US special forces stand
guard as Blackhawk helicopter land in Afghanistan's Marjah region, on
February 24, 2010. A NATO helicopter strike has killed two children in
southern Afghanistan, officials said, in the latest civilian casualties
to beset the coali
April 26, 2013
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Chalmers Johnson’s book
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was
published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed. Until then,
blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson
defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept
secret from the American people.” In his prologue, the former
consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant
revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier
for empire.”
After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was
surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other
Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of
military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever
had happened. Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a
memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American
empire” of immense reach and power. He also became convinced that, in
its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around
the world... for future forms of blowback.”
Johnson noted
“portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other
things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.” In
the first chapter of
Blowback, he focused in particular on a
“former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and
on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization
called al-Qaeda had emerged. It had been a war in which Washington
backed to the hilt,
and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists,
paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.
Talk
about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give
the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did.
All of this laid the foundation for... well, in 1999 when Johnson was
writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on
September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized
one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had “freed ourselves of...
any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this
globe.”
With
Blowback, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically
unprecedented garrisoning of
the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback
were building globally. After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to
the center of the 9/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and
became a bestseller, while “blowback” and that phrase “unintended
consequences” made their way into our everyday language.
Chalmers
Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar. Now, more than a
decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter. His
name is Jeremy Scahill. In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise
bestseller,
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in
service to its foreign wars, was working manically to “privatize”
national security and the U.S. military by hiring
rent-a-spies,
rent-a-guns, and
rent-a-corporations for its proliferating wars.
In
the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation
to heart -- that we Americans can’t see our world as it is. And little
wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the
shadows. As two administrations in Washington
arrogated ever
greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a
new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making. In the process,
they transformed an
increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “
perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military.
In
these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business
and property of the White House and the national security state -- and
no one else. Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the
receiving end. It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much
about what was being done in their name. As a result, there was a
secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be
written. Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book,
Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.
Scahill
has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC. In Iraq, it grew into a
kind of Murder Inc., “an executive assassination wing,” as Seymour
Hersh
once put it,
operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. It next turned
its hunter/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the
special operations forces themselves grew into an
expansive secret military cocooned
inside the U.S. military. In those years, Scahill started following
the footsteps of special ops types into the field, while mainlining into
sources in their community as well as other parts of the American
military and intelligence world.
In his new book, he dramatically
retraces the bureaucratic intel wars in Washington as the Pentagon, the
CIA, and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community muscled up, and
secret presidential orders gave JSOC, in particular, unprecedented
authority to turn the globe into a free-fire zone. Finally, as a
reporter, he traveled to a series of danger spots -- Somalia, Yemen,
Pakistan -- that Americans could care less about, where the U.S.
military and the CIA (in conjunction with private security contractors)
were experimenting with and developing new ways of waging Washington’s
spreading secret wars.
As Scahill writes in his acknowledgements,
thanking another reporter who traveled with him, “We were shot at
together on rooftops in Mogadishu, slept on dingy floors in rural
Afghanistan, and traveled together in the netherlands of Southern
Yemen.” That catches something of the spirit behind a book produced by a
dedicated, unembedded, independent reporter -- a thoroughly impressive,
even awe-inspiring piece of work.
In the process, Scahill, who in these years
broke a number of major stories as national security correspondent for the
Nation magazine,
fills us in on those American military death squads in Iraq,
nightmarish special ops night raids in Afghanistan (that target all the
wrong people), secret renditions of terror suspects to a CIA-funded jail
in Somalia (after President Obama had forsworn “rendition”), the
dispatching of drones and cruise missiles in disastrous strikes on
civilians in
Yemen, the hunting down and assassination of American citizens (aka
terror suspects, although 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki
certainly wasn’t one) also in Yemen on the orders of the president, the
complex world of
JSOC-CIA-Blackwater operations in Pakistan -- and so much more,
including an indication that JSOC has even launched secret ground
operations of some sort in Uzbekistan. (Who knew?)
Dirty Wars is
also, in Johnson’s terms, a history of the future; that is, a history
of potential blowback-to-come, a message in a bottle sent to us from the
hidden front lines of America’s global battlefields -- and therein lies
a tale of tales.
Preparing the Battlefield
A couple of years back, TomDispatch correspondent Ann Jones told me something I’ve never forgotten. Having
spent time with U.S. troops in
Afghanistan, she described their patrols in the countryside this way:
yes, there were dangers, mainly IEDs (roadside bombs) and the odd
potshot taken at them, but on the whole the areas they patrolled every
day were eerily “empty.” In some sense, it almost seemed as if no one
was there, as if they were fighting a ghost war on -- her term -- an
empty battlefield.
