Empire of Destruction Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh By
Tom Engelhardt
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war,
American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of
taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about
anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that
they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything
“networked.” It was to be a glorious dream of limited destruction
combined with unlimited power and success. In reality, it would prove
to be a nightmare of the first order.
If you want a single word to summarize American war-making in this
last decade and a half, I would suggest rubble. It's been a painfully
apt term since September 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of
such war in this century, two new words might be useful: rubblize and
rubblization. Let me explain what I mean.
In recent weeks, another major city in Iraq has officially been “
liberated” (
almost)
from the militants of the Islamic State. However, the results of the
U.S.-backed Iraqi military campaign to retake Mosul, that country’s
second largest city, don’t fit any ordinary definition of triumph or
victory. It began in October 2016 and, at nine months and counting, has
been
longer than the World War II battle of Stalingrad. Week after week, in street to street fighting, with
U.S. airstrikes repeatedly called in on neighborhoods still filled with terrified Mosulites, unknown but
potentially staggering numbers of civilians have died.
More than a million
people -- yes, you read that figure correctly -- were uprooted from
their homes and major portions of the Western half of the city they
fled, including its ancient historic sections, have been turned into
rubble.
This should be the definition of victory as defeat, success as
disaster. It’s also a pattern. It’s been the essential story of the
American war on terror since, in the month after the 9/11 attacks,
President George W. Bush loosed American air power on Afghanistan. That
first air campaign began what has increasingly come to look like the
full-scale rubblization of significant parts of the Greater Middle
East.
By not simply going after the crew who committed those attacks but
deciding to take down the Taliban, occupy Afghanistan, and in 2003,
invade Iraq, Bush's administration opened the proverbial can of worms in
that vast region. An imperial urge to overthrow Iraqi ruler Saddam
Hussein, who had once been Washington’s
guy
in the Middle East only to become its mortal enemy (and who had nothing
whatsoever to do with 9/11), proved one of the fatal miscalculations of
the imperial era.
So, too, did the deeply
engrained fantasy
of Bush administration officials that they controlled a high-tech,
precision military that could project power in ways no other nation on
the planet or in history ever had; a military that would be, in the
president’s words, “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” With Iraq occupied and garrisoned (
Korea-style)
for generations to come, his top officials assumed that they would take
down fundamentalist Iran (sound familiar?) and other hostile regimes in
the region, creating a
Pax Americana there. (Hence, the particular irony of the present
Iranian ascendancy
in Iraq.) In the pursuit of such fantasies of global power, the Bush
administration, in effect, punched a devastating hole in the oil
heartlands of the Middle East. In the
pungent imagery of Abu Mussa, head of the Arab League at the time, the U.S. chose to drive straight through “the gates of hell.”
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176310/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_bombing_the_rubble/#more
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