DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Waging war: A US
monopoly By Tom Engelhardt
It's pop-quiz time when it comes to the
American way of war: three questions, torn from
the latest news, just for you. Here's the first of
them, and good luck!
Two weeks ago, 200 US
marines began armed operations in ... ?: a)
Afghanistan b) Pakistan c) Iran
d)
Somalia e) Yemen f) Central Africa g)
Northern Mali h) The Philippines i)
Guatemala
If you opted for any answer, "a"
through "h", you took a reasonable shot at it.
After all, there's an ongoing American war in
Afghanistan and somewhere in the southern part of
that country, 200 armed US marines could well have
been involved in an operation. In Pakistan, an
undeclared, CIA-run air war has long been under
way, and in the past there have been armed border
crossings by US special operations forces as well
as US piloted cross-border air strikes, but no
marines.
When it comes to Iran,
Washington's regional preparations for war are
staggering. The continual buildup of US naval
power in the Persian Gulf, of land forces on bases
around that country, of air power (and
anti-missile defenses) in the region should leave
any observer breathless. There are US special
operations forces near the Iranian border and
Central Intelligence Agency drones regularly over
that country.
In conjunction with the
Israelis, Washington has launched a cyberwar
against Iran's nuclear program and computer
systems. It has also established fierce oil and
banking sanctions, and there seem to have been at
least some US cross-border operations into Iran
going back to at least 2007.
In addition,
a recent front-page New York Times story on US
administration attempts to mollify Israel over its
Iran policy included this ominous line: "The
administration is also considering ... covert
activities that have been previously considered
and rejected." So 200 armed marines in action in
Iran - not yet, but don't get down on yourself, it
was a good guess.
In Somalia, according to
Wired magazine's "Danger Room" blog, there have
been far more US drone flights and strikes against
the Islamic extremist al-Shabaab movement and
al-Qaeda elements than anyone previously knew. In
addition, the US has at least partially funded,
supported, equipped, advised, and promoted proxy
wars there, involving Ethiopian troops back in
2007 and more recently Ugandan and Burundian
troops (as well as an invading Kenyan army). In
addition, CIA operatives and possibly other
irregulars and hired guns are well established in
Mogadishu, the capital.
In Yemen, as in
Somalia, the combination has been proxy war and
strikes by drones (as well as piloted planes),
with some US Special Forces advisers on the
ground, and civilian casualties (and anger at the
US) rising in the southern part of the country -
but also, as in Somalia, no marines.
Central Africa? Now, there's a thought.
After all, at least 100 Green Berets were sent in
there this year as part of a campaign against
Joseph Kony's Ugandan-based Lord's Resistance
Army. As for northern Mali, taken over by Islamic
extremists (including an al-Qaeda-affiliated
group), it certainly presents a target for future
US intervention - and we still don't know what
those three US Army commandos who skidded off a
bridge to their deaths in their Toyota Land
Cruiser with three "Moroccan prostitutes" were
doing in a country with which the US military had
officially cut its ties after a democratically
elected government was overthrown.
But 200
marines operating in war-torn areas of Africa? Not
yet.
When it comes to the Philippines,
again no marines, even though US Special Forces
and drones have been aiding the government in a
low-level conflict with Islamic militants in
Mindanao.
As it happens, the correct, if
surprising, answer is "i". And if you chose it,
congratulations!
On August 29, The
Associated Press reported that a "team of 200 US
marines began patrolling Guatemala's western coast
this week in an unprecedented operation to beat
drug traffickers in the Central America region, a
US military spokesman said Wednesday".
This could have been big news. It's a
sizable enough intervention: 200 marines sent into
action in a country where the US last had a
military presence in 1978. If this wasn't the
beginning of something bigger and wider, it would
be surprising, given that commando-style
operatives from the US Drug Enforcement
Administration have been firing weapons and
killing locals in a similar effort in Honduras,
and that, along with US drones, the CIA is
evidently moving ever deeper into the drug war in
Mexico.
