The Sorrows of Empire (46 page)

Implementation of the new National Security Strategy is considerably
more problematic than its promulgation and presents blowback possibilities galore. By mid-2003, our armed forces were seriously overstretched and we were going deeply into debt to finance our war machine. Already, 93 percent of budgetary allocations dedicated to international affairs were going to the military and only 7 percent to the State Department.
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During 2003, the Pentagon deployed a quarter of a million troops against Iraq while several thousand soldiers were engaged in daily skirmishes in Afghanistan, countless navy crews were manning ships in the waters off North Korea, a few thousand marines were in the southern Philippines assisting local forces in fighting an Islamic separatist movement with roots a century old, and several hundred “advisers” were involved in what might someday become a Vietnam-like insurgency in Colombia (and possibly elsewhere in the Andean region). We had a military presence in 153 of the 189 member countries of the United Nations, including large-scale deployments in twenty-five of them. We had military treaties or binding security arrangements with at least thirty-six countries.
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Aside from the financial costs of all this, another constraint exists. The American people have, since Vietnam, proved unwilling to accept large numbers of casualties in our imperial wars. To produce what military analyst William Arkin calls a “painless dentistry” approach to warfare or what retired Russian major general and specialist on future wars Vladimir Slipchenko refers to as “no-contact war,” the Pentagon has committed itself to a massive and very expensive effort to computerize the battlefield.
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It has spent lavishly on smart bombs, battlefield sensors, computer-guided munitions, and technologically complex high-performance aircraft and ships, without comparable efforts to train and retain personnel capable of using them. The result, as any computer owner can guess, is that these devices often break down. Lieutenant Colonel John A. Gentry, U.S. Army Special Forces (ret.), writing in the Army War College’s journal
Parameters,
details a three-day failure of the National Security Agency’s computers in January 2000 that was so threatening to national security it was immediately classified at the highest level. He describes the incredible complexity of the Pentagon’s 1.5 million individual computers—which are organized into some 10,000 systems, of which 2,300 are “mission
critical”—and the ease with which adversaries could hack into, jam, or deceive our cyberwarfare technology.
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The main reason for the emphasis on the highest of high-tech warfare is to keep our troops out of the line of fire. Many soldiers being sent into what bloviating senators like to call “harm’s way” are now in considerably less danger than they would be in their automobiles at home. Working in front of computer screens in air-conditioned tents miles from the battlefield or at 35,000 feet in a B-2 bomber, they have no more sense of combat than teenagers in a video arcade. Colonel Gentry deplores “the debilitating effects on military ethics resulting from the technologists’ promises of easy victories and comfortable lives.”
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But there is another problem as well. Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in March 2002 was supposed to be a showcase for “the miracle of modern technology as applied to combat, with an array of sensitive surveillance platforms to pinpoint the enemy and then precision-bomb him out into the open.”
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An investigation by the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, however, discovered that more than half of the enemies’ positions went undetected by our eyes in the sky and many precision-guided bombs missed their targets. The operation was a failure as large numbers of al-Qaeda terrorists escaped. A month later, on April 17, 2002, one of our F-16 fighters mistakenly bombed a group of Canadian soldiers, killing four and injuring eight—a typical incident caused by inappropriately high-tech equipment (overly fast aircraft on a ground support mission) and failures of command and control communications. The Pentagon, as usual, dismissed it as just another “tragic” case of friendly fire.

