DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA America as a shining drone upon a
hill By Tom Engelhardt
Here's the essence of it: you can trust
America's creme de la creme, the most elevated,
responsible people, no matter what weapons, what
powers, you put in their hands. No need to
constantly look over their shoulders.
Placed in the hands of evildoers, those
weapons and powers could create a living
nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they
lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in
which bad things are (with rare and understandable
exceptions) done only to truly terrible types. In
the process, you simply couldn't be better
protected.
And in case you were wondering,
there is no question who among us are the best,
most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and
judicious people: the officials of our national
security state. Trust
them implicitly. They
will never give you a bum steer.
You may
be paying a fortune to maintain their world - the
30,000 people hired to listen in on conversations
and other communications in this country, the
230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland
Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret
clearances, the 4.2 million with security
clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion,
one-million-square-foot data center that the
National Security Agency is constructing in Utah,
the gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters the
National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently
built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington
area - but there's a good reason. That's what's
needed to make truly elevated, surgically precise
decisions about life and death in the service of
protecting American interests on this dangerous
globe of ours.
And in case you wondered
just how we know all this, we have it on the best
authority: the people who are doing it - the only
ones, given the obvious need for secrecy, capable
of judging just how moral, elevated, and
remarkable their own work is. They deserve our
congratulations, but if we're too distracted to
give it to them, they are quite capable of
high-fiving themselves.
We're talking, in
particular, about the use by the Barack Obama
administration (and the George W Bush
administration before it) of a growing armada of
remotely piloted planes, aka drones, grimly
labeled Predators and Reapers, to fight a
nameless, almost planet-wide war (formerly known
as the "war on terror"). Its purpose: to destroy
al-Qaeda-in-wherever and all its wannabes and
look-alikes, the Taliban, and anyone affiliated or
associated with any of the above, or just about
anyone else we believe might imminently endanger
our "interests".
In the service of this
war, in the midst of a perpetual state of war and
of wartime, every act committed by these leaders
is, it turns out, absolutely, totally and
completely legal. We have their say-so for that,
and they have the documents to prove it, largely
because the best and most elevated legal minds
among them have produced that documentation in
secret. (They dare not show it to the rest of us,
lest lives be endangered.)
By their own
account, they have, in fact, been covertly
exceptional, moral and legal for more than a
decade (minus the odd black site and torture
chamber) - so covertly exceptional, in fact, that
they haven't quite gotten the credit they deserve.
Now, they would like to make the latest version of
their exceptional mission to the world known to
the rest of us. It is finally in our interest, it
seems, to be a good deal better informed about
America's covert wars in a year in which the
widely announced "covert" killing of Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan is a major selling point in the
president's reelection campaign.
No one
should be surprised. There was always an "overt"
lurking in the "covert" of what now passes for
"covert war". The Central Intelligence Agency's
(CIA's) global drone assassination campaign has
long been a bragging point in Washington, even if
it couldn't officially be discussed directly
before, say, congress.
The covertness of
our drone wars in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere really
turns out to have less to do with secrecy - just
about every covert drone strike is reported,
sooner or later, in the media - than assuring two
administrations that they could pursue their drone
wars without accountability to anyone.
A classic of self-congratulation Recently, top administration officials seem to
be fanning out to offer rare peeks into what's
truly on-target and exceptional about America's
drone wars. In many ways, these days, American
exceptionalism is about as unexceptional as apple
pie. It has, for one thing, become the everyday
language of the presidential campaign trail. And
that shouldn't surprise us either.
After
all, great powers and their leaders tend to think
well of themselves. The French had their
"mission civilisatrice", the Chinese had
the "mandate of heaven" and like all imperial
powers they inevitably thought they were doing the
best for themselves and others, sadly benighted,
in this best of all possible worlds.
Sometimes, though, the American version of
this does seem ... I hate to use the word, but
exceptional. If you want to get a taste of just
what this means, consider as exhibit one a recent
speech by the president's counter-terrorism
"tsar", John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars.
According to his own account, he was
dispatched to the center by Obama to provide
greater openness when it comes to the
administration's secret drone wars, to respond to
critics of the drones and their legality, and
undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone
operations generally.
Ever since the
Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the
phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to
North America, "a city upon a hill" has caught
something of at least one American-style dream - a
sense that this country's fate was to be a blessed
paragon for the rest of the world, an exception to
every norm. In the last century, it became "a
shining city upon a hill" and was regularly cited
in presidential addresses.
Whatever that
"city", that dream, was once imagined to be, it
has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in
the 21st century. It has become - even in our
dreams - an up-armored garrison encampment, just
as Washington itself has become the heavily
fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state.
So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new
version of American exceptionalism: the first
"shining drone upon a hill" speech, which also
qualifies as an instant classic of
self-congratulation.