As it happens, her observation has a planetary
analogue that lies at the heart of Scahill’s remarkable book. As you
may remember, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took no time at all
for Bush administration officials to think big. Notoriously, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began
urging aides to
build a case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein only five hours
after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Within
weeks administration figures were already talking with confidence about
the need to “
drain the swamp” of terrorists and enemies on a global scale. They were reportedly planning to target
60to
80 countries,
almost a third to close to one-half of the nations on this planet. In
other words, when they quickly declared a Global War on Terror, they
weren’t kidding. They meant it quite literally and, as Scahill reports,
they promptly went to work building up the kinds of forces -- secret
and at their command alone -- that could fight anywhere on the sly.
As these forces were dispatched globally to collect intelligence, train foreign forces (also often “special” and
secret),
and especially hunt and kill terrorists, a new tradecraft term came
into play, a phrase as crucial to Scahill’s book as “blowback” was to
Johnson’s. They were, it was claimed, going out to “prepare the
battlefield” (or alternately, “the battlespace” or “the environment”).
That process of preparation couldn’t have been more breathtakingly
hubristic. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the situation this
way: “Today, the entire world is the ‘battlespace.’”
Here’s
the strange thing, though: when those secret forces went out to do
their dirty work, that global battlefield was, using Jones’s term,
remarkably, eerily empty. There was hardly anyone there. Perhaps
hundreds or at most a few thousand
jihadis scattered mainly in
the backlands of the planet. If “preparing the battlefield” turned out
to be the crucial term of the era, it wasn't exactly a descriptively
accurate one. More on the mark might have been: “creating the
battlefield” or “filling the empty battlefield.”
The pattern that Scahill traces brilliantly might have boiled down to a version of the tag line for the movie
Field of Dreams:
if you prepare it, they will come.
The result was not so much a war on, as a war of, and for, terror.
Washington would, at one and the same time, produce a killing machine
and a terror-generating machine.
Dirty Wars catches the way
its top officials became convinced that the planet’s last superpower,
with “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” (as American
presidents now
never grow tired of repeating), could simply kill its way to victory globally.
As Scahill also shows, they were often remarkably successful at eliminating the figures on their “
kill list”
of targeted enemies from Osama bin Laden on down: Bin Laden himself in
Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Aden Hashi Ayro in Somalia,
Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as various “lieutenants” of top
al-Qaeda figures and allied groups. And yet, as those on the kill lists
died, thanks to the CIA’s drones and JSOC’s raiders, so did others.
Often enough, they were
innocent civilians -- and in quantity. People who shouldn’t have ever had their doors kicked in, their sons arrested or their
pregnant wives shot
down, and who bitterly resented what they experienced. And so before
Washington knew it, the kill list was growing larger, not smaller, and
its wars were becoming more, not less, intense and spreading to other
lands. The battlefield, copiously prepared, was filling with enemies.
A Perpetual Motion Machine for the Destabilization of the Planet
As
Washington launched its post-9/11 adventures, the neoconservative
allies of the Bush administration, believing the wind in their sails,
eyed the vast area from North Africa to the Central Asian border of
China (aka “the Greater Middle East”) that they liked to call the “arc
of instability.” The job of the U.S., they imagined, was to bring
stability to that “arc” by using America's overwhelming military power
to create a
Pax Americana in the region. They were, in other words,
fundamentalists and
the U.S. military was their born-again religion. They believed that
its techno-power would trump every other form of power on the planet,
hands down.
In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and
in light of the ongoing disastrous war in Afghanistan, if you look at
the Greater Middle East today -- from Pakistan to Syria, Afghanistan to
Mali -- you’ll know what instability is really all about. Twelve years
later, much of the region has been destabilized to one degree or
another, which might pass as the definition for Washington of short-term
success and long-term failure.
In reality, they should have known
better from the start. After all, behind the global war launched by
the Bush administration and carried on by Obama was a
twenty-first-century replay of a brutal flop of a strategy in
Washington’s failed war in Vietnam. The phrase that went with it back
then was “the crossover point,” the supposedly crucial moment in what
was bluntly thought of as a “war of attrition.”
