Empire
of Destruction
Precision
Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh
By
Tom Engelhardt
July
21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- You remember. It was supposed to be
twenty-first-century war, American-style:
precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones
capable of taking out a carefully identified and
tracked human being just about anywhere on
Earth; special operations raids so
pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a
triumph of modern military science. Everything
“networked.” It was to be a glorious dream of
limited destruction combined with unlimited
power and success. In reality, it would prove
to be a nightmare of the first order.
If you
want a single word to summarize American
war-making in this last decade and a half, I
would suggest rubble. It's been a painfully apt
term since September 11, 2001. In addition, to
catch the essence of such war in this century,
two new words might be useful: rubblize and
rubblization. Let me explain what I mean.
In recent weeks, another major city in Iraq has
officially been “liberated”
(almost)
from the militants of the Islamic State.
However, the results of the U.S.-backed Iraqi
military campaign to retake Mosul, that
country’s second largest city, don’t fit any
ordinary definition of triumph or victory. It
began in October 2016 and, at nine months and
counting, has been
longer than the
World War II battle of Stalingrad. Week after
week, in street to street fighting, with
U.S. airstrikes
repeatedly called in on neighborhoods still
filled with terrified Mosulites, unknown but
potentially staggering
numbers of civilians have died.
More than a million
people -- yes, you read that figure correctly --
were uprooted from their homes and major
portions of the Western half of the city they
fled, including its ancient historic sections,
have been turned into
rubble.
This
should be the definition of victory as defeat,
success as disaster. It’s also a pattern. It’s
been the essential story of the American war on
terror since, in the month after the 9/11
attacks, President George W. Bush loosed
American air power on Afghanistan. That first
air campaign began what has increasingly come to
look like the full-scale rubblization of
significant parts of the Greater Middle East.
By not simply going after the crew who committed
those attacks but deciding to take down the
Taliban, occupy Afghanistan, and in 2003, invade
Iraq, Bush's administration opened the
proverbial can of worms in that vast region. An
imperial urge to overthrow Iraqi ruler Saddam
Hussein, who had once been Washington’s
guy in the
Middle East only to become its mortal enemy (and
who had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11),
proved one of the fatal miscalculations of the
imperial era.
So, too, did the deeply
engrained fantasy
of Bush administration officials that they
controlled a high-tech, precision military that
could project power in ways no other nation on
the planet or in history ever had; a military
that would be, in the
president’s words,
“the greatest force for human liberation the
world has ever known.” With Iraq occupied and
garrisoned (Korea-style)
for generations to come, his top officials
assumed that they would take down fundamentalist
Iran (sound familiar?) and other hostile regimes
in the region, creating a Pax Americana
there. (Hence, the particular irony of the
present
Iranian ascendancy
in Iraq.) In the pursuit of such fantasies of
global power, the Bush administration, in
effect, punched a devastating hole in the oil
heartlands of the Middle East. In the
pungent imagery
of Abu Mussa, head of the Arab League at the
time, the U.S. chose to drive straight through
“the gates of hell.”
Rubblizing
the Greater Middle East
In the 15-plus years since 9/11, parts of an
expanding swathe of the planet -- from
Pakistan’s borderlands in South Asia to Libya in
North Africa -- were catastrophically unsettled.
Tiny groups of Islamic terrorists multiplied
exponentially into both local and transnational
organizations, spreading across the region with
the help of American “precision” warfare and the
anger it stirred among helpless civilian
populations. States began to totter or
fail.
Countries essentially collapsed, loosing a
tide of refugees
on the world, as year after year, the U.S.
military, its
Special Operations forces,
and the CIA were increasingly deployed in one
fashion or another in one country after another.
Though in case after case the results were
visibly disastrous, like so many addicts, the
three post-9/11 administrations in Washington
seemed incapable of drawing the obvious
conclusions and instead continued to do
more of the same
(with modest adjustments of one sort of
another). The results, unsurprisingly enough,
were similarly disappointing or disastrous.
Despite the doubts about such a form of global
warfare that candidate Trump raised during the
2016 election campaign, the process has only
escalated in the first months of his presidency.
