The United States of Fear

Planetary Predators

Whether in the skies or patrolling on the ground, Americans know next to nothing of the worlds they are passing above or through. This is, of course, even more true of the “pilots” who fly our latest wonder weapons, the Predators, Reapers, and other unmanned drones over American battle zones, while sitting at consoles somewhere in the United States. They are clearly engaged in the most literal of video-game wars, while living the most prosaic of godlike lives. A sign at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada warns such a drone pilot to “drive carefully” on leaving the base after a work shift “in” Afghanistan or Iraq. This, it says, is “the most dangerous part of your day.”

One instructor of drone pilots has described this form of warfare vividly: “Flying a Predator is like a chess game…. Because you have a God’s-eye perspective, you need to think a few moves ahead.” However much you may “think ahead,” though, the tiny, barely distinguishable creatures you’re deciding whether or not to eradicate certainly don’t inhabit the same universe as you, with your own looming needs, troubles, and concerns.

Here’s the fact of the matter: in the cities, towns, and villages of the distant lands where Americans tend to make war, civilians die regularly and repeatedly at our hands. Each death may contain its own uniquely nightmarish details, but the overall story remains remarkably repetitious. Such “incidents” are completely predictable. Even General McChrystal, determined to “protect the population” in Afghanistan as part of his counterinsurgency war, has proven remarkably incapable of changing the nature of our style of warfare. Curtail air strikes, rein in special operations night attacks—none of it will, in the long run, matter. Put in a nutshell: If you arrive from the heavens, they will die.

Having watched the death of his son, the twenty-two-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, in that July 2007 video, his father said: “At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth…. If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?” Noor-Eldeen may not have gone far enough. For that helicopter crew, his son was indeed the wartime equivalent of a hunted animal. An article on the front page of the New York Times captured this perspective, however inadvertently, when, speaking of the CIA’s aerial war over Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, it described the agency’s unmanned drones as “observing and tracking targets, then unleashing missiles on their quarry.” The word quarry has quite a straightforward definition: “a hunted animal; prey.” Indeed, the al-Qaeda leaders, Taliban militants, and local civilians in the region are all “prey” which, of course, makes us the predators. That the majority of drones cruising those skies 24-7 and repeatedly launching their Hellfire missiles are named “Predators” should come as no surprise.

Americans are unused to being the prey in war and so essentially incapable of imagining what that actually means, day in, day out, year after year. We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes—“collateral damage”—when they are the norm, not what’s collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best of values and intentions to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus, we have a tendency to flatter ourselves, even as we continually remake the “rules of engagement” to suit our changing tastes and needs, while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.

In this way, for instance, assassination-by-drone has become an ever more central part of the Obama administration’s foreign and war policy, and yet the word assassination—with all its negative implications, legal and otherwise—has been displaced by the far more anodyne, bureaucratic term targeted killing. In a sense, in fact, what “enhanced interrogation techniques” were to the Bush administration, “targeted killing” is to the Obama administration.

For the gods, anything is possible. In the language of Olympian war, for instance, even sitting at a console thousands of miles from the not-quite-humans you are preparing to obliterate can become an act worthy of Homeric praise. As Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported, Colonel Eric Mathewson, the air force officer with the most experience with unmanned aircraft, has a new notion of “valor,” a word “which is a part of almost every combat award citation.” “Valor to me is not risking your life,” he says. “Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons.”

What the gods do is, by definition, glorious.

Descending from on High

It’s not only the American way of war, but the American way of statecraft that arrives as if from the heavens, ready to impose its own definitions of the good and necessary on the world. American officials, civilian and military, constantly fly into the embattled (and let’s be blunt: Muslim) regions of the planet to make demands, order, chide, plead, wheedle, cajole, intimidate, threaten, twist arms, and bluster to get our “allies” to do what we most want.

Our special plenipotentiaries, our envoys, our secretary of state, our chairman of the Joint Chiefs, our Centcom commander, and our secretary of defense descend from the clouds on Islamabad, Kabul, or Baghdad frequently. Our vice president careens Iraq-wards to help mediate disputes, and even our president, the “heaviest political artillery” (as one analyst called him), dropped in for a six-hour visit to “Afghanistan” (actually the hanger of a large American air base and the presidential palace in Kabul) in 2010. While there—as American papers reported quite proudly—he chided and “pressed” Afghan president Hamid Karzai, offered “pointed criticism” on corruption, and delivered “a tough message.” He then returned to the United States to find, to the surprise and frustration of his top officials, that Karzai—almost immediately accused of being unstable, possibly on drugs, and prone to childlike tantrums—responded by lashing out at his American minders.

We are, of course, the rational ones, the grown-ups, the good governance team, the incorruptible crew who bring enlightenment and democracy to the world, even if, as practical gods, in support of our Afghan War we’re perfectly willing to shore up a corrupt autocrat elsewhere who is willing to lend us an air base (for $60 million a year in rent) to haul in troops and supplies—until he falls.

All of this is par for the course for the Olympians from North America. It all seems normal, even benign, except in the rare moments when videos of slaughter begin to circulate. Viewed from the ground up, however, we undoubtedly seem as petulant as the gods or demiurges of some malign religion, or as the aliens and predators of some horrific sci-fi film—heartless, unfeeling, and murderous. As Safa Chmagh, the brother of one of the Reuters employees who died in the 2007 Apache attack, reportedly said: “The pilot is not human, he’s a monster. What did my brother do? What did his children do? Does the pilot accept his kids to be orphans?”

As with tales humans tell of the gods, there’s a moral here: If you want it to be otherwise, don’t descend on strange lands armed to the teeth, prepared to occupy, and ready to kill.

The Perfect American Weapon

Before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the United States had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan. In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, would be turned into twisted metal and ash—the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.

Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered. According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable—so the CIA director and vice president claimed—of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the East Coast of the United States.