama’s for his failure to make a more decisive break with some of former President George W. Bush’s policies and to close Guantanamo, and his heavy first-term reliance on drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist suspects.
“President Obama is right to say that we cannot be on a war footing forever – but the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the rule of law is now, not at some indeterminate future point,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Romero especially praised Obama’s initial moves to transfer detainees at Guantanamo but noted that he had failed to offer a plan to deal with those prisoners who are considered too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. courts for lack of admissible evidence. He also called the new curbs on drone strikes “promising” but criticised Obama’s continued defence of targeted killings.
Obama’s speech came amidst growing controversy over his use of drone strikes in countries – particularly Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – with which the U.S. is not at war. Since 9/11, the U.S. has conducted more than 400 strikes in the three countries with a total death toll estimated to range between 3,300 and nearly 5,000, depending on the source. The vast majority of these strikes were carried out during Obama’s first term.
While top administration officials have claimed that almost all of the victims were suspected high-level terrorists, human rights groups, as well as local sources, have insisted that many civilian non-combatants – as well as low-level members of militant groups — have also been killed.
In a letter sent to Obama last month, some of the country’s leading human rights groups, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First, questioned the legality of the criteria used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to select targets.
Earlier this month, the legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Harold Koh, also criticised the administration for the lack of transparency and discipline surrounding the drone programme.
In his speech Thursday, Obama acknowledged the “wide gap” between his government and independent assessments of casualties, but he strongly defended the programme as effective, particularly in crippling Al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership, legal under the AUMF, and more humane than the alternative in that “(c)onventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.”
“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places – like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold,” he said.
According to a “Fact Sheet” released by the White House, lethal force can be used outside of areas of active hostilities when there is a “near certainty that a terrorist target who poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” is present and that non-combatants will not be injured or killed. In addition, U.S. officials must determine that capture is not feasible and that local authorities cannot or will not effectively address the threat.
The fact sheet appeared to signal an end to so-called “signature strikes” that have been used against groups of men whose precise is identity is unknown but who, based on surveillance, are believed to be members of Al-Qaeda or affiliated groups.
If the target is a U.S. citizen, such as Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who the administration alleged had become an operational leader of AQAP and was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen, Obama said there would be an additional layer of review and that he would engage Congress on the possibility of establishing a secret court or an independent oversight board in the executive branch.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department disclosed that three other U.S. citizens – none of whom were specifically targeted – have been killed in drone strikes outside Afghanistan.
On Guantanamo, where 102 of the 166 remaining detainees are participating in a three-month-old hunger strike, Obama said he would permit the 56 Yemenis there whose have been cleared for release to return home “on a case-by-case basis”. He also re-affirmed his determination to transfer all remaining detainees to super-max or military prisons on U.S. territory – a move that Congress has so far strongly resisted. He also said he would insist that every detainee have access to the courts to review their case.
In addition to addressing the festering drone issue and Guantanamo, however, the main thrust of Thursday’s speech appeared designed to mark what Obama called a “crossroads” in the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and how the threat from them has changed.
“Lethal yet less capable Al-Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” he said. “We must take these threats seriously, and do all we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognise that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
“Beyond Afghanistan,” he said later, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”
Obama also disclosed he had signed a Presidential Policy Guidance Wednesday to codify the more restrictive guidelines governing the use of force.
White House officials who brief reporters before the speech suggested that, among other provisions, the Guidance called for gradually shifting responsibility for drone strikes and targeted killings from the CIA to the Pentagon – a reform long sought by human-rights groups.
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
Yesterday a Senate hearing was held on the Obama administration’s “targeted killing” program, which you can watch here. It resulted in headlines like this. To date, discussions about President Obama’s use of “kill lists” and assassinations of those deemed as threats to US national security have mostly ranged [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
Yesterday a Senate hearing was held on the Obama administration’s “targeted killing” program, which you can watch here. It resulted in headlines like this. To date, discussions about President Obama’s use of “kill lists” and assassinations of those deemed as threats to US national security have mostly ranged from criticism and reform recommendations to outright support. But operating independently of the constraints associated with Washington think tanks and Congress is award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill, who remains a sharp throne in the sides of those who claim that drone warfare enables the US to engage in clean wars. Indeed, the shift towards robotic warfare with no oversight, which has also taken the lives of American citizens, may not be that clean at all, explained Scahill to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! yesterday:
I called it Dirty Wars because, you know, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration, I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there’s—there is a such thing as a clean war and that the drone and what’s called targeted killing—I mean, I use that term myself, but it’s actually not—if you think about it, it’s actually not a very appropriate term for what’s going on, because it’s—as we know, these strikes are anything but targeted, in many cases, and we don’t know the—we don’t even know the identities of many of the people that we’re killing in intentional strikes. So, I called it Dirty Wars because there is no such thing as a clean war, and drone warfare is not clean, but also as a sort of allusion to how we’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond. And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries. President Obama continues to use mercenary forces in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the aiding of dictatorships and other, you know, right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to what Reagan and company were doing in Central America.