In addition, there's a history
here. After all, in the early part of the previous
century, sending in the marines - in Nicaragua,
Haiti, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere - was
the way Washington demonstrated its power in its
own "back yard". And yet other than a few
straightforward news reports on the Guatemala
intervention, there has been no significant media
discussion, no storm of criticism or commentary,
no mention at either political convention, and no
debate or discussion about the wisdom of such a
step in this country. Odds are that you didn't
even notice it had happened.
Think of it
another way: in the post-2001 era, along with two
disastrous wars on the Eurasian mainland, the US
has been regularly sending in the marines or
Special Operations forces, as well as naval, air
and robotic power. Such acts are, by now, so
ordinary that they are seldom considered worthy of
much discussion in the US, even though no other
country acts (or even has the capacity to act)
this way. This is simply what Washington's
National Security Complex does for a living.
At
the moment, it seems, a historical circle is being
closed with the US Marine Corps once again heading
back into Latin America as the "drug war"
Washington proclaimed years ago becomes an actual
drug war. It's a demonstration that, these days,
when Washington sees a problem anywhere on the
planet, its version of a "foreign policy" is most
likely to call on the US military. Force is
increasingly not America's option of last resort,
but its first choice.
Now, consider Question 2 in
our little snap quiz of recent war news: in 2011,
what percentage of the global arms market did the
US control? (Keep in mind that, as everyone knows,
the world is an arms bazaar filled with haggling
merchants. Though the Cold War and the superpower
arms rivalry is long over, there are obviously
plenty of countries eager to peddle their
weaponry, no matter what conflicts may be stoked
as a result.):
a) 37%
(US$12.1 billion), followed closely by Russia
($10.7 billion), France, China and Britain. b)
52.7% ($21.3 billion), followed by Russia at 19.3%
($12.8 billion), France, Britain, China, Germany
and Italy. c) 68% ($37.8 billion), followed by
Italy at 9% ($3.7 billion) and Russia at 8% ($3.5
billion). d) 78% ($66.3 billion), followed by
Russia at 5.6% ($4.8
billion).
Naturally, you eliminated "d"
first. Who wouldn't? After all, cornering close to
80% of the arms market would mean that the global
weapons bazaar had in essence been converted into
a monopoly operation.
Of course, it's
common knowledge that the US arms giants, given a
massive helping hand in their marketing by the
Pentagon, remain the collective 800-pound gorilla
in any room. But 37% of that market is nothing to
sniff at. (At least, it wasn't in 1990, the final
days of the Cold War when the Russians were still
a major competitor worldwide.)
As for
52.7%, what national industry wouldn't bask in the
glory of such a figure - a majority share of arms
sold worldwide? (And, in fact, that was an
impressive percentage back in the dismal sales
year of 2010, when arms budgets worldwide were
still feeling the pain of the lingering global
economic recession.)
Okay, so what about
that hefty 68%? It couldn't have been a more
striking achievement for US arms makers back in
2008 in what was otherwise distinctly a lagging
market.
The correct answer for 2011,
however, is the singularly unbelievable one: the
US actually tripled its arms sales last year,
hitting a record high, and cornering almost 78% of
the global arms trade. This was reported in late
August but, like those 200 marines in Guatemala,
never made in on to front pages or into the top TV
news stories. And yet if arms were drugs (and it's
possible that, in some sense, they are, and that
we humans can indeed get addicted to them), then
the US has become something close enough to the
world's sole dealer. That should be front-page
news, shouldn't it?
Okay, so here's the
third question in today's quiz:
From a
local base in which country did US Global Hawk
drones fly long-range surveillance missions
between late 2001 and at least 2006? a)
Seychelles b) Ethiopia c) An unnamed Middle
Eastern country d) Australia
Actually, the drone base the
US has indeed operated in the Seychelles
archipelago in the Indian Ocean was first used
only in 2009, and the drone base Washington has
developed in Ethiopia by upgrading a civilian
airport only became operational in 2011. As for
that "unnamed Middle Eastern country", perhaps
Saudi Arabia, the new airstrip being built there,
assumedly for the CIA's drones, may now be
operational.
