Tomgram: Engelhardt, Tomorrow's News Today
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on January 24, 2016, Printed on January 24, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176094/ ;
Failed States and States of Failure
"We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them" and Other Future Headlines
By Tom Engelhardt
One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability,
its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass.
Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply
short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the
spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly,
could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace
(unless, of course, you had read William Gibson's novel Neuromancer 30 years
ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country's intelligence outfits
would be able to listen in on or otherwise intercept and review not just the
conversations and messages of its own citizens -- imagine the totalitarian
regimes of the twentieth century -- but those of just about anyone on the
planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of
major and minor countries around the world? This is, of course, our
dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi
writers somehow didn't imagine.
And who thought that the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street were coming down
the pike or, for that matter, a terror caliphate in the heart of the former
Middle East or a Donald Trump presidential run that would go from success to
success amid free media coverage the likes of which we've seldom seen?
(Small career tip: don't become a seer. It's hell on Earth.)
All of this might be considered the bad but also the good news about the
future. On an increasingly grim globe that seems to have failure stamped
all over it, the surprises embedded in the years to come, the unexpected
course changes, inventions, rebellions, and interventions offer, at least
until they arrive, grounds for hope. On the other hand, in that same grim
world, there's an aspect of the future that couldn't be more depressing: the
repetitiveness of so much that you might think no one would want to repeat.
I'm talking about the range of tomorrow's headlines that could be written
today and stand a painfully reasonable chance of coming true.
I'm sure you could produce your own version of such future headlines in a
variety of areas, but here are mine when it comes to Washington's remarkably
unwinnable wars, interventions, and conflicts in the Greater Middle East and
increasingly Africa.
What "Victory" Looks Like
Let's start with an event that occurred in Iraq as 2015 ended and generated
headlines that included "victory," a word Americans haven't often seen in
the twenty-first century -- except, of course, in Trumpian patter. ("We're
going to win so much -- win after win after win -- that you're going to be
begging me: 'Please, Mr. President, let us lose once or twice. We can't
stand it any more.' And I'm going to say: 'No way. We're going to keep
winning. We're never going to lose. We're never, ever going to lose.'") I'm
talking about the "victory" achieved at Ramadi, a city in al-Anbar Province
that Islamic State (IS or ISIL) militants seized from the Iraqi army in May
2015. With the backing of the U.S. Air Force -- there were more than 600
American air strikes in and around Ramadi in the months leading up to that
victory -- and with U.S.-trained and U.S.-financed local special ops units
leading the way, the Iraqi military did indeed largely take back that
intricately booby-trapped and mined city from heavily entrenched IS
militants in late December. The news was clearly a relief for the Obama
administration and those headlines followed.
And here's what victory turned out to look like: according to the Iraqi
defense minister, at least 80% of the city of 400,000 was destroyed.
Rubblized. Skeletized. "City" may be what it's still called, but it's
hardly an accurate description. According to New York Times reporter Ben
Hubbard, who visited Ramadi soon after the "victory," few inhabitants
remained. Of an Iraqi counterterrorism general there with him, Hubbard
wrote:
"In one neighborhood, he stood before a panorama of wreckage so vast that it
was unclear where the original buildings had stood. He paused when asked how
residents would return to their homes. 'Homes?' he said. 'There are no
homes.'"
Hubbard also cited the head of the Anbar provincial council as estimating
that "rebuilding the city would require $12 billion." (Other Iraqi officials
put that figure at $10 billion.) That's money no one has, including an Iraqi
government increasingly strapped by plummeting oil prices -- and keep in
mind that that's only a single destroyed community. The earlier, smaller
victories of the Kurds at Kobane and Sinjar in Syria, also backed by
devastating U.S. air power, destroyed those towns in a similar fashion, as
for instance has Bashar al-Assad's barrel bombing air force and military in
parts of the city of Aleppo and in the now thoroughly devastated city of
Homs in central Syria. The Russians have, of course, entered the fray, too,
in the American style, bombing and advising.