I’m looking forward to reading Scahill’s book on this important topic, which is shaping how the world perceives the United States and perhaps impacting national security in a way that officials are not paying enough attention to. Scahill and filmmaker Rick Rowley have also made a Sundance-selected documentary on America’s covert wars that’s screening now. You can find out where on their website.
]]>The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill injects some badly needed context into the media frenzy over David Petraeus’s CIA resignation by examining the four-star General’s legacy against the backdrop of an increasingly militarized intelligence agency:
As head of US Central Command in 2009, Petraeus issued execute orders that significantly broadened the ability [...]]]>
The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill injects some badly needed context into the media frenzy over David Petraeus’s CIA resignation by examining the four-star General’s legacy against the backdrop of an increasingly militarized intelligence agency:
]]>As head of US Central Command in 2009, Petraeus issued execute orders that significantly broadened the ability of US forces to operate in a variety of countries, including Yemen, where US forces began conducting missile strikes later that year. During Petraeus’s short tenure at the CIA, drone strikes conducted by the agency, sometimes in conjunction with JSOC, escalated dramatically in Yemen; in his first month in office, he oversaw a series of strikes that killed three US citizens, including 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In some cases, such as the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, commandos from the elite JSOC operated under the auspices of the CIA, so that the mission could be kept secret if it went wrong.
The Washington Post‘s Greg Miller has begun a three-part series on the future of the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism drone strike program, which will include a “next-generation targeting list” (aka “kill list”) in the form of a “dipposition matrix”.
Though the White House, CIA, JSOC and ODNI declined comment requests, the article cites [...]]]>
The Washington Post‘s Greg Miller has begun a three-part series on the future of the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism drone strike program, which will include a “next-generation targeting list” (aka “kill list”) in the form of a “dipposition matrix”.
Though the White House, CIA, JSOC and ODNI declined comment requests, the article cites “dozens of current and former national security officials, intelligence analysts and others.”
Miller’s report somewhat contradicts the Obama Administration’s frequent assertions that al Qaeda is exhausted and on the run. The officials interviewed essentially offer a redux of the “War on Terror” methodology minus the renditions and speechifying. And, even while touting the success of the program, the Administration remains committed to “embedding” it in national security planning.
According to Miller, the program is meant to outlive the Obama Administration: “White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is seeking to codify the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced.”
The expansion of the US’s drone fleet and African operations were also noted, as was the US’s overall growing reliance on unarmed drone surveillance, now over Libya, and according to the Post, Iran. Meanwhile, The Diplomat notes the US is looking to create a more autonomous drone force that is less dependent on operator-control to carry out missions.
Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations reflects on President Obama’s institutionalization of “extrajudicial killings” in comparison to his predecessor’s more careful approach:
]]>Having spoken with dozens of officials across both administrations, I am convinced that those serving under President Bush were actually much more conscious and thoughtful about the long-term implications of targeted killings than those serving under Obama. In part, this is because more Bush administration officials were affected by the U.S. Senate Select Committee investigation, led by Senator Frank Church, that implicated the United States in assassination plots against foreign leaders—including at least eight separate plans to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro—and President Ford’s Executive Order 11905: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
The US’s Acting Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland disclosed the information in an exchange with a number of American activists and journalists against the US’s undeclared drone war waged primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the country.
The US Government has not published casualty lists for Pakistanis reported killed and [...]]]>
The US’s Acting Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland disclosed the information in an exchange with a number of American activists and journalists against the US’s undeclared drone war waged primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the country.
The US Government has not published casualty lists for Pakistanis reported killed and wounded by drone strikes. A similar policy of non-disclosure is present with respect to US operations in Yemen and Somalia.
Available information on Pakistani drone casualties comes from investigative reports produced with the assistance of local NGOs. But according to Robert Naiman, the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, Amb. Hoagland offered a rare public acknowledgement of the program itself and civilian casualties:
“Well, first of all, for the numbers, to be very honest, I looked at the numbers before I came here today, and I saw a number for civilian casualties that officially — U.S. government classified information — since July 2008, it is in the two figures, I can’t vouch for you that that’s accurate, in any way, so I can’t talk about numbers. I wanted to see what we have on the internal record, it’s quite low.”
Imperial Psychosis on Display
Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted [...]]]>
Imperial Psychosis on Display
Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline.
And yet, among the dramatis personae we’ve been watching, there are clearly missing actors. They happen to be out of town, part of a traveling roadshow. When it comes to their production, however, there has, of late, been little publicity, few reviewers, and only the most modest media attention. Moreover, unlike the scenery-chewing divas in Washington, these actors have simply been going about their business as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.
On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America’s new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul. According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech “warning” that “Western powers needed to ‘proceed carefully’” and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would “be no rush for the exits.”
If, in Washington, people were rushing for those exits, no chance of that in Kabul almost a decade into America’s second Afghan War. There, the air strikes, night raids, assassinations, roadside bombs, and soldier and civilian deaths, we are assured, will continue to 2014 and beyond. In a war in which every gallon of gas used by a fuel-guzzling U.S. military costs $400 to $800 to import, time is no object and — despite the panic in Washington over debt payments — neither evidently is cost.