The idea was
simple enough. The staggering firepower available to Washington would
be brought to bear on the Vietnamese enemy with the obvious, expectable
result: sooner or later, a moment would be reached in which the U.S.
would be killing more of that enemy than could be replaced by
recruitment in South Vietnam or the infiltration of reinforcements from
the North. At that moment, Washington would “crossover” into victory.
We know just where that led -- to the infamous body count (which the
Bush administration
tried desperately to avoid in Iraq and Afghanistan), to slaughter
on a staggering scale, and to defeat when the prodigious number of enemies killed somehow never resulted in the U.S. crossing over.
And here’s the ironic thing. Like his father who, as the first Gulf War ended in 1991,
spoke ecstatically of
having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” George W. Bush
and his top officials had an overwhelming allergy to the memory of
Vietnam. Yet they still managed to launch a global war of attrition
against a range of groups they defined as “terrorists.” They were
clearly planning to kill them, one by one if possible, or in
“signature” groups if
necessary, until some crossover point was reached, until the enemy was
losing more members than could be replaced and victory came into sight.
As in Vietnam, of course, that crossover point never arrived and it’s
increasingly clear that it never will. Scahill’s reporting couldn’t be
more incisive on the subject.
Dirty Wars is really the
secret history of how Washington launched a series of undeclared wars in
the backlands of the planet and killed its way to something that ever
more closely resembled an actual global war, creating a world of enemies
out of next to nothing. Think of it as a bizarre form of unconscious
wish fulfillment and the results --
they came! -- as a field of nightmares.
What
was created in the process now seems more like a perpetual motion
machine for the destabilization of the planet. Just follow the
spread of
drone bases and
of JSOC’s raiders, and you can actually watch the backlands of the
globe destabilizing before your eyes, or read Scahill’s book and get a
superb blow-by-blow account of just how it happened. The process is now
well underway
in Africa where destabilization seems to be heading south from Libya via Mali.
Reread
Blowback 13
years later and it’s hard to believe that anyone was so ahead of his
times, given the human predilection for being unable to foresee much of
anything. Perhaps the saddest thing that can be said about
Dirty Wars is
that, the way things look, 13 years from now Scahill's book, too, may
seem as fresh as last night’s news. He has laid out a style of
off-the-books war-making that seems destined to be perpetuated, no
matter what administration is in power.
Much remains unknown when
it comes to our recent non-war wars. Thirteen years from now we may
know far more about what JSOC, the CIA, and others were really doing in
these years. None of that, however, is likely to change the pattern
Scahill has set down for us.
So let’s not hesitate to say it:
mission accomplished! The world may not have been a battlefield then.
But they prepared the global battlespace so well that it’s heading in
that direction now.
Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a
way of coming home. Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings.
The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in
American history. In its own way, it was also an example of the empty
battlefield. An
87-square mile metropolitan area was almost totally locked down. At least
9,000 heavily up-armored local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, hundreds of
National Guard troops,
SWAT teams, armored vehicles, helicopters, and who knows what else hit
the streets of greater Boston’s neighborhoods in a search for two
dangerous, deluded young men, one of whom ended up bloodied inside a
boat in a backyard just outside the zone the police had cordoned off to
search in Watertown. It was a spectacle that would have been
unimaginable in pre-9/11 America.
The expense must have been
staggering (especially if you add in business losses from the city’s
shutdown). In the end, of course, one of the suspects was killed and
the other captured -- and
celebrations of
that short-term success began immediately on the streets of Boston and
in the media. But here, too, killing your way to success is unlikely to
prove a winning strategy. After all, we’re already in Scahill’s
blowback world in which, no matter the number of deaths, there is
unlikely to be a crossover point.
After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombing suspect, was captured, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
tweeted a new phrase into
the American lexicon. While calling for the 19-year-old to be held as
an “enemy noncombatant” (Ã la Guantanamo), he wrote,
"The homeland is the battlefield." That should send chills down the spine of any reader of
Dirty Wars.
Above all else, there’s this: while the world
burned and
melted, Washington set itself one crucial global mission: to send its secret forces out onto that global battlefield to hunt random
jihadis. It may be the worst case of imperial risk assessment since Nero fiddled and Rome burned.
[
Note for TomDispatch Readers: This essay focused on Jeremy Scahill’s new book
Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books). In June,
a film of the same title directed
by Rick Rowley and based on the book will hit the theaters. I’ve seen
it in preview. Its focus differs from the book’s. Scahill is its
narrator. It's deeply personal and is powerfully humanizing of those
whose doors we’ve kicked in during this last grim decade-plus. It could
be the documentary of the year.]
