And that’s amazing when you think about it, since globally Americans are constantly building and upgrading military bases. The Pentagon is hooked. In Afghanistan, it’s gone totally wild—more than four hundred of them and still building! Not only that, Washington is now deep into negotiations with the Afghan government to transform some of them into “joint bases” and stay on them if not until hell freezes over, then at least until Afghan soldiers can be whipped into an American-style army. Latest best guesstimate for that? 2017without even getting close. Fortunately, we plan to turn those many bases we built to the tune of billions of dollars, including the gigantic establishments at Bagram and Kandahar, over to the Afghans and just hang around, possibly “for decades,” as—and the word couldn’t be more delicate or thoughtful—“tenants.”
And by the way, accompanying reports that the CIA is preparing to lend the U.S. military a major covert hand, drone-style, in its Yemen campaign, was news that the agency is building a base of its own on a rushed schedule in an unnamed Persian Gulf country. Just one base. But don’t expect that to be the end of it. After all, that’s like eating one potato chip.
If our bases are shots of heroin, then for the U.S. military leaving anyplace represents a form of “withdrawal,” which means the shakes. Like drugs, it just feel so darn good to go in that Washington keeps doing it again and again. Getting out’s the bear. Who can blame them if they don’t want to leave?
In Iraq, for instance, Washington has been in the grips of withdrawal fever since the Bush administration agreed in 2008 that all U.S. troops would leave by the end of 2011. You can still hear those combat boots dragging in the sand with top administration and military officials practically begging the Iraqis to let us remain on a few of our monster bases, like the ill-named Camp Victory or Balad Air Base. But here’s the thing: even if the U.S. military officially departs, lock, stock, and (gun) barrel, Washington’s still not really planning on leaving. Instead, the Obama administration is planning to militarize the State Department, turning its embassy in Baghdad and its consulates into a little archipelago of bases defended by 5,100 hire-a-guns and a small mercenary air force.
In sum, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya” is not a song that Washington likes to sing.
Is it even a “war” if only one side ever appears in person and only one side ever suffers damage? In this sense, America’s drones are something new in the history of warfare. Drones are, of course, the weaponry of choice in our covert wars, which means that the military just can’t wait to usher chosen reporters into its secret labs and experimental testing grounds to reveal dazzling visions of future robotic destruction.
To make sense of drones, we probably have to stop thinking about “war” and start envisaging other models—for example, that of the executioner who carries out a death sentence on another human being at no danger to himself. If a pilotless drone is actually an executioner’s weapon, a modern airborne version of the guillotine, the hangman’s noose, or the electric chair, the death sentence it carries with it is not decreed by a judge and certainly not by a jury of peers.
It’s assembled by intelligence agents based on fragmentary (and often self-interested) evidence, organized by targeters, and given the thumbs-up by military or CIA lawyers. All of them are scores, hundreds, thousands of miles away from their victims, people they don’t know and may not faintly understand or share a culture with. In addition, the capital offenses are often not established, still to be carried out, never to be carried out, or nonexistent. The fact that drones, despite their “precision” weaponry, regularly take out innocent civilians as well as prospective or actual terrorists reminds us that, if this is our model, Washington is a drunken executioner.
In a sense, Bush’s Global War on Terror called drones up from the depths of its unconscious to fulfill its most basic urges: to be endless and to reach anywhere on Earth with an Old Testament–style sense of vengeance. The drone makes mincemeat of victory (which involves an endpoint), withdrawal (for which you have to be there in the first place), and national sovereignty (see below).
Don’t be distracted by the $6.6 billion that, in the form of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, the Bush administration loaded onto C-130 transport planes, flew to liberated Iraq in 2003 for “reconstruction” purposes, and somehow mislaid. The U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction did suggest that it might prove to be “the largest theft of funds in national history.” On the other hand, accidents happen.
Iraq’s parliamentary speaker claims that up to $18.7 billion in Iraqi oil funds have gone missing in action, but Iraqis, as you know, are corrupt and unreliable. So pay no attention. Anyway, not to worry, it wasn’t our money. All those crisp Benjamins came from Iraqi oil revenues that just happened to be held by U.S. banks. And in war zones, what can you do? Sometimes bad things happen to good $100 bills!
In any case, corruption is endemic to the societies of the Greater Middle East, which lack the institutional foundations of democratic societies. Not surprisingly then, in impoverished, narcotized Afghanistan, it’s run wild. Fortunately, Washington has fought nobly against its ravages for years. Time and again, top American officials have cajoled, threatened, even browbeat Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his compatriots to get them to crack down on corrupt practices and hold honest elections to build support for the American-backed government in Kabul.
Here’s the funny thing though: a report on Afghan reconstruction released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff in June 2011 suggested that the military and foreign “developmental” funds that have poured into the country, and which account for 97 percent of its gross domestic product, have played a major role in encouraging corruption. To find a peacetime equivalent, imagine firemen rushing to a blaze only to pour gasoline on it and then lash out at the building’s dwellers as arsonists.
Here’s the credo of the American war state in the twenty-first century. Please memorize it. The world is our oyster. We shall not weep. We may missile (bomb, assassinate, night raid, invade) whom we please, when we please, where we please. This is to be called “American safety.”
Those elsewhere, with a misplaced reverence for their own safety or security, or an overblown sense of pride and self-worth, who put themselves in harm’s way—watch out. After all, in a phrase: Sovereignty ‘R’ Us.
Note: As we still live on a one-way imperial planet, don’t try reversing any of the above, not even as a thought experiment. Don’t imagine Iranian drones hunting terrorists over Southern California or Pakistani special operations forces launching night raids on small Midwestern towns. Not if you know what’s good for you.
Which is undoubtedly why the Obama administration decided not to ask Congress for approval of its Libyan intervention as required by the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The administration instead issued a report essentially declaring Libya not to be a “war” at all, and so not to fall under the provisions of that resolution. As that report explained: “U.S. operations [in Libya] do not involve [1] sustained fighting or [2] active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve [3] the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties, or a serious threat thereof, or [4] any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”
This, of course, opens up the possibility of quite a new and sunny American future, one in which it will no longer be wildly utopian to imagine war becoming extinct. After all, the Obama administration is already moving to intensify and expand its (fill in the blank) in Yemen, which will meet all of the above criteria, as its (fill in the blank) in the Pakistani tribal borderlands already does. Someday, Washington could be making America safe all over the globe in what would, miraculously, be a thoroughly warless world.
