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April 11, 2008 Minor as that Somali mis-strike might seem,
this is not, in fact, a small matter. Think of that strike and
the many like it around the world over these last years as
reflections of George Bush's post-9/11 update of globalization.
After all, the most basic principle of his Global War on Terror
has been the erasure of global boundaries and whatever
international agreements about war-making might go with them.
Across the Islamic world, in particular, boundaries simply no
longer matter. In fact, in such regions no aspect of sovereignty
can now constrain a U.S. president from acting as he pleases in
pursuit of whatever he may personally define as American
interests.
"Assassinations by air" are, writes David Case in Mother Jones
magazine, "a relatively new tactic in warfare." By the beginning
of 2006, however, U.S. Predator drones "bearing Hellfire
missiles -- the preferred weapon in decapitation [strikes] --
had already hit 'terrorist suspects overseas' at least 19 times
since 9/11." Such strikes and other similar operations by air,
land, and sea have been a crucial follow-on to the Bush
administration's proclamations, immediately after 9/11, that
there would be no "safe havens" for terrorists on the planet,
nor safety for those countries which housed them, inadvertently
or otherwise. Within days of the destruction of the World Trade
Center towers, Bush administration officials were already
identifying up to 60 countries-cum-targets.
This aspect of the Bush Doctrine, of what the President likes to
call staying "on the offensive," when mixed with a couple of
decades of "advances" in air warfare, including the development
of sophisticated, missile-armed drones, "smart bombs,"
"precision-guided munitions," and the like, has resulted in a
lethal globalizing brew of assassination and destruction. It
recognizes neither boundaries, nor sovereignty across much of
the planet. With all its "actionable" possibilities, it will
surely be with us long after George W. Bush has left office.
Of course, those few nameless dead or wounded Somali civilians
-- swatted like so many flies and forgotten as quickly as flies
would be -- don't faintly match up against the "dozens" of Iraqi
civilian deaths that, according to Human Rights Watch, were
caused by 50 decapitation strikes launched against the top
officials of Saddam Hussein's regime back in March 2003. (Not a
single official was harmed.)
Nor do they quite make it into the company of the "Afghan
elders" being taken to President Hamid Karzai's inauguration
back in 2001, who were mistaken "for a Taliban group" and
bombed, with 20 killed; nor the 30 or more guests at an Afghan
wedding party back in 2002 blown away by 2,000-pound bombs after
celebratory gunfire was evidently mistaken for an attack (no
apologies offered); nor that wedding party in the Western desert
of Iraq near the Syrian border wiped out in 2004 with 42 deaths,
including 27 in one extended family, 14 children in all. They
were, of course, taken for terrorists. (As U.S. Major General
James Mathis put the matter in offering an explanation: "How
many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding
80 miles from the nearest civilization?")
And these are just a few prominent cases, not including the
civilians killed in periodic Predator and other strikes in
Pakistani border areas, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere whom no
fuss is ever made about -- not here, anyway.
After all, there's always going to be "collateral damage" when
you keep your eye -- and your 2,000-pound bomb or Hellfire
missile -- focused on the prize.
The "right" to kill civilians
Remember back in the 1990s, when the glories of an economically
borderless world were being limned? Just after September 11,
2001, the Bush administration proudly declared us to be in a far
darker world without borders (except, of course, when it came to
our own). In this new world, whether we knew it or not, whether
we cared or not, we granted our highest officials --
specifically our military and intelligence services -- the full
powers of prosecutor, defense counsel, judge, jury, and
executioner, as well as the right to report on such events only
to the extent, and as, they wished.
Our domain, it seems, is now much of the globe, when it comes to
the bloody work of assassinating individuals via bombs or
missiles that, however precise, surgical, and smart, are weapons
meant to kill en masse and largely without discrimination.
There are still limits of sorts on such actions. These put
bluntly -- though no one is likely to say this --- are the
limits imposed, in part, by racism, by gradations, however
unspoken, in the global value given to a human life.