In Iraq, meanwhile, in year eight of America’s armed involvement, U.S. officials are still wangling to keep significant numbers of American troops stationed there beyond an agreed end-of-2011 withdrawal date. And the State Department is preparing to hire a small army of 5,000-odd armed mercenaries (with their own mini-air force) to keep the American “mission” in that country humming along to the tune of billions of dollars.
In Libya, the American/NATO war effort, once imagined as a brief spasm of shock-‘n’-awe firepower that would oust autocrat Muammar Gaddafi in a nanosecond, is now in its fifth month with neither an end nor a serious reassessment in sight, and no mention of costs there either. In Yemen and Somalia, the drones, CIA and military, are being sent in, and special operations forces built up, while in the region a new base is being constructed and older ones expanded in the never-ending war against al-Qaeda, its affiliates, wannabes, and any other nasties around. (At the same time, the Obama administration is leaking information that the original al-Qaeda teeters at the edge of defeat, even as it intensifies the CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.) And further expansion of the war on terror — watch out, al-Qaeda in North Africa! — seems to be a given.
Meanwhile back in Washington — not, mind you, the Washington of the debt-ceiling crisis, but the war capital on the banks of the Potomac — national security spending still seems to be on an upward trajectory. At $526 billion (without the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars added in), the 2011 Pentagon budget is, as Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, has written, “in real or inflation adjusted dollars… higher than at any time since World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the height of the Reagan buildup.” The 2012 Pentagon budget is presently slated to go even higher.
Senator John McCain recently raised the question of Pentagon spending in tight times with General Martin Dempsey, the newly nominated chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He asked about a plan proposed by President Obama to cut $400 billion in Pentagon funds over twelve years, as well as proposals kicking around Congress for cutting up to $800 billion over the same period.
General Dempsey replied, “I haven’t been asked to look at that number. But I have looked and we are looking at $400 billion. Based on the difficulty of achieving the $400 billion cut, I believe achieving $800 billion would be extraordinarily difficult and very high risk.”
In little of the reporting on this was it apparent that Obama’s $400 billion in Pentagon “cuts” are not cuts at all — not unless you consider an obese person, who continues eating at the same level but reduces his dreams of ever grander future repasts, to be on a diet. The “cuts” in the White House proposal, that is, will only be from projected future Pentagon growth rates. Nor were the “savings” of up to one trillion dollars over a decade being projected by Senator Harry Reid as part of his deficit-reduction plan cuts either, not in the usual sense anyway. They are expected savings based largely on the prospective winding down of America’s wars and, like so much funny money, could evaporate with the morning dew. (In his last minute deal with John Boehner, President Obama’s Pentagon “savings” have, in fact, been reduced to a provisional $350 billion over 10 years.)
So here’s a question at a moment when financial mania has Washington by the throat: How would you define the state of mind of our war-makers, who are carrying on as if trillion-dollar wars were an American birthright, as if the only sensible role for the United States was to eternally police the planet, and as if garrisoning U.S. troops, corporate mercenaries, and special operations forces in scores and scores of countries was the essence of life as it should be lived on this planet?
When I was kid, I used to be fascinated by a series of ads filled with visual absurdities, in which, for instance, five-legged cows floated through clouds. Each ad’s tagline went something like: What’s wrong with this picture?
So imagine two worlds, both centered in Washington. In one, they’re heading for the exits, America’s credit rating is in danger of being downgraded, jobs are disappearing, infrastructure is eroding, homeownership levels are falling rapidly, foreclosures are sky-high, times are bad, and even the president admits that the political system designated to make things better is “dysfunctional”; in the other, the exits are there, but there’s no rush to use them, not with those global ramparts to be guarded, those wars to be fought, and a massive national security complex — larger than anything ever imagined when the U.S. still faced a nuclear-armed superpower enemy — to feed and cultivate.
Now tell me: What’s wrong with this picture?
Two worlds, two productions, one over-the-top and raising fears of bankruptcy, the other steady as she goes — and (so it seems) never the twain shall meet. And yet look again and those two worlds will fuse before your eyes, those two Washingtons will meld into a single capital city. Then it will be clearer that the actors at center stage and those traveling in the provinces are putting on linked parts of a single performance. The financial problems of one will turn out to be inextricably linked to the other; the lack of an effective stimulus package in the first connected to the endless series of stimulus packages — all that failed “nation-building” in the imperium — in the second.
Like some Roman god, it turns out that schizophrenic Washington has two faces, each reflecting a different aspect of American decline. In one, everybody can spot the madness. In the other, it’s less evident, even though untold American treasure — literally trillions of dollars communities here desperately need — has been poured into a series of wars, conflicts, and war preparations without a victory, or even a significant success on the horizon. (Greeted as if World War II had been won, the killing of Osama bin Laden should have been a reminder of the success of the Global War on Terror for a man with few “troops” and relatively modest amounts of money who somehow managed to land Washington in a financial and military quagmire.)
One American world, one Washington, is devouring the other. Think of this as the half-hidden psychodrama of this American moment.
Put another way, for months Americans have been focused on raising that debt ceiling, as onscreen countdown clocks ticked away to disaster. In the process, few have asked the obvious question: Isn’t it time to lower America’s war ceiling?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).
Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt
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