Let's add one more thing before we write our future headlines. The day
after President Obama gave his final State of the Union address, Secretary
of Defense Ashton Carter visited the 101st Airborne Division at Fort
Campbell, Kentucky. Eighteen hundred of that division's members are soon to
be deployed to Iraq to aid Iraqi military units in their drive to retake
parts of their country from the Islamic State. For those future advisers,
Carter elaborated on the president's plans, laying out in some detail how he
(and presumably Obama) saw the conflict playing out. Favoring the image of
the Islamic State as a metastasizing cancer, he said:
"The ISIL parent tumor has two centers -- Raqqa in Syria, and Mosul in Iraq.
ISIL has used its control of these cities and nearby territories as a power
base from which to derive considerable financial resources, manpower, and
ideological outreach. They constitute ISIL's military, political, economic,
and ideological centers of gravity.
"That's why our campaign plan's map has got big arrows pointing at both
Mosul and Raqqa. We will begin by collapsing ISIL's control over both of
these cities and then engage in elimination operations through other
territories ISIL holds in Iraq and Syria."
In fact, such a campaign would give "elimination operations" new meaning,
since it would clearly involve quite literally eliminating the urban
infrastructure of significant parts of the region. Three cities are, in
fact, at present targeted: Fallujah (population perhaps 300,000), the other
major IS-controlled city in al-Anbar Province, Mosul (the second largest
city in Iraq, with a population presently estimated at 1 to 1.5 million),
and Raqqa, the Syrian "capital" of the Islamic State, now reportedly stuffed
with refugees (population 200,000-plus). Put them together and you have a
2016 plan for a U.S.-backed set of campaigns in Iraq and Syria based on the
same formula as the taking of Ramadi: massive American air power in support
of heavily trained and advised Iraqi special ops forces and army units or,
in Syria, Kurdish peshmerga outfits and assorted Kurdish and Syrian rebels.
Add in the Islamic State's urge to turn the urban areas it holds into giant
bombs and what you have is a plan for the rubblization of yet more cities in
the region.
There has, of course, been much talk about an offensive to retake Mosul
since relatively small numbers of Islamic State fighters captured the city
from tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi troops in June 2014. There was, for
instance, a highly touted spring offensive against Mosul that was much
discussed in early 2015 but never happened, so it's impossible to be sure
that the overstretched, generally underperforming Iraqi military will even
make it to Mosul in 2016 or that there will be any non-American "boots"
available to take Raqqa, especially since that city sits well outside any
imaginable future Kurdistan. Still, assuming all went "well," we essentially
know what the future holds: Ramadi-style "victories."
As a result, the end of the year headline for American/Iraqi/Kurdish/Syrian
rebel operations -- adapted from an infamous 1968 line by an anonymous
American officer in Vietnam after U.S. planes had pummeled the provincial
capital of Ben Tre -- would be: "We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them."
Based on Ramadi, you could then perhaps offer these "ballpark" (not that any
stadiums would be left standing) future estimates for rebuilding: Falluja,
$10 billion; Raqqa, $7 billion; Mosul, $20 to $25 billion. Those are
obviously fantasy figures, but the point is that "success" against and
"victory" over the Islamic State would undoubtedly leave much of the region
a modern Carthage. And who would pay for a new Ramadi, or Mosul, or
Fallujah, or Raqqa, no less all of them and more?
Put another way, "victory" would mean that Iraq will have far fewer
habitable cities and a far larger number of displaced people whose
resettlement will undoubtedly be subject to the ethnic tensions that helped
fuel the Islamic State in the first place. This represents a reasonably
predictable future, one that should be obvious enough to anyone who took a
half-serious look at the situation. It certainly should be obvious to
Ashton Carter, as well as to American planners at the Pentagon and in the
Obama administration. And yet the planning goes on as if "victory" were a
meaningful category under the circumstances.
And here's the thing: you can join the Islamic State in blowing up the
physical plant of Syria and parts of Iraq and then eject its fighters from
the rubble, but you'll be destroying the means of existence of a vast,
increasingly unsettled population. What you may not be able to do in the
process is destroy a movement that began in an American military prison in
Iraq and has always been a set of ideas. You may simply create a legend.
