{"id":28288,"date":"2013-04-29T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=28288"},"modified":"2015-05-06T12:53:09","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T11:53:09","slug":"filling-the-empty-battlefield-jeremy-scahill-blowback-reporter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/04\/filling-the-empty-battlefield-jeremy-scahill-blowback-reporter\/","title":{"rendered":"Filling the Empty Battlefield – Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chalmers Johnson\u2019s book\u00a0Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire<\/em><\/a>\u00a0was published in March 2000 — and just about no one noticed.\u00a0 Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as \u201cthe unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.\u201d\u00a0 In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong\u2019s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a \u201cspear-carrier for empire.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened.\u00a0 Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found \u201can informal American empire\u201d of immense reach and power.\u00a0 He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork \u201call around the world… for future forms of blowback.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson noted \u201cportents of a twenty-first century crisis\u201d in the form of, among other things, \u201cterrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.\u201d \u00a0In the first chapter of\u00a0Blowback<\/em>, he focused in particular on a \u201cformer prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of the United States\u201d by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged.\u00a0 It had been a war in which Washington\u00a0backed to the hilt<\/a>, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Talk about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did. All of this laid the foundation for… well, in 1999 when Johnson was writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had \u201cfreed ourselves of… any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe.\u201d<\/p>\n

With\u00a0Blowback<\/em>, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically\u00a0unprecedented garrisoning<\/a>\u00a0of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally.\u00a0 After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to the center of the 9\/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and became a bestseller, while \u201cblowback\u201d and that phrase \u201cunintended consequences\u201d made their way into our everyday language.<\/p>\n

Chalmers Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar.\u00a0 Now, more than a decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter.\u00a0 His name is Jeremy Scahill.\u00a0 In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise bestseller,\u00a0Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army<\/em><\/a>. It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in service to its foreign wars, was working manically to \u201cprivatize\u201d national security and the U.S. military by hiring\u00a0rent-a-spies<\/a>,\u00a0rent-a-guns<\/a>, and\u00a0rent-a-corporations<\/a>\u00a0for its proliferating wars.<\/p>\n

In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson\u2019s observation to heart — that we Americans can\u2019t see our world as it is.\u00a0 And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows.\u00a0 As two administrations in Washington\u00a0arrogated<\/a>\u00a0ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making.\u00a0 In the process, they transformed an\u00a0increasingly militarized CIA<\/a>, a hush-hush crew called the\u00a0Joint Special Operations Command<\/a>\u00a0(JSOC), and a shiny new \u201cperfect weapon<\/a>\u201d and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president\u2019s own privatized military.<\/p>\n

In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state — and no one else.\u00a0 Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end.\u00a0 It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name.\u00a0 As a result, there was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written.\u00a0 Now, we have it in the form of Scahill\u2019s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield<\/em><\/a>. \"scahilldirtywars\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC – Joint Special Operations Command.\u00a0 In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., \u201can executive assassination wing,\u201d as Seymour Hersh once put it<\/a>, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney\u2019s office.\u00a0 It next turned its hunter\/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military<\/a> cocooned inside the U.S. military.\u00a0 In those years, Scahill started following the footsteps of special ops types into the field, while mainlining into sources in their community as well as other parts of the American military and intelligence world.<\/p>\n

In his new book, he dramatically retraces the bureaucratic intel wars in Washington as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community muscled up, and secret presidential orders gave JSOC, in particular, unprecedented authority to turn the globe into a free-fire zone.\u00a0 Finally, as a reporter, he traveled to a series of danger spots — Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan — that Americans could care less about, where the U.S. military and the CIA (in conjunction with private security contractors) were experimenting with and developing new ways of waging Washington\u2019s spreading secret wars.<\/p>\n

As Scahill writes in his acknowledgements, thanking another reporter who traveled with him, \u201cWe were shot at together on rooftops in Mogadishu, slept on dingy floors in rural Afghanistan, and traveled together in the netherlands of Southern Yemen.\u201d\u00a0 That catches something of the spirit behind a book produced by a dedicated, unembedded, independent reporter — a thoroughly impressive, even awe-inspiring piece of work.<\/p>\n