Once again, the right answer
turns out to be the unlikely one. Recently, the
Australian media reported that the US had flown
early, secretive Global Hawk missions out of a
Royal Australian Air Force Base at Edinburgh,
South Australia. These were detected by a "group
of Adelaide aviation historians". The Global Hawk,
an enormous drone, can stay in the air a long
time. What those flights were surveilling back
then is unknown, though North Korea might be one
guess. Whether they continued beyond 2006 is also
unknown.
Unlike the previous two stories,
this one never made it into the US media and if it
had, would have gone unnoticed anyway. After all,
who in Washington or among US reporters and
pundits would have found it odd that, long before
its recent, much-ballyhooed "pivot" to Asia, the
US was flying some of its earliest drone missions
over vast areas of the Pacific? Who even finds it
strange that, in the years since 2001, the US has
been putting together an ever more elaborate
network of its own drone bases on foreign soil, or
that it has an estimated 1,000-1,200 military
bases scattered across the planet, some the size
of small US towns (not to speak of scads of bases
in the United States)?
Like those marines
in Guatemala, like the near-monopoly on the arms
trade, this sort of thing is hardly considered
significant news in the US, though in its size and
scope it is surely historically unprecedented.
Nor does it seem strange to us Americans
that no other country on the planet has more than
a tiny number of bases outside its own territory:
the Russians have a scattered few in the former
Soviet republics and a single old naval base in
Syria that has been in the news of late; the
French still have some in francophone Africa; the
British have a few leftovers from their own
imperial era, including the island of Diego Garcia
in the Indian Ocean, which has in essence been
transformed into a US base; and the Chinese may be
in the process of setting up a couple of modest
bases as well. Add up every non-US base on foreign
soil, however, and the total is probably less than
2% of the American empire of bases.
Investing in war It would, by
the way, be a snap to construct a little quiz like
this every couple of weeks from US military news
that's reported but not attended to, and each quiz
would make the same essential point: From
Washington's perspective, the world is primarily a
landscape for arming for, garrisoning for,
training for, planning for, and making war. War is
what we in the US invest our time, energy and
treasure in on a scale that is, in its own way,
remarkable, even if it seldom registers in this
country.
In a sense (leaving aside the
obvious inability of the US military actually to
win wars), it may, at this point, be what we do
best. After all, whatever the results, it's an
accomplishment to send 200 marines to Guatemala
for a month of drug-interdiction work, to get
those Global Hawks secretly to Australia to
monitor the Pacific, and to corner the market on
things that go boom in the night.
Think of
it this way: the United States is alone on the
planet, not just in its ability, but in its
willingness to use military force in drug wars,
religious wars, political wars, conflicts of
almost any sort, constantly and on a global scale.
No other group of powers collectively even comes
close. It also stands alone as a purveyor of major
weapons systems and so as a generator of war. It
is, in a sense, a massive machine for the
promotion of war on a global scale.
We
have, in other words, what increasingly looks like
a monopoly on war.
There have, of course,
been warrior societies in the past that committed
themselves to a mobilized life of war-making above
all else. What's unique about the United States is
that it isn't a warrior society. Quite the
opposite.
Washington may be mobilized for
permanent war. Special Operations forces may be in
up to 120 countries. Drone bases may be
proliferating across the planet. We may be
building up forces in the Persian Gulf and
"pivoting" to Asia. Warrior corporations and
rent-a-gun mercenary outfits have mobilized on the
country's disparate battle fronts to profit from
the increasingly privatized 21st-century US
version of war.
The American people,
however, are demobilized and detached from the
wars, interventions, operations, and other
military activities done in their name. As a
result, 200 marines in Guatemala, almost 78% of
global weapons sales, drones flying surveillance
from Australia - no one here notices; no one here
cares.
War: it's what we do the most and
attend to the least. It's a nasty combination.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the
American Empire Project and author of The
United States of Fear as well as The End of
Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with
Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First
History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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