Unleashing the Special Operators and the Drones
Now, let's consider another set of potential future headlines linked to
present planning and past experience. Secretary of Defense Carter claims
that the U.S. strategy against the Islamic State is focused on creating
"sustainable political stability in the region," by which he means not just
the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, but all of the Greater Middle East. As
he said to the members of the 101st Airborne:
"Next, let me describe the fight outside of Iraq and Syria. As we work to
destroy the parent tumor in Iraq and Syria, we must also recognize that ISIL
is metastasizing in areas such as North Africa, Afghanistan, and Yemen. The
threat posed by ISIL, and groups like it, is continually evolving, changing
focus and shifting location. It requires from us, therefore, a flexible and
nimble response with a broad reach."
For this, he clearly plans to let loose American Special Operations forces
not just in Syria but elsewhere on assassination missions against key
Islamic State figures or those heading their distant franchises. He's also
intent on sending in the drones across the region in "counter-terror
operations and strikes on high-value targets" to "act decisively to prevent
ISIL affiliates from becoming as great of a threat as the parent tumor
itself."
As with the future taking of cities in Iraq and Syria, there is an
experiential baseline for such operations across the region. In his book
Kill Chain, Andrew Cockburn has called this approach to the enemy "the
kingpin strategy." It was first used in the drug wars in Latin America and
Central America in the 1990s and then, after 9/11, adapted to the weaponized
drone and special operations forces. The idea was to dismantle drug cartels
or later terror outfits from the top down by taking out their leadership
figures.
In fact, in both the drug wars and the terror wars, as Cockburn shows, the
results of this strategy have been repetitiously calamitous. The drone, for
instance, has proven remarkably capable of "eliminating" both the top
leadership of terror groups and key "lieutenants" as well as other
influential figures in those organizations -- with the grimmest results:
under the pressure of the drones and those special ops raids, such
organizations (like the drug cartels before them) simply replaced their dead
leaders with often younger and even more aggressive figures, while attacks
rose and the groups themselves, instead of folding up, spread across the
Greater Middle East and deep into Africa. The drones, bringing with them
relatively widespread "collateral damage," including the deaths of
significant numbers of children, have terrorized the societies over which
they cruise and so proved an ideal recruitment poster for those spreading
terror groups.
Hence, first in the Bush era in a seat-of-the-pants way and then in the
Obama years in a highly organized fashion, drone assassination campaigns in
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia killed
leadership figures while functionally helping to spread the terror
organizations they directed. They have, that is, been engaged not in a war
on terror, but in a war for terror. When you look at the expansion of those
terror outfits, including the growing numbers of "franchises" of the Islamic
State, it should be obvious that, from special ops missions to drone
assassinations, from full-scale invasions to the destruction of cities, the
14-plus years of varied American strategies and military tactics have
repetitively contributed to one horror after another, sucking much of the
region into the vortex.
What's striking when you listen to Secretary of Defense Carter is that,
obvious as this may be, none of it seems to truly penetrate in Washington.
Otherwise how do you explain the lack of any serious recalibration of
American actions, the only debate being between those in the Obama
administration, including the president, who favor a version of mission
creep and their Republican critics who favor doing more in a bigger way? In
other words, in 2016 we're clearly going to witness further rounds of the
utterly familiar with -- somehow -- the expectation that something different
will happen. Since that's not likely, for the next set of future headlines
just reach into the familiar past, substituting, when necessary, the future
terror kingpin's name: "AQAP [al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula] announces
death of [fill in name] in U.S. drone strike," "U.S.: ISIS no. 2 killed in
U.S. drone strike in Iraq," "Army elite Delta Force kills top ISIS official,
[fill in name], in daring Syria raid," "Pentagon says senior al-Qaeda leader
killed in drone strike," and so on more or less ad infinitum.
The Arc of Instability
Recently, with Ashton Carter's strategy for "stability" on my mind, I caught
a phrase in a news report that I hadn't heard for quite a while. A
journalist, perhaps on NPR, was discussing the recent al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terror attack on a hotel in Burkina Faso, a
previously relatively stable country in West Africa, where at least 30 died,
mainly foreigners. He spoke of a spreading "arc of instability" in the
region.
