War All the Time

I keep thinking my country has hit the nadir and must begin to rebound, but almost every day more evidence pops up to prove the empire is on the down slope and flailing like an elephant on roller skates.

The Senate held a hearing the other day about the Authorization for Use of Military Force or AUMF as it’s known, passed with bipartisan congressional support and patriotic fervor immediately after the 9/11 attacks. The AUMF gave then President George W. Bush and his henchman, Vice President Dick Cheney, unprecedented latitude to take the War on Terror to terrorists, wherever in the world they happened to operate. The president could prosecute the War on Terror any way he deemed fit without consulting much with Congress.

We’re thirteen years from 9/11 and still fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and other locales in Africa, and the AUMF is alive and well, and if some of the senators and generals who spoke at the hearing are to be believed, may continue another twenty years. 

In his second inaugural address, Obama claimed the era of perpetual war was over, but that was just a line in a speech designed to appease the base, not meant to be taken literally.

Perpetual war is still US policy.

The Obama Administration also uses the AUMF as legal cover for its targeted killing program. Every Tuesday, according to investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, a list of names is presented to President Obama, and the leader of the free world decides who dies and who lives. Terror Tuesday is what the national security and intelligence apparatus calls it. Without due process of any kind, the president hands down a death sentence to be carried out by drone strike or by one of America’s proxies. Quite often innocent people are killed either with the suspected terrorist or instead of the terrorist, but we don’t lose any sleep over our mistakes. 

The U.S. also carries out pre-emptive “signature strikes,” guilt-by-association strikes, aimed at creating terror in a group of people of a certain age and with certain habits of movement and congregation. The military and its allies in the mainstream propaganda industry tell the American public that these strikes are clinical, surgical, precise, carefully designed to limit civilian casualties; they spin other fables for us as well.

When it comes to bending the Constitution, Obama is no better than Bush was and in many ways worse. His depredations against the Constitution, the sovereign territory of other nations, and basic human rights are many.

Basically, the U.S. has adopted Israeli operating procedures when it comes to protecting the homeland from terrorists: we assert the right to kill anyone, anywhere, at any time; we shoot first and mop up the mess later; we kidnap, render, and torture. It’s incomprehensible to me that this country maintains kill lists, and that the Executive branch has usurped so much war making power from the Legislative branch. When we finally and fatally become a fascist nation – and there are many disquieting indications that that day is approaching – we will look back at the AUMF and rue the day it became law.

How many more terrorists will we birth during another twenty years of extrajudicial killings and signature strikes and shadow warfare? One thing is for sure, because of the secrecy surrounding these operations, and the viciousness with which the current administration prosecutes whistleblowers and honest journalists, it will be a long time before we understand the full extent of the crimes committed in the name of freedom and security.

History shows that empires cannot sustain perpetual wars. U.S. policy makers will not outsmart or outrun history. The day when our proverbial birds come home to roost will be very dark and very cold.