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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Obama's six-point plan for Global
War By Nick
Turse
Recently, however, the Obama
administration has been ramping up operations
south of the border using its new formula. This
has meant Pentagon drone missions deep inside
Mexico to aid that country's battle against the
drug cartels, while CIA agents and civilian
operatives from the Department of Defense were
dispatched to Mexican military bases to take part
in the country's drug war.
In 2012, the
Pentagon has also ramped up its anti-drug
operations in Honduras. Working out of Forward
Operating Base Mocoron and other remote camps
there, the US military is supporting Honduran
operations by way of the methods it honed in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
In addition, US forces
have taken part in joint operations with
Honduran troops as part
of a training mission dubbed Beyond the Horizon
2012; Green Berets have been assisting Honduran
Special Operations forces in anti-smuggling
operations; and a Drug Enforcement Administration
Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team, originally
created to disrupt the poppy trade in Afghanistan,
has joined forces with Honduras's Tactical
Response Team, that country's most elite
counternarcotics unit.
A glimpse of these
operations made the news recently when DEA agents,
flying in an American helicopter, were involved in
an aerial attack on civilians that killed two men
and two pregnant women in the remote Mosquito
Coast region.
Less visible have been US
efforts in Guyana, where Special Operation Forces
have been training local troops in heliborne air
assault techniques.
"This is the first
time we have had this type of exercise involving
Special Operations Forces of the United States on
such a grand scale," Colonel Bruce Lovell of the
Guyana Defense Force told a US public affairs
official earlier this year. "It gives us a chance
to validate ourselves and see where we are, what
are our shortcomings."
The US military has
been similarly active elsewhere in Latin America,
concluding training exercises in Guatemala,
sponsoring "partnership-building" missions in the
Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, and Panama,
and reaching an agreement to carry out 19
"activities" with the Colombian army over the next
year, including joint military exercises.
Still in the middle of the Middle
East Despite the end of the Iraq and Libyan
wars, a coming drawdown of forces in Afghanistan,
and copious public announcements about its
national security pivot toward Asia, Washington is
by no means withdrawing from the Greater Middle
East. In addition to continuing operations in
Afghanistan, the US has consistently been at work
training allied troops, building up military
bases, and brokering weapons sales and arms
transfers to despots in the region from Bahrain to
Yemen.
In fact, Yemen, like its neighbor,
Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden, has become a
laboratory for Obama's wars. There, the US is
carrying out its signature new brand of warfare
with "black ops" troops like the SEALs and the
Army's Delta Force undoubtedly conducting
kill/capture missions, while "white" forces like
the Green Berets and Rangers are training
indigenous troops, and robot planes hunt and kill
members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, possibly
assisted by an even more secret contingent of
manned aircraft.
The Middle East has also
become the somewhat unlikely poster-region for
another emerging facet of the Obama doctrine:
cyberwar efforts. In a category-blurring speaking
engagement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
surfaced at the recent Special Operations Forces
Industry Conference in Florida where she gave a
speech talking up her department's eagerness to
join in the new American way of war.
"We
need Special Operations Forces who are as
comfortable drinking tea with tribal leaders as
raiding a terrorist compound,'' she told the
crowd. "We also need diplomats and development
experts who are up to the job of being your
partners."
Clinton then took the
opportunity to tout her agency's online efforts,
aimed at websites used by al-Qaeda's affiliate in
Yemen. When al-Qaeda recruitment messages appeared
on the latter, she said, "our team plastered the
same sites with altered versions ... that showed
the toll al-Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni
people." She further noted that this
information-warfare mission was carried out by
experts at State's Center for Strategic
Counterterrorism Communications with assistance,
not surprisingly, from the military and the US
Intelligence Community. These modest on-line
efforts join more potent methods of cyberwar being
employed by the Pentagon and the CIA, including
the recently revealed "Olympic Games", a program
of sophisticated attacks on computers in Iran's
nuclear enrichment facilities engineered and
unleashed by the National Security Agency (NSA)
and Unit 8200, Israeli's equivalent of the NSA.
As with other facets of the new way of
war, these efforts were begun under the Bush
administration but were significantly accelerated
under the current president, who became the first
American commander-in-chief to order sustained
cyberattacks designed to cripple another country's
infrastructure.
From brushfires to
wildfires Across the globe from Central and
South America to Africa, the Middle East, and
Asia, the Obama administration is working out its
formula for a new American way of war. In its
pursuit, the Pentagon and its increasingly
militarized government partners are drawing on
everything from classic precepts of colonial
warfare to the latest technologies.
The
United States is an imperial power chastened by
more than 10 years of failed, heavy-footprint
wars. It is hobbled by a hollowing-out economy,
and inundated with hundreds of thousands of recent
veterans - a staggering 45% of the troops who
fought in Afghanistan and Iraq - suffering from
service-related disabilities who will require
ever-more expensive care.
No wonder the
current combination of special ops, drones, spy
games, civilian soldiers, cyberwarfare, and proxy
fighters sounds like a safer, saner brand of
war-fighting. At first blush, it may even look
like a panacea for America's national security
ills. In reality, it may be anything but.
The new light-footprint Obama doctrine
actually seems to be making war an ever more
attractive and seemingly easy option - a point
emphasized recently by former Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace.
"I worry about speed making it too easy to
employ force," said Pace when asked about recent
efforts to make it simpler to deploy Special
Operations Forces abroad. "I worry about speed
making it too easy to take the easy answer - let's
go whack them with special operations - as opposed
to perhaps a more laborious answer for perhaps a
better long-term solution."
As a result,
the new American way of war holds great potential
for unforeseen entanglements and serial blowback.
Starting or fanning brushfire wars on several
continents could lead to raging wildfires that
spread unpredictably and prove difficult, if not
impossible, to quench.
By their very
nature, small military engagements tend to get
larger, and wars tend to spread beyond borders. By
definition, military action tends to have
unforeseen consequences. Those who doubt this need
only look back to 2001, when three low-tech
attacks on a single day set in motion a
decade-plus of war that has spread across the
globe. The response to that one day began with a
war in Afghanistan, that spread to Pakistan,
detoured to Iraq, popped up in Somalia and Yemen,
and so on. Today, veterans of those interventions
find themselves trying to replicate their dubious
successes in places like Mexico and Honduras, the
Central Africa Republic and the Congo.
History demonstrates that the US is not
very good at winning wars, having gone without
victory in any major conflict since 1945. Smaller
interventions have been a mixed bag, with modest
victories in places like Panama and Grenada and
ignominious outcomes in Lebanon (in the 1980s) and
Somalia (in the 1990s), to name a few.
The
trouble is, it's hard to tell what an intervention
will grow up to be - until it's too late. While
they followed different paths, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and Iraq all began relatively small,
before growing large and ruinous. Already, the
outlook for the new Obama doctrine seems far from
rosy, despite the good press it's getting inside
Washington's Beltway.
What looks today
like a formula for easy power projection that will
further US imperial interests on the cheap could
soon prove to be an unmitigated disaster - one
that likely won't be apparent until it's too late.
Nick Turse is the associate
editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning
journalist, his work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at
TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several
books, including the just published Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt). This piece is
the latest article in his new series on the
changing face of American empire, which is being
underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can follow
him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on
Facebook.
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