Never, according to
him, has a country with such an advanced weapon
system as the drone used it quite so judiciously,
quite so - if not peacefully - at least with the
sagacity and skill usually reserved for the gods.
American drone strikes, he assured his listeners,
are "ethical and just," "wise" and "surgically
precise" - exactly what you'd expect from a
country he refers to, quoting the president, as
the preeminent "standard bearer in the conduct of
war."
Those drone strikes, he assured his
listeners, are based on staggeringly "rigorous
standards" involving the individual identification
of human targets. Even when visited on American
citizens outside declared war zones, they are
invariably "within the bounds of the law", as you
would expect of the pre-eminent "nation of laws".
The strikes are never motivated by
vengeance, always target someone known to us as
the worst of the worst, and almost invariably
avoid anyone who is even the most mediocre of the
mediocre. (Forget the fact that, as Greg Miller of
the Washington Post reported, the CIA has recently
received permission from the president to launch
drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed
"patterns of suspicious behavior" of groups of
unidentified individuals, as was already true in
the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)
Yes, in
such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die,
even if unbelievably rarely - and for that we
couldn't be more regretful. Such deaths, however,
are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the
most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so
improvements in, our actions. "This too," Brennan
assured his audience, "is a reflection of our
values as Americans".
"I would note," he
added, "that these standards, for identifying a
target and avoiding ... the loss of lives of
innocent civilians, exceed what is required as a
matter of international law on a typical
battlefield. That's another example of the high
standards to which we hold ourselves."
And
that's just a taste of the tone and substance of
the speech given by the president's leading
counter-terrorism expert, and in it he's no
outlier. It catches something about an American
sense of self at this moment. Yes, Americans may
be ever more down on the Afghan war, but like
their leaders, they are high on drones.
In
a February Washington Post/ABC News poll, 83% of
respondents supported the administration's use of
drones. Perhaps that's not surprising either,
since the drones are generally presented here as
the coolest of machines, as well as cheap
alternatives (in money and lives) to sending more
armies onto the Eurasian mainland.
Predator nation In these past
years, this country has pioneered the development
of the most advanced killing machines on the
planet for which the national security state has
plans decades into the future. Conceptually
speaking, our leaders have also established their
"right" to send these robot assassins into any
airspace, no matter the local claims of national
sovereignty, to take out those we define as evil
or simply to protect American interests. On this,
Brennan couldn't be clearer. In the process, we
have turned much of the rest of the planet into
what can only be considered an American free-fire
zone.
We have, in short, established a
remarkably expansive set of drone-war rules for
the global future. Naturally, we trust ourselves
with such rules, but there is a fly in the
ointment, even as the droniacs see it. Others far
less sagacious, kindly, lawful, and good than we
are do exist on this planet and they may soon have
their own fleets of drones. About 50 countries are
today buying or developing such robotic aircraft,
including Russia, China, and Iran, not to speak of
Hezbollah in Lebanon. And who knows what terror
groups are looking into suicide drones?
As
the Washington Post's David Ignatius put it in a
column about Brennan's speech: "What if the
Chinese deployed drones to protect their workers
in southern Sudan against rebels who have killed
them in past attacks? What if Iran used them
against Kurdish separatists they regard as
terrorists? What if Russia used them over
Chechnya? What position would the United States
take, and wouldn't it be hypocritical if it
opposed drone attacks by other nations that face
'imminent' or 'significant' threats?"
This
is Washington's global drone conundrum as seen
from inside the Beltway. These are the nightmarish
scenarios even our leaders can imagine others
producing with their own drones and our rules. A
deeply embedded sense of American exceptionalism,
a powerful belief in their own special,
self-evident goodness, however, conveniently
blinds them to what they are doing right now.
Looking in the mirror, they are incapable of
seeing a mask of death. And yet our proudest
export at present, other than Hollywood superhero
films, may be a stone-cold robotic killer with a
name straight out of a horror movie.
Consider this as well: those "shining
drones" launched on campaigns of assassination and
slaughter are increasingly the "face" that we
choose to present to the world. And yet it's
beyond us why it might not shine for others.
In reality, it's not so hard to imagine
what we increasingly look like to those others: a
Predator nation. And not just to the parents and
relatives of the more than 160 children the Bureau
of Investigative Journalism has documented as
having died in US. drone strikes in Pakistan.
After all, war is now the only game in town.
Peace? For the managers of our national security
state, it's neither a word worth mentioning, nor
an imaginable condition.
In truth, our
leaders should be in mourning for whatever
peaceful dreams we ever had. But mention drones
and they light up. They're having a love affair
with those machines. They just can't get enough of
them or imagine their world or ours without them.
What they can't see in the haze of
exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are
transforming the promise of America into a promise
of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn't
precise. It isn't glorious. It isn't judicious. It
certainly isn't a shining vision. It's hell. And
it's a global future for which, someday, no one
will thank us.
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