Washington, it seems, just can’t help itself in
its drive to pursue this version of war in all
its grim imprecision to its increasingly
imprecise but predictably destructive
conclusions. Worse yet, if the leading military
and political figures in Washington have their
way, none of this may end in our lifetime. (In
recent years, for example, the Pentagon and
those who channel its thoughts have begun
speaking of a “generational
approach” or a
“generational
struggle” in
Afghanistan.)
If
anything, so many years after it was launched,
the war on terror shows every sign of continuing
to expand and rubble is increasingly the name of
the game. Here’s a very partial tally sheet on
the subject:
In addition to Mosul, a number of Iraq’s other
major cities and towns -- including
Ramadi and
Fallujah --
have also been reduced to rubble. Across the
border in Syria, where a brutal civil war has
been raging for six years, numerous cities and
towns from
Homs to parts
of
Aleppo have
essentially been destroyed. Raqqa, the “capital”
of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, is now
under siege. (American Special Operations forces
are already
reportedly active
inside its breached walls, working with allied
Kurdish and Syrian rebel forces.) It, too, will
be “liberated” sooner or later -- that is to
say, destroyed.
As in Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, American
planes have been striking ISIS positions in the
urban heart of Raqqa and
killing civilians,
evidently in sizeable numbers, while rubblizing
parts of the city. And such activities have in
recent years only been spreading. In distant
Libya, for instance, the city of
Sirte is in
ruins after a similar struggle involving local
forces, American air power, and ISIS militants.
In Yemen, for the last two years the Saudis have
been conducting a never-ending air campaign
(with
American support),
significantly aimed at the civilian population;
they have, that is, been rubblizing that
country, while paving the way for a
devastating famine
and a horrific
cholera epidemic
that can’t be checked, given the condition of
that impoverished, embattled land.
Only recently, this sort of destruction has
spread for the first time beyond the Greater
Middle East and parts of Africa. In late May, on
the island of Mindanao in the southern
Philippines, local Muslim rebels
identified with ISIS
took Marawi City. Since they moved in, much of
its population of 200,000 has been displaced and
almost two months later they
still hold
parts of the city, while engaged in Mosul-style
urban warfare with the Filipino military (backed
by U.S. Special
Operations advisers). In the process, the area
has
reportedly suffered
Mosul-style rubblization.
In most of these rubblized cities and the
regions around them, even when “victory” is
declared, worse yet is in sight. In Iraq, for
instance, with the “caliphate” of Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi now being dismantled, ISIS remains a
genuinely threatening
guerilla force, the Sunni and Shiite communities
(including armed Shiite militias) show little
sign of coming together, and in the north of the
country the Kurds are
threatening to
declare an independent state. So fighting of
various sorts is essentially guaranteed and the
possibility of
Iraq turning into a full-scale failed state or
several devastated mini-states remains all too
real, even as the Trump administration is
reportedly
pushing
Congress for permission to construct and occupy
new “temporary” military bases and other
facilities in the country (and in neighboring
Syria).
Worse yet, across the Greater Middle East,
“reconstruction” is basically
not even a concept.
There’s simply no money for it. Oil prices
remain deeply
depressed and,
from Libya and Yemen to Iraq and Syria,
countries are either too poor or too divided to
begin the reconstruction of much of anything.
Nor -- and this is a given -- will Donald
Trump’s America be launching the war-on-terror
equivalent of a Marshall Plan for the region.
And even if it did, the record of the post-9/11
years already shows that the highly militarized
American version of “reconstruction” or “nation
building” via crony
warrior corporations
in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been one of the
great scams of
our time. (More American taxpayer dollars have
been poured into reconstruction efforts in
Afghanistan alone than went into
the whole of
the Marshall Plan and it’s painfully obvious how
effective that proved to be.)
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Of course, as in Syria’s civil war, Washington
is hardly responsible for all the destruction in
the region. ISIS itself has been a remarkably
destructive and brutal killing machine with its
own
impressive record
of urban rubblization. And yet most of the
destruction in the region was triggered, at
least, by the militarized dreams and plans of
the Bush administration, by its response to 9/11
(which ended up being something like Osama bin
Laden’s
dream scenario).
