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General News    H3'ed 6/23/11

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Defining an American State of War

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Drones are the covert weaponry of choice in our covert wars, which means, of course, that the military just can't wait to usher chosen reporters into its secret labs and experimental testing grounds to reveal dazzling visions of future destruction.

To make sense of drones, we probably have to stop thinking about "war" and start envisaging other models -- for example, that of the executioner who carries out a death sentence on another human being at no danger to himself.  If a pilotless drone is actually an executioner's weapon, a modern airborne version of the guillotine, the hangman's noose, or the electric chair, the death sentence it carries with it is not decreed by a judge and certainly not by a jury of peers.

It's assembled by intelligence agents based on fragmentary (and often self-interested) evidence, organized by targeteers, and given the thumbs-up sign by military or CIA lawyers.  All of them are scores, hundreds, thousands of miles away from their victims, people they don't know, and may not faintly understand or share a culture with.  In addition, the capital offenses are often not established, still to be carried out, never to be carried out, or nonexistent. The fact that drones, despite their "precision" weaponry, regularly take out innocent civilians as well as prospective or actual terrorists reminds us that, if this is our model, Washington is a drunken executioner.

In a sense, Bush's global war on terror called drones up from the depths of its unconscious to fulfill its most basic urges: to be endless and to reach anywhere on Earth with an Old Testament-style sense of vengeance.  The drone makes mincemeat of victory (which involves an endpoint), withdrawal (for which you have to be there in the first place), and national sovereignty (see below).

Corruption:  Something inherent in the nature of war-torn Iraqis and Afghans from which only Americans, in and out of uniform, can save them.

Don't be distracted by the $6.6 billion that, in the form of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, the Bush administration loaded onto C-130 transport planes, flew to liberated Iraq in 2003 for "reconstruction" purposes, and somehow mislaid.  The U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction did recently suggest that it might prove to be "the largest theft of funds in national history"; on the other hand, maybe it was just misplaced... forever. 

Iraq's parliamentary speaker now claims that up to $18.7 billion in Iraqi oil funds have gone missing-in-action, but Iraqis, as you know, are corrupt and unreliable.  So pay no attention.  Anyway, not to worry, it wasn't our money.  All those crisp Benjamins came from Iraqi oil revenues that just happened to be held in U.S. banks.  And in war zones, what can you do?  Sometimes bad things happen to good $100 bills!

In any case, corruption is endemic to the societies of the Greater Middle East, which lack the institutional foundations of democratic societies.  Not surprisingly then, in impoverished, narcotized Afghanistan, it's run wild.  Fortunately, Washington has fought nobly against its ravages for years.  Time and again, top American officials have cajoled, threatened, even browbeat Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his compatriots to get them to crack down on corrupt practices and hold honest elections to build support for the American-backed government in Kabul.

Here's the funny thing though: a report on Afghan reconstruction recently released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority staff suggests that the military and foreign "developmental" funds that have poured into the country, and which account for 97% of its gross domestic product, have played a major role in encouraging corruption.  To find a peacetime equivalent, imagine firemen rushing to a blaze only to pour gasoline on it and then lash out at the building's dwellers as arsonists.

National Sovereignty:  1. Something Americans cherish and wouldn't let any other country violate; 2. Something foreigners irrationally cling to, a sign of unreliability or mental instability.

Here's the twenty-first-century credo of the American war state.  Please memorize it:  The world is our oyster.  We shall not weep.  We may missile [bomb, assassinate, night raid, invade] whom we please, when we please, where we please.  This is to be called "American safety." 

Those elsewhere, with a misplaced reverence for their own safety or security, or an overblown sense of pride and self-worth, who put themselves in harm's way -- watch out.   After all, in a phrase: Sovereignty "R' Us.

Note: As we still live on a one-way imperial planet, don't try reversing any of the above, not even as a thought experiment.  Don't imagine Iranian drones hunting terrorists over Southern California or Pakistani special operations forces launching night raids on small midwestern towns.  Not if you know what's good for you.

War:  A totally malleable concept that is purely in the eye of the beholder.

Which is undoubtedly why the Obama administration recently decided not to return to Congress for approval of its Libyan intervention as required by the War Powers Resolution of 1973.  The administration instead issued a report essentially declaring Libya not to be a "war" at all, and so not to fall under the provisions of that resolution.  As that report explained: "U.S. operations [in Libya] do not involve [1] sustained fighting or [2] active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve [3] the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties, or a serious threat thereof, or [4] any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors."

This, of course, opens up the possibility of quite a new and sunny American future on planet Earth, one in which it will no longer be wildly utopian to imagine war becoming extinct.  After all, the Obama administration is already moving to intensify and expand its [fill in the blank] in Yemen, which will meet all of the above criteria, as its [fill in the blank] in the Pakistani tribal borderlands already does.  Someday, Washington could be making America safe all over the globe in what would, miraculously, be a thoroughly war-less world.

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).

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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