In the process, Scahill, who in these years broke<\/a> a number of major stories as national security correspondent for the Nation<\/em> magazine, fills us in on those American military death squads in Iraq, nightmarish special ops night raids in Afghanistan (that target all the wrong people), secret renditions of terror suspects to a CIA-funded jail in Somalia (after President Obama had forsworn \u201crendition\u201d), the dispatching of drones and cruise missiles in disastrous strikes on civilians<\/a> in Yemen, the hunting down and assassination of American citizens (aka terror suspects, although 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki certainly wasn\u2019t<\/a> one) also in Yemen on the orders of the president, the complex world<\/a> of JSOC-CIA-Blackwater operations in Pakistan — and so much more, including an indication that JSOC has even launched secret ground operations of some sort in Uzbekistan. (Who knew?)<\/p>\n

Dirty Wars<\/em> is also, in Johnson\u2019s terms, a history of the future; that is, a history of potential blowback-to-come, a message in a bottle sent to us from the hidden front lines of America\u2019s global battlefields — and therein lies a tale of tales.<\/p>\n

Preparing the Battlefield<\/strong><\/p>\n

A couple of years back, TomDispatch correspondent Ann Jones told me something I\u2019ve never forgotten.\u00a0 Having spent time with U.S. troops<\/a> in Afghanistan, she described their patrols in the countryside this way: yes, there were dangers, mainly IEDs (roadside bombs) and the odd potshot taken at them, but on the whole the areas they patrolled every day were eerily \u201cempty.\u201d\u00a0 In some sense, it almost seemed as if no one was there, as if they were fighting a ghost war on — her term — an empty battlefield.<\/p>\n

As it happens, her observation has a planetary analogue that lies at the heart of Scahill\u2019s remarkable book.\u00a0 As you may remember, in the wake of the 9\/11 attacks, it took no time at all for Bush administration officials to think big.\u00a0 Notoriously, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began urging aides<\/a> to build a case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein only five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.\u00a0 Within weeks administration figures were already talking with confidence about the need to \u201cdrain the swamp<\/a>\u201d of terrorists and enemies on a global scale.\u00a0 They were reportedly planning to target 60<\/a> to 80<\/a> countries, almost a third to close to one-half of the nations on this planet.\u00a0 In other words, when they quickly declared a Global War on Terror, they weren\u2019t kidding.\u00a0 They meant it quite literally and, as Scahill reports, they promptly went to work building up the kinds of forces — secret and at their command alone — that could fight anywhere on the sly.<\/p>\n

As these forces were dispatched globally to collect intelligence, train foreign forces (also often \u201cspecial\u201d and secret<\/a>), and especially hunt and kill terrorists, a new tradecraft term came into play, a phrase as crucial to Scahill\u2019s book as \u201cblowback\u201d was to Johnson\u2019s.\u00a0 They were, it was claimed, going out to \u201cprepare the battlefield\u201d (or alternately, \u201cthe battlespace\u201d or \u201cthe environment\u201d).\u00a0 That process of preparation couldn\u2019t have been more breathtakingly hubristic.\u00a0 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the situation this way: \u201cToday, the entire world is the \u2018battlespace.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the strange thing, though: when those secret forces went out to do their dirty work, that global battlefield was, using Jones\u2019s term, remarkably, eerily empty.\u00a0 There was hardly anyone there.\u00a0 Perhaps hundreds or at most a few thousand jihadis<\/em> scattered mainly in the backlands of the planet.\u00a0 If \u201cpreparing the battlefield\u201d turned out to be the crucial term of the era, it wasn’t exactly a descriptively accurate one.\u00a0 More on the mark might have been: \u201ccreating the battlefield\u201d or \u201cfilling the empty battlefield.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pattern that Scahill traces brilliantly might have boiled down to a version of the tag line for the movie Field of Dreams<\/em><\/a>: if you prepare it, they will come<\/em>.\u00a0 The result was not so much a war on, as a war of, and for, terror.\u00a0 Washington would, at one and the same time, produce a killing machine and a terror-generating machine.\u00a0 Dirty Wars<\/em> catches the way its top officials became convinced that the planet\u2019s last superpower, with \u201cthe finest fighting force the world has ever known\u201d (as American presidents now never grow tired<\/a> of repeating), could simply kill its way to victory globally.<\/p>\n

