A Strange and Far-flung War

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:



A Strange and Far-flung War
By Daniel Luban - October 23, 2013

The Way of the Knife:
The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth
by Mark Mazzetti
Penguin Press, 2013, 400 pp.

Dirty Wars:
The World Is a Battlefield
by Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books, 2013, 680 pp.

Kill Anything That Moves:
The Real American War in Vietnam
by Nick Turse
Metropolitan Books, 2013, 384 pp.

The first Predator drone missions ran surveillance on Serbian forces in the Balkan wars of the mid-1990s. They flew, Mark Mazzetti tells us, “out of a hangar in Albania that the CIA had rented in exchange for two truckloads of wool blankets.” Predators were successfully weaponized at a Nevada Air Force base just as George W. Bush was taking office, and drone strikes began in Afghanistan in the weeks after the September 11 attacks. A November 2002 Predator strike in Yemen killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole; it was the first time in decades that the United States had publicly confirmed an assassination outside a declared war zone, and the strike also claimed the first American drone victim, Ahmed Hijazi (aka Kemal Darwish) of Lackawanna, New York. Bush expanded the drone war in Pakistan in his final year in office—“signature strikes,” targeting as-yet-unidentified suspects on the basis of their behavior alone, entered the American repertoire around this time—and the Obama administration expanded it still further. So far 2010 stands as the peak of the drone war, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, with 127 strikes in Pakistan alone.

The drone’s ascent to iconic status, however, was more recent and sudden. Until a couple years ago, the American debate over drones was chiefly conducted between national security professionals and concerned their usefulness as a weapon against terrorism. Boosters hailed their accuracy and efficiency compared to traditional airpower; skeptics warned of their alienating effects on local communities whose hearts and minds America hoped to win over. Only recently—it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when—did the drone enter public consciousness as The Drone, symbol of modernity gone wrong.

No doubt the reasons for this sudden notoriety were varied. On the left, increased awareness of the drone war coincided with growing across-the-board disappointment in the Obama presidency. “Drones” became the one-word answer with which to express this disenchantment. On the right, the image of robot killers piloted from secret bases triggered all the libertarian fears about government power that had largely been suppressed since 9/11. They became safe to voice once again when Barack Hussein Obama was the one with his finger on the button. The public backlash reached its zenith this past March, when Senator Rand Paul spent thirteen hours filibustering the nomination of John Brennan, an architect of the War on Terror, as CIA director. Paul and his colleague Ted Cruz (a fellow Tea Partier but not typically one who shares Paul’s dovish and libertarian instincts) also introduced a bill forbidding the government from “us[ing] drones to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil if they do not represent an imminent threat”—although they added that the bill should not be taken to imply that it was permissible to do so by any other means.

As that last proviso suggests, there is some risk of fetishizing The Drone at the expense of a wider view of the American War on Terror. The visceral creepiness of the new technology has been crucial in raising awareness of the human consequences of this war, but it can distract us from the fact that Predators and Reapers are simply one type of weapon by which it is being waged. Americans may shiver at the thought of Hellfire missiles falling out of a clear blue sky, but most continue to thrill to the exploits of Seal Team Six, and the latter is just as fundamental a feature of the new American way of war as the former. So, too, are the Kalashnikov-wielding militiamen on the payroll of U.S.-backed warlords in Somalia and the programmers conducting cyber-sabotage against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. As the books under review make clear, we might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints—both of law and of public scrutiny—imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another. A wider view of the War on Terror may be necessary, but it is by no means more comforting. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-strange-and-far-flung-war

[anawat]

1. AAS

GOOD!!

[gopiscrap]

2. welcome to DU

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Than you, Marmar

Ihave 2 of the books....will look for the Mazzetti one.