The United States of Fear (14 page)

Right now, in what still remains largely a post–Cold War arms race of one, the United States is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. We’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. We may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike. We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of “terrorists,” we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.

In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization,” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the United States and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty business, this globalization of death.

Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference on Thursday, June 24, 2010. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks as well as the person who had taken responsibility for the vast Afghan War document release at that site. “Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who, in school civics texts of my childhood, always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement. After all, a crucial revelation in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands.

The British
Guardian
was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes.” Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA Paramilitaries’ Role in Civilian Deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs, recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.” Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. Special Operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”

Admittedly, the events recorded in the WikiLeaks archive took place between 2004 and the end of 2009, and so don’t cover the Obama administration’s across-the-board surge in Afghanistan. Then again, Admiral Mullen became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2007, and so has been at the helm of the American war machine for more than two of the years in question. He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or planes took out an Afghan bridal party—seventy to ninety strong and made up mostly of women—on a road near the Pakistani border. They were “escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates.” The bride, whose name we don’t know, died too, as did at least twenty-seven other members of the party, including children. Mullen was similarly chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province was hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that killed at least ninety civilians, including perhaps fifteen women and up to sixty children.

Mullen was still chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the minister of agriculture, were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a special operations night raid; as he was—and here we move beyond the WikiLeaks time frame—when, in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of minibuses, killing up to twenty-seven civilians, including women and children. He was no less chairman in July of 2010 when residents of a small town in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan claimed that a NATO missile attack had killed fifty-two civilians, an incident that, like just about every other one mentioned above and so many more, was initially denied by U.S. and NATO spokespeople.

And this represents only a grim, minimalist highlight reel among rafts of such incidents, including repeated killings or woundings of innocent civilians at checkpoints. In other words, if your basic Martian visitor were to take the concept of command responsibility at all seriously, he might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the
Guardian
highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the WikiLeaks documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from Chairman Mullen.

In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on something that most Americans would be unlikely to notice—that, with only slight alterations, Mullen’s blistering comment about Assange could be applied remarkably well to Mullen himself. “Chairman Mullen,” that Martian might have responded, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he is doing, but the truth is he already has on his hands the blood of some young soldiers and that of many Afghan families.”

Fortunately, there are remarkably few Martians in America, as was apparent when the WikiLeaks story broke in June 2010. Certainly, they were in scarce supply in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and, it seemed, hardly less scarce in the mainstream media. If, for instance, you read the version of the WikiLeaks story produced—with the same several weeks of special access—by the
New York Times
, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the
Times
reporters had accessed a different archive of documents than had the
Guardian
crew.

While the
Guardian
led with the central significance of those unreported killings of Afghan civilians, the
Times
led with reports (mainly via Afghan intelligence) of a Pakistani double-cross of the American war effort—of the ties, that is, between Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, and the Taliban. The paper’s major sidebar piece concerned the experiences and travails of Outpost Keating, an isolated American base in Afghanistan. To stumble across the issue of civilian deaths at American hands in the
Times
coverage, you had to make your way off the front page and through two full four-column WikiLeaks-themed pages and deep into a third.

With rare exceptions, this was typical of initial American coverage of that initial document dump. The WikiLeaks story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless saga in the United States until Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who oversaw the Afghan War since being confirmed in his post in December 2006) took control of it and began focusing directly on blood, specifically, the blood on Julian Assange’s hands. Within a few days, that had become the WikiLeaks story, as headlines like CNN’s “Top Military Official: WikiLeaks Founder May Have ‘Blood’ on His Hands” indicated. On ABC News, for instance, in a typical “bloody hands” piece of reportage, the secretary of defense told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange’s legal culpability might be, when it came to “moral culpability . . . that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on WikiLeaks.”

Moral culpability. From the Martian point of view, it might have been considered a curious phrase from the lips of the man responsible for the previous three and a half years of two deeply destructive wars that have accomplished nothing and have been responsible for killing, wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary Iraqis and Afghans. Given the reality of those wars, our increasingly wide-eyed visitor, now undoubtedly camping out on the Washington Mall, might have been struck by the selectivity of our sense of what constitutes blood and what constitutes collateral damage.

Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might notice: in a decade of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan and more than eight years of the same in Iraq, the United States has filled metaphorical tower upon tower with the exceedingly unmetaphorical bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks, checkpoint shootings, night raids, artillery and missile fire, and, in some cases, the direct act of murder. Afghans and Iraqis have died in numbers impossible to count (though some have tried).

Among those deaths was that of a good Samaritan who stopped his minivan on a Baghdad street in July 2007 to help transport Iraqis wounded by an American Apache helicopter attack to the hospital. In repayment, he and his two children were gunned down by that same Apache crew. (The children survived; the event was covered up; typically, no American took responsibility for it; the case was not further investigated, and no one was punished or even reprimanded.) That was one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar events in both wars that Americans have known little or nothing about.

Now, Private Bradley Manning, a twenty-two-year-old intelligence analyst deployed to eastern Baghdad, who reportedly leaked the video of the event to WikiLeaks and may have leaked those ninety-two thousand documents as well, is preparing to face a court-martial, was branded a “traitor” by a U.S. senator, his future execution endorsed by the ranking minority member of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on terrorism, and is almost certain to find himself behind bars for years or decades to come. As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video (and, without doubt, many similar ones cloaked in the secrecy of “national security”), their fates are no less sure.

When Admiral Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly have his choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he cares to, lucrative consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense contractors, as well as an impressive pension to take home with him. Secretary of Defense Gates will undoubtedly leave his post with a wide range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably get a multimillion-dollar contract to write his memoirs. Both will be praised, no matter what happens in or to their wars. Neither will be considered in any way responsible for those tens of thousands of dead civilians in distant lands.

Moral culpability? It doesn’t apply. Not to Americans—not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an “out, damned spot!” moment. That’s a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn’t want it on his hands, who found himself “actively involved in something that I was completely against,” who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms,” will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn’t.

The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over our wars, the military figures and secretaries of defense, the intelligence chiefs and ambassadors who helped make them happen, will have libraries to inaugurate, books to write, awards to accept, speeches to give, honors to receive, talk shows to go on. They will be treated with great respect, while Americans—once we have finally left the lands we insistently fought over—will undoubtedly feel little culpability either. And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first suicide drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered, but one thing is certain, we will not consider any damage done to our society “collateral” damage.

So much blood. So many hands. So little culpability. No remorse.

Remember how, as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the American dead arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? In fact, the Bush-era ban did more than that. As the
Washington Post
’s Dana Milbank wrote, it “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases.”

For those whose lives were formed in the crucible of the Vietnam years, including the civilian and military leadership of the Bush era, the dead, whether ours or the enemy’s, were seen as a potential minefield when it came to antiwar opposition or simply the loss of public support in the opinion polls. Admittedly, many of the so-called lessons of the Vietnam War were based on half-truths or pure mythology, but they were no less powerful or influential for that.

In the Vietnam years, the Pentagon had, for instance, been stung by the thought that images of the American dead coming home in body bags had spurred on that era’s huge antiwar movement (though, in reality, those images were rare). Nor were they likely to forget the effect of the “body count,” offered by U.S. military spokesmen in late afternoon press briefings in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. Among disillusioned reporters, these became known as “the Five O’clock Follies.” They were supposedly accurate counts of enemy dead, but everyone knew otherwise.