As Scahill also shows, they were often remarkably successful at eliminating the figures on their \u201ckill list<\/a>\u201d of targeted enemies from Osama bin Laden on down: Bin Laden himself in Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Aden Hashi Ayro in Somalia, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as various \u201clieutenants\u201d of top al-Qaeda figures and allied groups.\u00a0 And yet, as those on the kill lists died, thanks to the CIA\u2019s drones and JSOC\u2019s raiders, so did others.\u00a0 Often enough, they were innocent civilians<\/a> — and in quantity.\u00a0 People who shouldn\u2019t have ever had their doors kicked in, their sons arrested or their pregnant wives<\/a> shot down, and who bitterly resented what they experienced.\u00a0 And so before Washington knew it, the kill list was growing larger, not smaller, and its wars were becoming more, not less, intense and spreading to other lands.\u00a0 The battlefield, copiously prepared, was filling with enemies.<\/p>\n

A Perpetual Motion Machine for the Destabilization of the Planet<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Washington launched its post-9\/11 adventures, the neoconservative allies of the Bush administration, believing the wind in their sails, eyed the vast area from North Africa to the Central Asian border of China (aka \u201cthe Greater Middle East\u201d) that they liked to call the \u201carc of instability.\u201d\u00a0 The job of the U.S., they imagined, was to bring stability to that \u201carc\u201d by using America’s overwhelming military power to create a Pax Americana<\/em> in the region.\u00a0 They were, in other words, fundamentalists<\/a> and the U.S. military was their born-again religion.\u00a0 They believed that its techno-power would trump every other form of power on the planet, hands down.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and in light of the ongoing disastrous war in Afghanistan, if you look at the Greater Middle East today — from Pakistan to Syria, Afghanistan to Mali — you\u2019ll know what instability is really all about.\u00a0 Twelve years later, much of the region has been destabilized to one degree or another, which might pass as the definition for Washington of short-term success and long-term failure.<\/p>\n

In reality, they should have known better from the start.\u00a0 After all, behind the global war launched by the Bush administration and carried on by Obama was a twenty-first-century replay of a brutal flop of a strategy in Washington\u2019s failed war in Vietnam.\u00a0 The phrase that went with it back then was \u201cthe crossover point,\u201d the supposedly crucial moment in what was bluntly thought of as a \u201cwar of attrition.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea was simple enough.\u00a0 The staggering firepower available to Washington would be brought to bear on the Vietnamese enemy with the obvious, expectable result: sooner or later, a moment would be reached in which the U.S. would be killing more of that enemy than could be replaced by recruitment in South Vietnam or the infiltration of reinforcements from the North.\u00a0 At that moment, Washington would \u201ccrossover\u201d into victory.\u00a0 We know just where that led — to the infamous body count (which the Bush administration tried desperately<\/a> to avoid in Iraq and Afghanistan), to slaughter on a staggering scale<\/a>, and to defeat when the prodigious number of enemies killed somehow never resulted in the U.S. crossing over.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the ironic thing.\u00a0 Like his father who, as the first Gulf War ended in 1991, spoke ecstatically<\/a> of having \u201ckicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,\u201d George W. Bush and his top officials had an overwhelming allergy to the memory of Vietnam.\u00a0 Yet they still managed to launch a global war of attrition against a range of groups they defined as \u201cterrorists.\u201d They were clearly planning to kill them, one by one if possible, or in \u201csignature\u201d groups<\/a> if necessary, until some crossover point was reached, until the enemy was losing more members than could be replaced and victory came into sight. As in Vietnam, of course, that crossover point never arrived and it\u2019s increasingly clear that it never will.\u00a0 Scahill\u2019s reporting couldn\u2019t be more incisive on the subject.<\/p>\n

Dirty Wars<\/em> is really the secret history of how Washington launched a series of undeclared wars in the backlands of the planet and killed its way to something that ever more closely resembled an actual global war, creating a world of enemies out of next to nothing.\u00a0 Think of it as a bizarre form of unconscious wish fulfillment and the results — they<\/em> came! — as a field of nightmares.<\/p>\n