The Bush administration has, so far, only been willing to carry
out "decapitation" strikes in countries where human life is, by
implication, of less or little value. It has yet to carry one
out in London or Hamburg or Tokyo or Moscow or the Chinese
countryside, even though "terrorist suspects" abound everywhere,
even (as with the Anthrax attacks of 2001) in our own country.
On the other hand, given the impetus of this kind of
globalization, who knows when such a strike might come. After
all, the CIA has already carried out clearly illegal,
sovereignty-violating "extraordinary rendition" operations
(kidnappings of terror suspects) on the streets of European
cities.
In this country, we still theoretically venerate the sovereign
self ("the individual") and that self's right to "life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness." Despite George Bush's "Freedom
Agenda," however, the sovereignty, not to say the life, liberty,
and happiness of other peoples, individually or collectively,
have not really been much on our minds these last years. Our
freedom of action, our safety, has been the only freedom, the
only "security," to which we have attached much global value.
And don't for a second think that, when the "actionable
intelligence" comes in to John McCain's, Hillary Clinton's, or
Barack Obama's Oval Office, those Predators won't be soaring or
those cruise missiles leaving subs lurking off some coast -- and
that innocent civilians elsewhere won't continue to die.
In places like Somalia, we deliver death, and every now and then
an American bomb or missile actually obliterates a terrorist
suspect. Then we celebrate. The rest of time, it's hardly even
news. When the deeper principle behind such global strikes is
mentioned in our papers, in some passing paragraph, it's done --
as in a recent Washington Post article about a Predator strike,
piloted from Nevada, that killed a suspected "senior al-Qaeda
commander" in Pakistan -- in this polite way: "Independent
actions by U.S. military forces on another country's sovereign
territory are always controversial..." (Imagine the language
that the Washington Post would use, if that had been a Pakistani
drone strike in Utah.)
This version of globalization is already so much the norm of our
world that few here even blink an eye when it's reported, or
consider it even slightly strange. It's already an American
right. In the meantime, other people, who obviously don't rise
to the level of our humanity, regularly die.
And here's the thing: In our world, there is a chasm that can
never be breached between, say, an extremist clothed in a
'suicide' vest who walks into a market in Baghdad with the
barbaric intent of killing as many civilians as possible, and an
air or missile attack, done in the name of American "security"
and aimed at a "known terrorist," that just happens to --
repeatedly --- kill innocent civilians. And yet, what if you
know before you launch your attack, as American planners
certainly must, that the odds are innocents (and probably no one
else) will die?
Not so long ago in the United States, presidentially sanctioned
assassinations abroad were illegal. But that was then, this is
so now. Nonetheless, it's a fact that the "right" to missile,
bomb, shell, "decapitate," or assassinate those we declare to be
our enemies, without regard to borders or sovereignty, is based
on nothing more than the power to do it. This is simply the
"right" of force (and of technology). If the tables were turned,
any American would recognize such acts for the barbarism they
represent.
And yet, late last week, like clockwork, the Associated Press
brought us the latest notice: "In Afghanistan, a spokesman for
the American-led coalition said troops had used
'precision-guided munitions' to strike a compound about a mile
inside Pakistan..." This operation was, as they all are, said to
be based on "reliable intelligence"; in this case, "senior"
Taliban commanders were said to be in residence.
As it happened, according to the Pakistani military and the AP
reporter who made it to Tangrai, a village of about forty
houses, the residence hit was that of "Noor Khan, a greengrocer
who said the house was his family home." The AP reporter added
that "only one of its four walls was standing amid a tangle of
mud bricks, bedding and cooking pots." And Noor Khan, who was
quoted saying, "We are innocent, we have nothing to do with such
things," claimed that six of his relatives, four women and two
boys, had been killed. (The Pakistani military, on
investigating, reported that two women and two children had
died.)
This was but the latest minor decapitation strike, and -- we can
be sure of this -- not the last. Philip K. Dick move over. We're
already in your future.
-- Tom Engelhardt |
