What's interesting to me is looking at the Dexter phenomenon as a component of mass pop psychology and national myth that deals with the use of lethal violence as a more and more acceptable solution to problems. In that sense, it's disturbing how much Dexter's motivations and self-justifications as a necessary killer mirror the current US military doctrine centered on Special Operations hunter-killer teams.
The New York Times
reported this week that Admiral William McRaven , a former Navy Seal
and now commander of US Special Operations Command, is lobbying that his
hunter-killer Special Ops units be given a larger role in US military strategy.
He wants greater authority to employ these sophisticated hunter-killer "cells"
outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels -- that is, increasing secrecy
and diminishing accountability vis-a-vis the American tax-paying, voting
public.
[[SPEC
This is the super secret world of military and intelligence operatives that has evolved out of the paranoid, post-911 Bush-Cheney years. It is the legacy of Vice President Dick Cheney's famous statement that the times required that the nation not shrink from going to "the dark side."
The pop culture Dexter novel really gets interesting when its major plot element opens up. It seems a homicidal torturer from the 1980s US war in El Salvador -- Dr. Danco -- has gone rogue and is operating in South Florida to get revenge on those who betrayed him.
Back in the 1980s, the evil Danco had worked in Salvador with Miami-Dade Police Sergeant Doakes, then in US Special Forces on loan to the Salvadorans, and with federal operative Kyle Chutsky. Dexter refers to the 1980s as "a homicidal carnival" in El Salvador, a time when death squads flourished and bodies were common in the streets. Dexter points out that Sergeant Doakes, now his partner in the hunt for Dr. Danco, "would have been one of the ringmasters."
The plot twist is that Danco was sold out to the communist rebels, who turned him over to the insidious Cubans. In the Isle of Pines prison in Cuba he was tortured to the point he joined forces with Fidel. The beast is now loose in South Florida in a white van seeking revenge on those who sold him out, to include Doakes and Chutsky. Danco specializes in surgically severing all a person's limbs and parts, leaving a hideous living head and torso tied to a table doomed to look at what's left of himself in a wall size mirror.
"Once you go over to the dark side, it's forever. You can't go back." That's what Chutsky tells Dexter, referring to Danco.
The Salvadoran Option
I was raised in rural South Dade County as a kid, so many of the streets and locales of this novel are familiar. My South Florida was living, fecund and wonderful and not the moral holocaust of this novel. As a photographer, I traveled quite a bit in El Salvador during the 1980s and 90s. So I heard many first-hand stories of the horrors Lindsay dredges up for his narrative. One example: A woman told me about finding her daughter's body skinned in a body dump. I had a terrible time absorbing that image. The fact is, the genre nonsense of this Dexter novel aside, the people tortured and killed by death squads in El Salvador were not monsters themselves; they were generally peasants and reformers hoping for a fair shake and the lifting of years of violent repression -- all supported, of course, by US policy under Ronald Reagan.
I was also in Iraq in 2003 and early 2004 as a journalist when the US military invasion force began to realize the mission had not been "accomplished" and it faced a powerful and growing, internally-generated insurgency that wanted the US to leave -- especially in Falluja and the Sunni area of Anbar Province, which I traveled through four times in a fast-moving GMC truck.
The US counter to that insurgency became known as "the surge." General Stanley McChrystal ran the counter-insurgency operation. Insider reporters like Bob Woodward called it "the secret weapon." Others called it "the Salvadoran option," as in war by death squad. So it wasn't a "surge" of troops that turned back the insurgency; it was the establishment of special operations assassin teams. It was "the dark side." All the rest was public relations to clean things up for home consumption. No one really wanted to think of our boys working as common assassins.
The critical factor was the use of both highly sophisticated and crude methods of intelligence gathering (to include torture) to identify the leaders of the insurgency and then to send out hunter-killer units supported by air power, satellite communications and whatever else would help the mission. And the mission was to kill or capture leaders and other people critical to the insurgent effort. As counter insurgency expert William Polk has made clear, the most successful counter insurgency campaigns in history have relied on scorched earth tactics focused on the troublesome population. That, of course, is impossible in today's world. So, the next best thing is to focus on systematically eliminating the leaders of an insurgent movement.
General MyChrystal's tactics were successful in at least slowing down the insurgency enough so US military public relations could claim it controlled the area. No matter whether one holds onto the notion of "the surge" or what one chooses to call it, the tactic was focused on identifying and killing key people in Anbar who simply wanted US soldiers out of their neighborhoods.
Since sovereignty means not having to answer to anyone, especially in a "war," such killing was not characterized as "murder" and soldiers were praised and got medals. This isn't to question the toughness or bravery of these soldiers. The issue is the mission and, on a disturbing level, how the justifications for these killings are not unlike Dexter's pop culture "red, white and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue."
From the "granular level" of Anbar Province circa 2005, the so-called Salvadoran option advocated by Vice President Joe Biden and others is fast becoming national military doctrine. Admiral McRaven wants to base hunter-killer cells in Asia, Africa and Latin America. While the traditional big unit military is being squeezed, special ops budgets are rising. The nation is in the midst of a major shift.
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