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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The military
'solution' By Tom Engelhardt
Americans may feel more distant from war
than at any time since World War II began.
Certainly, a smaller percentage of us - less than
1% - serves in the military in this all-volunteer
era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington's
constant warring in distant lands seems barely to
touch the lives of most Americans.
And yet
the militarization of the United States and the
strengthening of the National Security Complex
continues to accelerate. The Pentagon is, by now,
a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a
moment when no other power or combination of
powers comes near to challenging this country's
might.
In the era following the attacks of
September 11, 2001, the
military-industrial
complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the
rubric of "privatization" and now goes to war with
the Pentagon. With its US$80 billion-plus budget,
the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded.
There are so many competing agencies and outfits,
surrounded by a universe of private intelligence
contractors, all swathed in a penumbra of secrecy,
and they have grown so large, mainly under the
Pentagon's aegis, that you could say intelligence
is now a ruling way of life in Washington - and
it, too, is being thoroughly militarized.
Even the once-civilian Central
Intelligence Agency has undergone a process of
para-militarization and now runs its own "covert"
drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere. Its
director, a widely hailed retired four-star
general, was previously the US war commander in
Iraq and then Afghanistan, just as the national
intelligence director who oversees the whole
intelligence labyrinth is a retired US Air Force
lieutenant-general.
In a sense, even the
military has been "militarized". In these last
years, a secret army of special-operations forces,
60,000 or more strong and still expanding, has
grown like an incubus inside the regular armed
forces. As the CIA's drones have become the
president's private air force, so the special-ops
troops are his private army, and are now given
free rein to go about the business of war in their
own cocoon of secrecy in areas far removed from
what are normally considered America's war zones.
Diplomacy, too, has been militarized.
Diplomats work ever more closely with the
military, while the State Department is
transforming itself into an unofficial arm of the
Pentagon - as the secretary of state is happy to
admit - as well as of the weapons industry.
And keep in mind that we now have two
Pentagons, thanks to the establishment of the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is
focused, among other things, on militarizing the
southern border. Meanwhile, with the help of the
DHS, local police forces nationwide have, over the
past decade, been significantly up-armored and
have, in the name of fighting terrorism, gained a
distinctly military patina. They have ever more
access to elaborate weaponry and gadgets,
including billions of dollars of surplus military
equipment of every sort, often being funneled to
once-peaceable small-town police departments.
The military solution in the Greater
Middle East Militarization in the US is
hardly a new phenomenon. It can be traced back
decades, but the process hit warp speed in in the
years after the September 11 attacks, even if the
country still lacks the classic look of a
militarized society. Almost unnoticed has been an
accompanying transformation of the mindset of
Washington - what might be called the
militarization of solutions.
If the
institutions of US life and governance are
increasingly militarized, then it shouldn't be
surprising that the problems facing the country
are ever more often framed in militarized terms
and that the only solutions considered are
similarly militarized. This paucity of
imagination, this constraining of what might be
possible, seems especially evident in the Greater
Middle East.
In fact, Washington's record
there, seldom if ever collected in one place,
should be eye-opening. Start with a dose of irony:
Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was a
commonplace among neo-conservatives to label the
region extending across the oil heartlands of the
planet, from North Africa to the Chinese border in
Central Asia, "the arc of instability". After a
decade in which Washington has applied its
military might and thoroughly militarized
solutions to the region, that decade-old world now
looks remarkably "stable".
Here, in
shorthand, is a little regional scorecard of what
US militarization has meant in the Greater Middle
East, 2001-2012:
Pakistan: The US
has faced a multitude of complex problems in this
nuclear nation beset with insurgent movements, its
tribal areas providing sanctuary to both Afghan
and Pakistani rebels and jihadis, and its
intelligence service entangled in a complicated
relationship with the Taliban leadership as well
as other rebel groups fighting in Afghanistan.
Washington's response has been - as Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta recently labeled it - war. In
2004, the George W Bush administration launched a
drone assassination campaign in the country's
tribal borderlands largely focused on al-Qaeda
leaders (combined with a few cross-border
special-forces raids). Those rare robotic air
strikes have since expanded into something like a
full-scale covert drone war that is killing
civilians, is intensely unpopular throughout
Pakistan, and by now is clearly meant to punish
the Pakistani leadership for its transgressions as
well.
Frustrated by what they consider
Pakistani intransigence, elements in the US
military and intelligence community are reportedly
pressing to add a new set of cross-border joint
special operations/Afghan commando raids to the
present incendiary mix. US air strikes from
Afghanistan that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last
November, with no apologies offered for seven
months, brought to a boil a crisis in relations
between Washington and Islamabad, with the
Pakistani government closing off the country to US
war supplies headed for Afghanistan. (That added a
couple of billion dollars to the Pentagon's
expenses there before the crisis was ended with a
grudging apology this week.) The whole process has
clearly contributed to the destabilization of
nuclear Pakistan.
Afghanistan:
After a November 2001 invasion (light on invading
US troops), the United States opted for a
full-scale occupation and reconstruction of the
country. In the process, it managed to spur the
reconstruction and reconstitution of the
previously deeply unpopular and defeated Taliban
movement. An insurgent war followed. Despite a
massive surge of US forces, CIA agents,
special-operations troops, and private contractors
into the country, the calling in of air power in a
major way, and the expansion of a program of
"night raids" by special-ops types and the CIA,
success has not followed. By the end of 2014, the
US is scheduled to withdraw its main combat forces
from what is likely to be a thoroughly
destabilized country.
Iran: In a program long
aimed at regime change (but officially focused on
the country's nuclear program), the US has clamped
energy sanctions - often seen as an act of war -
on Iran, supported a special-operations campaign
of unknown proportions (including cross-border
actions), run a massive CIA drone surveillance
program in the country's skies, and (with the
Israelis) loosed at least two major malware
"worms" against the computer systems and
centrifuges of its nuclear facilities, which even
the Pentagon defines as acts of war. It has also
backed a massive buildup of US naval and air power
in the Persian Gulf and of
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