Headlined “U.S. Seeks Other
Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War,” the article was tucked away on page
A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention.
Here's the first paragraph:
“American intelligence and military officers are working
on additional clandestine plans to counter Iranian aggression in the Persian
Gulf, pushed by the White House to develop new options that could help deter
Tehran without escalating tensions into a full-out conventional war, according
to current and former officials.”
Note that “Iranian
aggression.” The rest of the piece, fairly typical of the tone of American
media coverage of the ongoing Iran crisis, included sentences like this: “The
C.I.A. has longstanding secret plans for responding to Iranian provocations.”
I’m sure I’ve read such things hundreds of times without ever really stopping
to think much about them, but this time I did. And what struck me was
this: rare is the moment
in such mainstream news reports when Americans are the “provocative” ones (though
the Iranians immediately accused the U.S. military of just that, a
provocation, when it came to the U.S. drone its Revolutionary Guard recently
shot down either over Iranian
air space or the Strait of Hormuz). When it comes to Washington’s never-ending
war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that, in the past,
the present, and the future, the one phrase you’re not likely to find in such
media coverage will be “American aggression.”
I mean, forget the history
of the second half of the last century and all of this one so far. Forget that
back in the Neolithic age of the 1980s, before Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein
turned out to be the new Adolf Hitler and needed to be taken
down by us (no aggression there), the administration of President Ronald Reagan
actively backed his unprovoked invasion of, and war against, Iran. (That
included his use of chemical weapons against Iranian troop concentrations that
American military intelligence helped him target.)
Forget that, in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush launched an
unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, based on false intelligence about
Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and his supposed links to
al-Qaeda. Forget that the Trump administration tore up a nuclear
agreement with Iran to which that country was adhering and which would indeed
have effectively prevented it from producing nuclear weapons for the
foreseeable future. Forget that its supreme leader (in fatwas he issued)
prohibited the creation or stockpiling of such weaponry in any case.
Forget that the Trump
administration, in a completely unprovoked manner, imposed crippling sanctions
on that country and its oil trade, causing genuine suffering, in
hopes of toppling that regime economically as Saddam Hussein’s had been toppled
militarily in neighboring Iraq in 2003, all in the name of preventing the
atomic weapons that the Obama-negotiated pact had taken care of. Forget the
fact that an American president, who, at the last moment, halted air strikes
against Iranian missile bases (after one of their missiles shot down that
American drone) is now promising that
an attack on "anything American will be met with great and overwhelming
force... In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration.”
Provocations? Aggression? Perish
the thought!
And yet,
just ask yourself what Washington and the Pentagon might do if an Iranian drone
were spotted off the East Coast of the United States (no less in actual U.S.
air space). No more need be said, right?
So here’s the strange
thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed
to 149 countries, or
approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside
its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas;
on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a
surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as
well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria
to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale
invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never
to identify the U.S. as an “aggressor” anywhere?
What you might say about
the United States is that, as the self-proclaimed leading proponent of
democracy and human rights (even if its president is now having a set of love affairs with
autocrats and dictators), Americans consider ourselves at home just about
anywhere we care to be on planet Earth. It matters little how we may be
armed and what we might do. Consequently, wherever Americans are bothered,
harassed, threatened, attacked, we are always the ones being provoked and
aggressed upon, never provoking and aggressing. I mean, how can you be the
aggressor in your own house, even if that house happens to be temporarily located
in Afghanistan, Iraq, or perhaps soon enough in Iran?
A Planet of Aggressors
and Provocateurs
To mine the same New
York Times piece a little more, here’s another paragraph:
“Some officials believe the United States needs [to] be
willing to master the kind of deniable, shadowy techniques Tehran has perfected
in order to halt Iran’s aggressions. Others think that, while helpful, such
clandestine attacks will not be enough to reassure American allies or deter
Iran.”