Back in the early years of the century, officials of the Bush administration
and supportive neocons regularly used that phrase to describe the Greater
Middle East, from Pakistan to North Africa. Strangely enough, it disappeared
in the post-Iraqi invasion years and remained largely absent in the Obama
years as the disastrous Libyan intervention, presidentially orchestrated
drone assassination campaigns, and other actions helped further transform
the Greater Middle East into a genuine "arc of instability."
Today, in a way that would have been unimaginable back in 2002-2003, the
region is filled with failing or failed states from Afghanistan and Syria to
Libya, Yemen, and Mali. While Iraq may not quite be a failed state, it is
no longer exactly a country either, but something like a tripartite entity.
And so it goes, and so it evidently will go if the U.S., as in 2015, drops
another 23,000 bombs and thousands of additional munitions on the region --
or far more, as seems likely under the mission-creep pressure of the war
with the Islamic State.
We can't, of course, know just what countries will fail next. However, it's
safe to assume that, as long as the Obama strategy -- and the Hillary
Clinton or Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio one that may follow --
involves more (or much more) of the same, more (or much more) of the same is
likely to happen. As a result, similar predictable headlines will appear,
as countries dissolve in various ways and the Islamic State, groups like
al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or newly founded terror outfits gain
footholds amid the chaos. In that case, you only have to look into the
recent past for headlines-to-come and adapt them slightly: "ISIS Is Building
'Little Nests' in [name of country here], U.S. Defense Secretary Warns,"
"ISIS Is Gaining Ground in [name of country here], Competing with al-Qaeda,"
"Islamic State Gained Strength in [name of country] by Co-opting Local
Jihadists," and so on.
Amid the grimly predictable, there are, of course, many unknowns. Above all,
we have no idea what it means at this point in history to turn a region,
city by city, country by country, into something like a vast failed state
and then continue to bomb the rubble. How do we begin to imagine what could
emerge from the ruins of such a failed region in such a world, from an arc
of instability far vaster than anything we have contemplated since World War
II? I wouldn't want to predict the headlines that could someday emerge from
that situation, but whatever surprises are in store for us, the mere
prospect of such a future should make your blood run cold.
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 on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176094
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Tomorrow's News Today
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on January 24, 2016, Printed on January 24, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176094/ ;
Failed States and States of Failure
"We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them" and Other Future Headlines
By Tom Engelhardt
One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability,
its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass.
Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply
short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the
spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly,
could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace
(unless, of course, you had read William Gibson's novel Neuromancer 30 years
ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country's intelligence outfits
would be able to listen in on or otherwise intercept and review not just the
conversations and messages of its own citizens -- imagine the totalitarian
regimes of the twentieth century -- but those of just about anyone on the
planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of
major and minor countries around the world? This is, of course, our
dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi
writers somehow didn't imagine.
And who thought that the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street were coming down
the pike or, for that matter, a terror caliphate in the heart of the former
Middle East or a Donald Trump presidential run that would go from success to
success amid free media coverage the likes of which we've seldom seen?
(Small career tip: don't become a seer. It's hell on Earth.)
All of this might be considered the bad but also the good news about the
future. On an increasingly grim globe that seems to have failure stamped all
over it, the surprises embedded in the years to come, the unexpected course
changes, inventions, rebellions, and interventions offer, at least until
they arrive, grounds for hope. On the other hand, in that same grim world,
there's an aspect of the future that couldn't be more depressing: the
repetitiveness of so much that you might think no one would want to repeat.
I'm talking about the range of tomorrow's headlines that could be written
today and stand a painfully reasonable chance of coming true.
I'm sure you could produce your own version of such future headlines in a
variety of areas, but here are mine when it comes to Washington's remarkably
unwinnable wars, interventions, and conflicts in the Greater Middle East and
increasingly Africa.