Don’t forget that ISIS’s predecessor, al-Qaeda
in Iraq, was a creature of the American invasion
and occupation of that country and that ISIS
itself was
essentially formed
in an American military prison camp in that
country where its future caliph was confined.
And in case you think any lessons have been
learned from all of this, think again. In the
first months of the Trump administration, the
U.S. has essentially decided on a new
mini-surge of
troops and air power in Afghanistan;
deployed for
the first time the largest non-nuclear weapon in
its arsenal there; promised the Saudis more
support in their war in Yemen; has
increased its
air strikes and special operations activities in
Somalia; is
preparing for a
new U.S. military presence in Libya; increased
U.S. forces and
eased the rules
for air strikes in civilian areas of Iraq and
elsewhere; and sent U.S. special operators and
other personnel in rising numbers into both Iraq
and Syria.
No matter the president, the ante only seems to
go up when it comes to the "war on terror," a
war of imprecision that has helped
uproot record
numbers of people on this planet, with the usual
predictable results: the further spread of
terror groups, the further destabilization of
state structures, rising numbers of displaced
and dead civilians, and the rubblization of
expanding parts of the planet.
While
no one would deny the destructive potential of
great imperial powers historically, the American
empire of destruction may be unique. At the
height of its military strength in these years,
it has been utterly incapable of translating
that power advantage into anything but
rubblization.
Living in
the Rubble, a Short History of the Twenty-First
Century
Let me
speak personally here, since I live in the
remarkably protected and peaceful heart of that
empire of destruction and in the very city where
it all began. What eternally puzzles me is the
inability of those who run that imperial
machinery to absorb what’s actually happened
since 9/11 and draw any reasonable conclusions
from it. After all, so much of what I’ve been
describing seems, at this point, dismally
predictable.
If anything, the “generational” nature of the
war on terror and the way it became a permanent
war of terror should by now seem too
obvious for discussion. And yet, whatever he
said on the campaign trail, President Trump
promptly appointed to key positions the
very generals
who have long been immersed in fighting
America’s wars across the Greater Middle East
and are clearly ready to do more of the same.
Why in the world anyone, even those generals,
should imagine that such an approach could
result in anything more “successful” is beyond
me.
In many ways, rubblization has been at the heart
of this whole process, starting with the 9/11
moment. After all, the very point of those
attacks was to turn the symbols of American
power -- the Pentagon (military power); the
World Trade Center (financial power); and the
Capitol or some other Washington edifice
(political power, as the hijacked plane that
crashed in a
field in Pennsylvania was undoubtedly heading
there) -- into so much rubble. In the process,
thousands of innocent civilians were
slaughtered.
In some
ways, much of the rubblization of the Greater
Middle East in recent years could be thought of
as, however unconsciously, a campaign of
vengeance for the horror and insult of the air
assaults on that September morning in 2001,
which pulverized the tallest towers of my
hometown. Ever since, American war has, in a
sense, involved paying Osama bin Laden back in
kind, but on a staggering scale. In
Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, a shocking but
passing moment for Americans has become everyday
life for whole populations and innocents have
died in numbers that would add up to so many
World Trade Centers piled atop each other.
The
origins of TomDispatch, the website I
run, also lie in the rubble. I was in New York
City on that day. I experienced the shock of the
attacks and the smell of those burning
buildings. A friend of mine saw a hijacked
plane hitting one of the towers and another
biked into the smoke-filled area looking for his
daughter. I went down to the site of the
attacks with my own daughter within days and
wandered the nearby streets, catching glimpses
of those giant shards of destroyed buildings.
In the phrase of that moment, in the wake of
9/11, everything “changed” and, in a sense,
indeed it did. I felt it. Who didn't? I noted
the sense of fear rising nationally and the
repetitious ceremonies across the country in
which Americans hailed themselves as the
planet’s most exceptional victims, survivors,
and (in the future) victors. In those post-9/11
weeks, I became increasingly aware of how a
growing sense of shock and a desire for
vengeance among the populace was freeing Bush
administration officials (who had for years
been dreaming
about making the “lone superpower” omnipotent in
a historically unprecedented way) to act more or
less as they wished.