Of course, such clandestine
American attacks would, by definition, not be “aggression,” not given that they
were directed against Iran. Forget the grim historical humor lurking in the
above passage, since the present Iranian religious hard-liners probably wouldn’t
be there if, back in 1953, the CIA hadn’t used just such techniques to
overthrow a democratically elected Iranian government and install its own
autocrat, the young Shah, in power.
As that Times piece
also emphasizes, Iran now uses “proxy forces” throughout the region (indeed it
does!) against U.S. (and Israeli) power, a tactic Americans evidently just
hadn’t thought about employing themselves in this century -- until now.
Americans naturally have no proxy forces in the Greater Middle East. That’s a
well-known fact. Just out of curiosity, however, what would you call the local
forces our special ops guys are training and
advising in so many of those 149 countries around the planet, since obviously
they could never be proxy forces? And how about the Afghan and Iraqi militaries
that the U.S. trained, supplied with
weaponry, and advised in these years? (You know, the Iraqi army that collapsed in the
face of ISIS in 2014 or the Afghan security forces that have been unable to
staunch either the growth of the
Taliban or of the Afghan branch of
ISIS.)
Now, don’t get me wrong. Yes, the Iranians can (and sometimes
do) provoke and aggress. It’s an ugly planet filled with aggression and
provocation. (Take Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Crimea and Ukraine, for instance.)
The Chinese are now aggressing in the South China Sea where the U.S. Navy
regularly conducts “freedom of navigation” operations -- though no provocation
there, as the Pacific's an American lake, isn’t it?
In short, when it comes to
provocation and aggression, the world is our oyster. There are so many bad guys
out there and then, of course, there’s us. We can make mistakes and missteps,
we can kill staggering
numbers of civilians, destroy cities, uproot
populations, create hordes of refugees with our never-ending wars
across the Greater Middle East and Africa, but aggression? What are you
thinking?
One thing is obvious if you
follow the mainstream media: in our world, no matter what we do, we’re still
the good guys on a planet filled with provocateurs and aggressors of every
sort.
War to the Horizon
Now let’s think for a
moment about that remarkable American comfort level, that unprecedented sense
of being at home practically anywhere on Earth we choose to send armed
Americans -- and while we’re at it, let’s consider a related subject: America’s
wars.
If, in the early 1970s, you
had told me or any other American that, in the nearly half-century to come, the
U.S. would fight wars and other lesser conflicts of almost every imaginable
sort in startling numbers of places thousands of miles from home, including
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, countries most Americans
couldn’t then (or now) find on a map, I guarantee you one thing: we would have
thought you were nuts. (Of course, if you had described Donald Trump’s White
House to me then as our future reality, I would have considered you beyond
delusional.)
And yet here we are. Think
about Afghanistan for a moment. In those distant days of the last century, that
country would undoubtedly have been known here only to small numbers of young adventurers
eager to hike what was then called “the hippy trail.” There,
in a still remarkably peaceful place, a young American might have been greeted
with remarkable friendliness and then spaced out on drugs.
That, of course, was before
Washington’s first (covert) Afghan War, the one the CIA oversaw, with the
help of Saudi money (yes, even then!) and a major hand from the Pakistani
intelligence services. Do you remember that conflict, which began in 1979 and
ended a decade later with the Red Army limping out of Kabul in defeat, heading
for a land, the Soviet Union, which would implode within two years? What a
“victory” that proved to be for America, not to speak of the groups of extremist
Islamic militants we helped to fund and support, including a young Saudi named
Osama bin Laden.
And keep in mind as well
that that was our “short” war in Afghanistan, a mere decade long. In October
2001, soon after the 9/11 attacks, instead of launching a police action against
Osama bin Laden and crew, the administration of George W. Bush decided to
invade that country. Almost 18 years later, the U.S. military is still fighting there (remarkably
unsuccessfully) against a thoroughly rejuvenated Taliban and a new branch of
ISIS. It now qualifies as the longest war in our
history (without even adding in that first Afghan War of ours).