What "Victory" Looks Like
Let's start with an event that occurred in Iraq as 2015 ended and generated
headlines that included "victory," a word Americans haven't often seen in
the twenty-first century -- except, of course, in Trumpian patter. ("We're
going to win so much -- win after win after win -- that you're going to be
begging me: 'Please, Mr. President, let us lose once or twice. We can't
stand it any more.' And I'm going to say: 'No way. We're going to keep
winning. We're never going to lose. We're never, ever going to lose.'") I'm
talking about the "victory" achieved at Ramadi, a city in al-Anbar Province
that Islamic State (IS or ISIL) militants seized from the Iraqi army in May
2015. With the backing of the U.S. Air Force -- there were more than 600
American air strikes in and around Ramadi in the months leading up to that
victory -- and with U.S.-trained and U.S.-financed local special ops units
leading the way, the Iraqi military did indeed largely take back that
intricately booby-trapped and mined city from heavily entrenched IS
militants in late December. The news was clearly a relief for the Obama
administration and those headlines followed.
And here's what victory turned out to look like: according to the Iraqi
defense minister, at least 80% of the city of 400,000 was destroyed.
Rubblized. Skeletized. "City" may be what it's still called, but it's hardly
an accurate description. According to New York Times reporter Ben Hubbard,
who visited Ramadi soon after the "victory," few inhabitants remained. Of an
Iraqi counterterrorism general there with him, Hubbard wrote:
"In one neighborhood, he stood before a panorama of wreckage so vast that it
was unclear where the original buildings had stood. He paused when asked how
residents would return to their homes. 'Homes?' he said. 'There are no
homes.'"
Hubbard also cited the head of the Anbar provincial council as estimating
that "rebuilding the city would require $12 billion." (Other Iraqi officials
put that figure at $10 billion.) That's money no one has, including an Iraqi
government increasingly strapped by plummeting oil prices -- and keep in
mind that that's only a single destroyed community. The earlier, smaller
victories of the Kurds at Kobane and Sinjar in Syria, also backed by
devastating U.S. air power, destroyed those towns in a similar fashion, as
for instance has Bashar al-Assad's barrel bombing air force and military in
parts of the city of Aleppo and in the now thoroughly devastated city of
Homs in central Syria. The Russians have, of course, entered the fray, too,
in the American style, bombing and advising.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Let's add
one more thing before we write our future headlines. The day after President
Obama gave his final State of the Union address, Secretary of Defense Ashton
Carter visited the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Eighteen hundred of that division's members are soon to be deployed to Iraq
to aid Iraqi military units in their drive to retake parts of their country
from the Islamic State. For those future advisers, Carter elaborated on the
president's plans, laying out in some detail how he (and presumably Obama)
saw the conflict playing out. Favoring the image of the Islamic State as a
metastasizing cancer, he said:
"The ISIL parent tumor has two centers -- Raqqa in Syria, and Mosul in Iraq.
ISIL has used its control of these cities and nearby territories as a power
base from which to derive considerable financial resources, manpower, and
ideological outreach. They constitute ISIL's military, political, economic,
and ideological centers of gravity.
"That's why our campaign plan's map has got big arrows pointing at both
Mosul and Raqqa. We will begin by collapsing ISIL's control over both of
these cities and then engage in elimination operations through other
territories ISIL holds in Iraq and Syria."
In fact, such a campaign would give "elimination operations" new meaning,
since it would clearly involve quite literally eliminating the urban
infrastructure of significant parts of the region. Three cities are, in
fact, at present targeted: Fallujah (population perhaps 300,000), the other
major IS-controlled city in al-Anbar Province, Mosul (the second largest
city in Iraq, with a population presently estimated at 1 to 1.5 million),
and Raqqa, the Syrian "capital" of the Islamic State, now reportedly stuffed
with refugees (population 200,000-plus). Put them together and you have a
2016 plan for a U.S.-backed set of campaigns in Iraq and Syria based on the
same formula as the taking of Ramadi: massive American air power in support
of heavily trained and advised Iraqi special ops forces and army units or,
in Syria, Kurdish peshmerga outfits and assorted Kurdish and Syrian rebels.
Add in the Islamic State's urge to turn the urban areas it holds into giant
bombs and what you have is a plan for the rubblization of yet more cities in
the region.