What was created in the process now seems more like a perpetual motion machine for the destabilization of the planet.\u00a0 Just follow the spread<\/a> of drone bases<\/a> and of JSOC\u2019s raiders, and you can actually watch the backlands of the globe destabilizing before your eyes, or read Scahill\u2019s book and get a superb blow-by-blow account of just how it happened.\u00a0 The process is now well underway in Africa<\/a> where destabilization seems to be heading south from Libya via Mali.<\/p>\n

Reread Blowback<\/em> 13 years later and it\u2019s hard to believe that anyone was so ahead of his times, given the human predilection for being unable to foresee much of anything.\u00a0 Perhaps the saddest thing that can be said about Dirty Wars<\/em> is that, the way things look, 13 years from now Scahill’s book, too, may seem as fresh as last night\u2019s news.\u00a0 He has laid out a style of off-the-books war-making that seems destined to be perpetuated, no matter what administration is in power.<\/p>\n

Much remains unknown when it comes to our recent non-war wars.\u00a0 Thirteen years from now we may know far more about what JSOC, the CIA, and others were really doing in these years.\u00a0 None of that, however, is likely to change the pattern Scahill has set down for us.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s not hesitate to say it: mission accomplished! \u00a0The world may not have been a battlefield then. \u00a0But they prepared the global battlespace so well that it\u2019s heading in that direction now.<\/p>\n

Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a way of coming home.\u00a0 Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings.\u00a0 The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in American history.\u00a0 In its own way, it was also an example of the empty battlefield.\u00a0 An 87-square mile<\/a> metropolitan area was almost totally locked down. At least 9,000<\/a> heavily up-armored local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, hundreds of National Guard troops<\/a>, SWAT teams, armored vehicles, helicopters, and who knows what else hit the streets of greater Boston\u2019s neighborhoods in a search for two dangerous, deluded young men, one of whom ended up bloodied inside a boat in a backyard just outside the zone the police had cordoned off to search in Watertown.\u00a0 It was a spectacle that would have been unimaginable in pre-9\/11 America.<\/p>\n

The expense must have been staggering (especially if you add in business losses from the city\u2019s shutdown).\u00a0 In the end, of course, one of the suspects was killed and the other captured — and celebrations<\/a> of that short-term success began immediately on the streets of Boston and in the media.\u00a0 But here, too, killing your way to success is unlikely to prove a winning strategy.\u00a0 After all, we\u2019re already in Scahill\u2019s blowback world in which, no matter the number of deaths, there is unlikely to be a crossover point.<\/p>\n

After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombing suspect, was captured, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a new phrase<\/a> into the American lexicon.\u00a0 While calling for the 19-year-old to be held as an \u201cenemy noncombatant\u201d (\u00e0 la Guantanamo), he wrote, “The homeland is the battlefield.”\u00a0 <\/em>That should send chills down the spine of any reader of Dirty Wars<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Above all else, there\u2019s this: while the world burned<\/a> and melted<\/a>, Washington set itself one crucial global mission: to send its secret forces out onto that global battlefield to hunt random jihadis<\/em>. It may be the worst case of imperial risk assessment since Nero fiddled and Rome burned.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and author of <\/em>The United States of Fear<\/a> as well as a history of the Cold War, <\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>, runs the Nation Institute’s <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is <\/em>Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[Note for the Readers:<\/strong>\u00a0 This essay focused on Jeremy Scahill\u2019s new book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield<\/em><\/a><\/i> <\/em>(Nation Books).\u00a0 In June, a film of the same title<\/a> directed by Rick Rowley and based on the book will hit the theaters.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen it in preview.\u00a0 Its focus differs from the book\u2019s.\u00a0 Scahill is its narrator.\u00a0 It’s deeply personal and is powerfully humanizing of those whose doors we\u2019ve kicked in during this last grim decade-plus.\u00a0 It could be the documentary of the year.]<\/i><\/p>\n

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written. Now, we have it in the form of Scahill\u2019s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC – Joint Special Operations Command. In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., \u201can executive assassination wing,\u201d as Seymour Hersh once put it, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney\u2019s office. It next turned its hunter\/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,65,55,48,62,148,146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","category-capitalism","category-in-focus","category-media","category-history","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}