And then, of course,
there’s Iraq. By my count, the U.S. has been involved in four conflicts
involving that country, starting with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980
and the ensuing war, which the administration of President Ronald Reagan
supported militarily (as the present one does the Saudi war in Yemen). Then
there was President George H.W. Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein after his
military invaded Kuwait in 1990, which resulted in a resounding (but by no
means conclusive) victory and the kind of victory parade in Washington that
Donald Trump can only dream of. Next, of
course, was President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq (mission accomplished!),
a grim and unsatisfying eight-year conflict from which President Barack Obama
withdrew U.S. troops in 2011. The fourth war followed in 2014 when the
U.S.-trained Iraqi military collapsed in the face of relatively small numbers
of ISIS militants, a group that was an offshoot of
al-Qaeda in Iraq, which didn’t exist until the U.S. invaded that country. That September,
President Obama loosed the U.S. air force on Iraq and Syria (so you can add a
fifth war in a neighboring country to the mix) and sent U.S. troops back into
Iraq and into Syria where they still remain.
Oh, yes, and don’t forget
Somalia. U.S. troubles there began with the famed Black Hawk Down incident amid
the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 and never, in a sense, really ended. Today,
U.S. Special Operations forces are still on the ground there
and U.S. air strikes against a Somali militant Islamic group, al-Shabaab, have
actually been on the rise in the
Trump era.
As for Yemen, from the
first U.S. drone strike there in 2002, the U.S. had
been in an on-again, off-again low-level conflict there that included commando
raids, cruise missile attacks, air strikes, and drone strikes against al-Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula, another offshoot of the original al-Qaeda. Since, in
2015, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates launched their war against Houthi
rebels (backed by Iran) who had come to control significant parts of the
country, the U.S. has been supporting them with weaponry, intelligence, and targeting,
as well as (until late last year) mid-air refueling and
other aid. Meanwhile, that brutal war of destruction has led to staggering
numbers of Yemeni civilian casualties (and widespread starvation),
but as with so many of the other campaigns the U.S. has involved itself in
across the Greater Middle East and Africa it shows no sign of ending.
And don’t forget Libya,
where the U.S. and NATO intervened in 2011 to help rebels take down Muammar
Gaddafi, the local autocrat, and in the process managed to foster a failed
state in a land now experiencing its own civil war. In the
years since 2011, the U.S. has sometimes had commandos on the ground there, has
launched hundreds of drone strikes
(and air strikes), often against a branch of ISIS that grew up in that land.
Once again, little is settled there, so we can all continue to sing the Marine
Hymn (“...to the shores of Tripoli”) with a sense of appropriateness.
And I haven’t even mentioned Pakistan, Niger, and god knows
where else. You should also note that the American forever war on
terror has proven a remarkably effective war for terror,
clearly helping to foster and spread such groups, aggressors and provocateurs
all, around significant parts of the planet, from the Philippines to the Congo.
Addicted to war? Not us.
Still, all in all, it’s quite a record and let’s not forget that looming on the
horizon is another possible war, this time with Iran, a country that the men
overseeing the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (including present
National Security Advisor John Bolton) were eager
to go after even then. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad,” so the saying reputedly
went in Washington at the time. “Real men want to go to Tehran.” And it’s just
possible that, in 2019, Bolton and crew will be able to act on that much
delayed urge. Considering the history of American wars in these years, what
could possibly go wrong?
To sum up, no one should
ever claim that we Americans aren’t “at home” in the world. We’re everywhere,
remarkably well funded and
well armed and ready to face off against the aggressors and provocateurs of
this planet. Just one small suggestion: thank the troops for
their service if you want, and then, as most Americans do, go about your
business as if nothing were happening in those distant lands. As we head into
election season 2020, however, just don’t imagine that we’re the good guys on
Planet Earth. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many good guys left.
Tom Engelhardt is a
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.
He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the
Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch
Books).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in
the Splinterlands series) Frostlands,Beverly
Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and
Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright Tom Engelhardt
2019