There has, of course, been much talk about an offensive to retake Mosul
since relatively small numbers of Islamic State fighters captured the city
from tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi troops in June 2014. There was, for
instance, a highly touted spring offensive against Mosul that was much
discussed in early 2015 but never happened, so it's impossible to be sure
that the overstretched, generally underperforming Iraqi military will even
make it to Mosul in 2016 or that there will be any non-American "boots"
available to take Raqqa, especially since that city sits well outside any
imaginable future Kurdistan. Still, assuming all went "well," we essentially
know what the future holds: Ramadi-style "victories."
As a result, the end of the year headline for American/Iraqi/Kurdish/Syrian
rebel operations -- adapted from an infamous 1968 line by an anonymous
American officer in Vietnam after U.S. planes had pummeled the provincial
capital of Ben Tre -- would be: "We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them."
Based on Ramadi, you could then perhaps offer these "ballpark" (not that any
stadiums would be left standing) future estimates for rebuilding: Falluja,
$10 billion; Raqqa, $7 billion; Mosul, $20 to $25 billion. Those are
obviously fantasy figures, but the point is that "success" against and
"victory" over the Islamic State would undoubtedly leave much of the region
a modern Carthage. And who would pay for a new Ramadi, or Mosul, or
Fallujah, or Raqqa, no less all of them and more?
Put another way, "victory" would mean that Iraq will have far fewer
habitable cities and a far larger number of displaced people whose
resettlement will undoubtedly be subject to the ethnic tensions that helped
fuel the Islamic State in the first place. This represents a reasonably
predictable future, one that should be obvious enough to anyone who took a
half-serious look at the situation. It certainly should be obvious to Ashton
Carter, as well as to American planners at the Pentagon and in the Obama
administration. And yet the planning goes on as if "victory" were a
meaningful category under the circumstances.
And here's the thing: you can join the Islamic State in blowing up the
physical plant of Syria and parts of Iraq and then eject its fighters from
the rubble, but you'll be destroying the means of existence of a vast,
increasingly unsettled population. What you may not be able to do in the
process is destroy a movement that began in an American military prison in
Iraq and has always been a set of ideas. You may simply create a legend.
Unleashing the Special Operators and the Drones
Now, let's consider another set of potential future headlines linked to
present planning and past experience. Secretary of Defense Carter claims
that the U.S. strategy against the Islamic State is focused on creating
"sustainable political stability in the region," by which he means not just
the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, but all of the Greater Middle East. As
he said to the members of the 101st Airborne:
"Next, let me describe the fight outside of Iraq and Syria. As we work to
destroy the parent tumor in Iraq and Syria, we must also recognize that ISIL
is metastasizing in areas such as North Africa, Afghanistan, and Yemen. The
threat posed by ISIL, and groups like it, is continually evolving, changing
focus and shifting location. It requires from us, therefore, a flexible and
nimble response with a broad reach."
For this, he clearly plans to let loose American Special Operations forces
not just in Syria but elsewhere on assassination missions against key
Islamic State figures or those heading their distant franchises. He's also
intent on sending in the drones across the region in "counter-terror
operations and strikes on high-value targets" to "act decisively to prevent
ISIL affiliates from becoming as great of a threat as the parent tumor
itself."
As with the future taking of cities in Iraq and Syria, there is an
experiential baseline for such operations across the region. In his book
Kill Chain, Andrew Cockburn has called this approach to the enemy "the
kingpin strategy." It was first used in the drug wars in Latin America and
Central America in the 1990s and then, after 9/11, adapted to the weaponized
drone and special operations forces. The idea was to dismantle drug cartels
or later terror outfits from the top down by taking out their leadership
figures.
In fact, in both the drug wars and the terror wars, as Cockburn shows, the
results of this strategy have been repetitiously calamitous. The drone, for
instance, has proven remarkably capable of "eliminating" both the top
leadership of terror groups and key "lieutenants" as well as other
influential figures in those organizations -- with the grimmest results:
under the pressure of the drones and those special ops raids, such
organizations (like the drug cartels before them) simply replaced their dead
leaders with often younger and even more aggressive figures, while attacks
rose and the groups themselves, instead of folding up, spread across the
Greater Middle East and deep into Africa. The drones, bringing with them
relatively widespread "collateral damage," including the deaths of
significant numbers of children, have terrorized the societies over which
they cruise and so proved an ideal recruitment poster for those spreading
terror groups.