When cyberwarfare munitions do work, they often kill so many non-combatants that their use constitutes a war crime. Although air power can be utterly devastating to all forms of life on earth, it has never once won a war alone. Yet the military remains committed to the most devastating forms of terror bombing with only a pretense of “precision” targeting of militarily significant installations. This strain of current military thinking can be found in the writing of Harlan Ullman, a former high-ranking Pentagon adviser and protégé of General Colin Powell, who
advocates that the United States attack its enemies in the same way it defeated Japan in World War II. “Super tools and weapons—information age equivalents of the atomic bomb—have to be invented. As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed toward a similar outcome.” Ullman is the author of the idea that the United States should “deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary’s perception and fear of his vulnerability and our own invincibility.” He calls this “rapid dominance” or “shock and awe.” He once suggested that it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves to attack people’s neurological systems and scare them to death.
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In the interest of avoiding military casualties altogether, our government has even declared that it must resume nuclear testing, acquire an array of new “low yield” nuclear weapons, and deal with nuclear proliferation not by trying to control the spread of nuclear devices through treaties and international pressure but through “counter-proliferation,” or what commentator Jonathan Schell has called “disarmament wars.” The administration’s March 2002 Nuclear Posture Review identified Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya as potential targets for nuclear weapons, and it laid out plans to build a nuclear “robust earth penetrator” as well as a new plant to manufacture nuclear weapons, a new intercontinental ballistic missile, a new submarine-launched missile, and a new bomber. In a leaked document of January 2003, the Pentagon revealed its desires to acquire “mini-nukes” of under one kiloton of explosive power (the Hiroshima bomb was a twenty-kiloton weapon) and neutron bombs; it wants a “future arsenal panel” to study “what forms of testing these new designs will require.”
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Although our government was an active promoter of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, the Bush administration’s weapons proposals are open violations of that treaty’s article 6, which “requires that the original five nuclear weapon states pursue effective nuclear disarmament measures.” Any use of nuclear weapons is also a prima facie violation of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which the United States is an
adherent. Nonetheless, in a 1995 statement to the International Court of Justice, the United States defended the use of nuclear weapons, arguing that “the deliberate killing of large numbers of people” counts as genocide only if the aggressor sets out to destroy “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.”
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High-tech warfare invites the kind of creative judo the terrorists of al-Qaeda utilized on September 11. Employing domestic American airliners as their weapons of mass destruction, they took a deadly toll of innocents. The United States worries that terrorists might acquire or be given fissionable material by a “rogue state,” but the much more likely source is via theft from the huge nuclear stockpiles of the United States or the far less well guarded ones Russia inherited from the USSR. The weapons-grade anthrax used in the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States almost certainly came from the Pentagon’s own biological stockpile, not from some poverty-stricken Third World country.
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The government has other ways to implement its new world strategy without getting its hands dirty, including what it (and its Israeli allies) call “targeted killings.” During February 2003, the Bush administration sought the Israeli government’s counsel on how to create a legal justification for the assassination of suspected terrorists. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, President Bush said that some terrorism suspects who were not caught and brought to trial had been “otherwise dealt with,” and he observed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”
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If the likelihood of perpetual war hangs over the world, the situation in the United States is hardly better. Militarism and imperialism threaten democratic government at home just as they menace the independence and sovereignty of other countries. Whether George Bush and his zealots can bring about “regime change” in a whole range of other countries may be an open question, but they certainly seem in the process of doing so within the United States. In the second presidential debate, on October 11, 2000, Bush joked, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” A little more than a year later, in
response to a question by
Washington
Post journalist Bob Woodward, he said, “I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
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Bush and his administration have worked tirelessly to expand the powers of the presidency at the expense of the other branches of government and the Constitution. Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution says explicitly, “The Congress shall have the power to declare war.” It prohibits the president from making that decision. The most influential author of the Constitution, James Madison, wrote in 1793, “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 the executive department.... The trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.”
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Yet, after September 11, 2001, President Bush unilaterally declared that the nation was “at war” more or less forever against terrorism, and a White House spokesman later noted that the president “considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason.”
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During October 3 to 10, 2002, Congress’s “week of shame” (in the phrase of military affairs analyst Winslow T. Wheeler), both houses voted to give the president open-ended authority to wage war against Iraq (296 to 33 in the House and 77 to 23 in the Senate). The president was also given the unrestricted power to use any means, including military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq whenever he—and he alone—deemed “appropriate.” There was no debate. Congressional representatives were too politically cowed even to address the issue. Instead, Senator Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico) extolled the 4-H Club, a kind of fraternity for budding young farmers, on its hundredth anniversary; Senator Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky) discussed the Future Farmers of America in his state; and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) offered her colleagues a brief history of the city of Mountain View, California (even though she voted against the resolution). As Wheeler concluded, all that the public owed their representatives after such a debacle was “the fare for a trip to the dustbin of history.”
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The Bush administration also arrogated to itself the power unilaterally
to judge whether an American citizen is part of a terrorist organization and could therefore be stripped of all constitutional rights, including the Sixth Amendment guarantees of a speedy trial before a jury of peers, the assistance of an attorney in offering a defense, the right to confront one’s accusers, protection against self-incrimination, and, most critically, the requirement that the government spell out its charges and make them public. The key cases here concern two native-born American citizens—Yasir Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla.

Hamdi, age twenty-two, was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but raised in Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon at first claimed he was captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan. In a more detailed submission it later acknowledged that he surrendered to the Northern Alliance forces, the warlords paid to fight on our side, without having engaged in any form of combat. Handed over to the U.S. military, Hamdi was transferred to the detention camp in Guantánamo, Cuba, where many foreign nationals captured on foreign soil are now sequestered. Discovering that Hamdi was an American citizen and fearing intervention by the courts, prison officials flew him to a naval prison in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was held incommunicado. As a citizen, he should be covered by the due process guarantees of the Constitution, but the Department of Justice contends that, having been designated an “enemy combatant” by the president, he can be held indefinitely without a lawyer merely on the president’s say-so.

On June 19, 2002, representatives of the Bush administration and the Pentagon outlined to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals a claim of presidential power that in its breathtaking sweep is unsupported by the Constitution, law, or precedent. “The military,” they argued, “has the authority to capture and detain individuals whom it has determined are enemy combatants ... including enemy combatants claiming American citizenship. Such combatants, moreover, have no right of access to counsel to challenge their detention.” They went on to contend that “the court may not second-guess the military’s enemy combatant determination” because by doing so they would intrude on “the president’s plenary authority as commander in chief,” which supposedly includes the power to order “the capture, detention, and treatment of the enemy and the
collection and evaluation of intelligence vital to national security.” The courts should defer to the military “when asked to review military decisions in time of war.”