As for
myself, I was overcome by a sense that the
period to follow would be the worst of my life,
far worse than the Vietnam era (the last time I
had been truly mobilized politically). And of
one thing I was certain: things would not go
well. I had an urge to do something, though no
idea what.
In early October 2001, the Bush administration
unleashed its air power on Afghanistan, a
campaign that, in a sense, would never end but
simply spread across the Greater Middle East.
(By now, the U.S. has launched repeated air
strikes in at least
seven countries
in the region.) At that moment, someone emailed
me an article by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan who had
been in the U.S. for years but had continued to
follow events in his country of birth.
His piece, which
appeared at the
website Counterpunch, would prove
prescient indeed, especially since it had been
written in mid-September, just days after 9/11.
At that moment, as Ansary noted, Americans were
already threatening -- in a phrase adopted from
the Vietnam War era -- to bomb Afghanistan “back
to the Stone Age.” What purpose, he wondered,
could possibly be served by such a bombing
campaign since, as he put it, “new bombs would
only stir the rubble of earlier bombs”? As he
pointed out, Afghanistan, then largely ruled by
the grim Taliban, had essentially been turned
into rubble years before in the
proxy war the
Soviets and Americans fought there until the Red
Army limped home in defeat in 1989. The rubble
that was already Afghanistan would only increase
in the brutal civil war that followed. And in
the years before 2001, little had been rebuilt.
So, as Ansary made clear, the U.S. was about to
launch its air power for the first time in the
twenty-first century against a country with
nothing, a country of ruins and in ruins.
From such an act he predicted disaster. And so
it would be. At the time, something about that
image of air strikes on rubble stunned me, in
part because it felt both horrifying and true,
in part because it seemed such an ominous signal
of what might lie in our future, and in part
because nothing like it could then be found in
the mainstream news or in any kind of debate
about how to respond to 9/11 (of which there was
essentially none). Impulsively, I emailed his
piece out with a note of my own to friends and
relatives, something I had never done before.
That, as it turned out, would be the start of
what became an ever-expanding no-name listserv
and, a little more than a year later,
TomDispatch.
A
Plutocracy of the Rubble?
So the
first word to fully catch my attention and set
me in motion in the post-9/11 era was “rubble.”
It’s sad that, almost 16 years later, Americans
are still obsessively afraid for themselves, a
fear that has helped fund and build a national
security state of staggering dimensions. On the
other hand, remarkably few of us have any sense
of the endless 9/11-style experiences our
military has so imprecisely delivered to the
world. The bombs may be smart, but the acts
couldn’t be dumber.
In this country, there is essentially no sense
of responsibility for the spread of terrorism,
the crumbling of states, the destruction of
lives and livelihoods, the tidal flow of
refugees, and
the rubblization of some of the planet’s great
cities. There’s no reasonable assessment of the
true nature and effects of American warfare
abroad: its imprecision, its idiocy, its
destructiveness. In this peaceful land, it’s
hard to imagine the true impact of the
imprecision of war, American-style. Given the
way things are going, it’s easy enough, however,
to imagine the scenario of Tamim Ansari writ
large in the Trump years and those to follow:
Americans continuing to bomb the rubble they had
such a hand in creating across the Greater
Middle East.
And yet distant imperial wars do have a way of
coming home, and not just in the form of
new surveillance techniques,
or drones
flying over
“the homeland,” or the full-scale
militarization
of police forces. Without those disastrous,
never-ending wars, I suspect that the election
of Donald Trump would have been
unlikely. And
while he will not loose such “precision” warfare
on the homeland itself, his project (and that of
the congressional Republicans) -- from health
care to the environment -- is visibly aimed at
rubblizing American society. If he were capable,
he would certainly create a plutocracy of the
rubble in a world where ruins are increasingly
the norm.
Tom
Engelhardt is a co-founder of the
American Empire Project
and the author of The United States of Fear
as well as a history of the Cold War,
The End of Victory Culture.
He is a fellow of the
Nation Institute
and runs
TomDispatch.com.
His latest book is
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Follow
TomDispatch
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out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's
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Since World War II,
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Splinterlands,
Nick Turse’s Next
Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,
and Tom Engelhardt's
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