Hence, first in the Bush era in a seat-of-the-pants way and then in the
Obama years in a highly organized fashion, drone assassination campaigns in
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia killed
leadership figures while functionally helping to spread the terror
organizations they directed. They have, that is, been engaged not in a war
on terror, but in a war for terror. When you look at the expansion of those
terror outfits, including the growing numbers of "franchises" of the Islamic
State, it should be obvious that, from special ops missions to drone
assassinations, from full-scale invasions to the destruction of cities, the
14-plus years of varied American strategies and military tactics have
repetitively contributed to one horror after another, sucking much of the
region into the vortex.
What's striking when you listen to Secretary of Defense Carter is that,
obvious as this may be, none of it seems to truly penetrate in Washington.
Otherwise how do you explain the lack of any serious recalibration of
American actions, the only debate being between those in the Obama
administration, including the president, who favor a version of mission
creep and their Republican critics who favor doing more in a bigger way? In
other words, in 2016 we're clearly going to witness further rounds of the
utterly familiar with -- somehow -- the expectation that something different
will happen. Since that's not likely, for the next set of future headlines
just reach into the familiar past, substituting, when necessary, the future
terror kingpin's name: "AQAP [al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula] announces
death of [fill in name] in U.S. drone strike," "U.S.: ISIS no. 2 killed in
U.S. drone strike in Iraq," "Army elite Delta Force kills top ISIS official,
[fill in name], in daring Syria raid," "Pentagon says senior al-Qaeda leader
killed in drone strike," and so on more or less ad infinitum.
The Arc of Instability
Recently, with Ashton Carter's strategy for "stability" on my mind, I caught
a phrase in a news report that I hadn't heard for quite a while. A
journalist, perhaps on NPR, was discussing the recent al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terror attack on a hotel in Burkina Faso, a
previously relatively stable country in West Africa, where at least 30 died,
mainly foreigners. He spoke of a spreading "arc of instability" in the
region.
Back in the early years of the century, officials of the Bush administration
and supportive neocons regularly used that phrase to describe the Greater
Middle East, from Pakistan to North Africa. Strangely enough, it disappeared
in the post-Iraqi invasion years and remained largely absent in the Obama
years as the disastrous Libyan intervention, presidentially orchestrated
drone assassination campaigns, and other actions helped further transform
the Greater Middle East into a genuine "arc of instability."
Today, in a way that would have been unimaginable back in 2002-2003, the
region is filled with failing or failed states from Afghanistan and Syria to
Libya, Yemen, and Mali. While Iraq may not quite be a failed state, it is no
longer exactly a country either, but something like a tripartite entity. And
so it goes, and so it evidently will go if the U.S., as in 2015, drops
another 23,000 bombs and thousands of additional munitions on the region --
or far more, as seems likely under the mission-creep pressure of the war
with the Islamic State.
We can't, of course, know just what countries will fail next. However, it's
safe to assume that, as long as the Obama strategy -- and the Hillary
Clinton or Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio one that may follow --
involves more (or much more) of the same, more (or much more) of the same is
likely to happen. As a result, similar predictable headlines will appear, as
countries dissolve in various ways and the Islamic State, groups like
al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or newly founded terror outfits gain
footholds amid the chaos. In that case, you only have to look into the
recent past for headlines-to-come and adapt them slightly: "ISIS Is Building
'Little Nests' in [name of country here], U.S. Defense Secretary Warns,"
"ISIS Is Gaining Ground in [name of country here], Competing with al-Qaeda,"
"Islamic State Gained Strength in [name of country] by Co-opting Local
Jihadists," and so on.
Amid the grimly predictable, there are, of course, many unknowns. Above all,
we have no idea what it means at this point in history to turn a region,
city by city, country by country, into something like a vast failed state
and then continue to bomb the rubble. How do we begin to imagine what could
emerge from the ruins of such a failed region in such a world, from an arc
of instability far vaster than anything we have contemplated since World War
II? I wouldn't want to predict the headlines that could someday emerge from
that situation, but whatever surprises are in store for us, the mere
prospect of such a future should make your blood run cold.
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 on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
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Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
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