I've gotten past the debate over the candidate whose name rhymes with Fawn Hall. Really, I have. I hope we all have. But I also hope we keep discussing issues related to the U.S military machine, which often get short shrift and which the RP debate sometimes illuminated and just as often obscured. Reading diaries and comments, I had the sense that even some well-informed liberals don't quite grasp the significance or scope of this collection of issues.
I kept hearing that that the National Security State and related issues were of secondary importance relative to bread-and-butter issues and that we were discussing "one or two issues." But U.S armed imperialism is about "one or two issues" in the sense that the American oligarchy is about "one or two issues." The U.S military presence in the world is fundamental. It affects the lives of billions of people, including Americans. It's tied to security, economics, racism, environmental degradation, you name it.
I also keep hearing some version of: Same as it ever was. I'm sympathetic to this argument -- it has the benefit of being mostly true -- but only insofar as it provides perspective. The rich history of American brutality should not be used to excuse today's. That would seem to go out without saying yet every time I write about American violence overseas, people attempt to minimize and normalize it by referring to the country's past transgressions.
Not only does the same-as-ever-was argument stench of fatalism, it obscures the ways in which American militarism is changing. Its new manifestations may not be (or may be) unprecedentedly problematic, but they pose new problems for our ostensible democracy and for those of us who hope to scale back the American military empire.
Specifically, the United States is increasingly relying on military actions that are least partly covert. One component of the country's secret war -- its drone program -- has gotten quite a bit of (though not enough) attention, but there's been very little discussion of its other main component, Special Ops, which are becoming their own worldwide army.
Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently. This global presence -- in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world...
In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once “special” for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.
You may argue that Special Ops missions are the best way to project force in that they're least likely to result in deadly accidents. I'll cede the point: deploying Special Ops in 120 countries is better than occupying or bombing 120 countries -- now can we talk about the issue? The issue is all the violence being done in secret. Declared wars, for all their horror, allow for Congressional oversight, debate, and votes. Also political pushback via the ballot box.
I'm not one who prays to the framers; their decisions like anyone's should be judged on their merits or lack thereof. But one good thing they did, as Charlie Pierce points out, was to place the decision to go to war in the hands of Congress.
Secret wars are still wars. There will be atrocities. And, because this is the nature of all governments in all wars, these atrocities will be covered up and lied about. But the problem with secret wars is not that they are secret from the people on whom they are waged, or the people who simply live in the country where they are waged. As Doonesbury once memorably pointed out, the "secret bombing" of Cambodia wasn't any secret to the Cambodians. But secret wars, waged by the Executive branch beyond the reach of congressional oversight, inevitably lead to a deep and abiding corruption in the government of this country. It is unavoidable now. It was unavoidable in the 1980's, when Reagan and his band of geopolitical fantasts were running amok in Central America. And it was unavoidable in 1793, when James Madison warned us, quite clearly:
In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man: not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement...
Hence it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.
Secret war is anathema to free government. Period. Now, you can argue that it's necessary, that the world has changed, that dangers come upon us too quickly, that the length and breadth of the evil in the world has made the perils Madison described quaint and irrelevant. You can do all that and people will applaud you and elect you president. But you cannot make the argument that secret wars conducted by the Executive are consonant with constitutional government, because they are not, and they never will be, and because, sooner or later, you wind up lying about the rape and murder of nuns.
And there's also the not-minor matter of International Law. A secret worldwide military force deployed in 120 nations doesn't just violate international law; it makes a mockery of it.
120/196. I'm not sure what to do with this information. It's hard enough to mobilize opposition to an official, declared disaster like the war in Afghanistan. Which, of course, is the very purpose of secret warfare, to be able to kill and impose American will on the world and generally do very bad shit with impunity. Mission accomplished.