Similarly, the NSA’s surveillance regime, another form of global intervention by Washington, has—experts are convinced—done
little or
nothing to protect Americans from terror attacks. It has, however, done a great deal to damage the
interests of America’s
tech corporations and to increase
suspicion and anger over Washington’s policies even among allies. And by the way, congratulations are due on one of the latest military moves of the Obama administration, the sending of US military
teams and
drones into Nigeria and neighboring countries to help rescue those girls kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram. The rescue was a remarkable success… oops,
didn’t happen (and we don’t even know yet what the blowback will be).
3. American-style war is a destabilizing force. Just look at the effects of American war in the twenty-first century. It’s clear, for instance, that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 unleashed a brutal, bloody, Sunni-Shiite civil war across the region (as well as the Arab Spring, one might argue). One result of that invasion and the subsequent occupation, as well as of the wars and civil wars that followed: the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis,
Syrians and Lebanese, while major areas of
Syria and some parts of
Iraq have fallen into the hands of armed supporters of Al Qaeda or, in one major case, a group that didn’t find that organization
extreme enough. A significant part of the oil heartlands of the planet is, that is, being destabilized.
Meanwhile, the US war in Afghanistan and the CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal borderlands of neighboring Pakistan have destabilized that country, which now has its own
fierce Taliban movement. The 2011 US intervention in Libya initially seemed like a triumph, as had the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan before it. Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown and the rebels swept into power. Like Afghanistan and Iraq, however, Libya is now a basket case, riven by
competing militias and
ambitious generals, largely ungovernable, and an open wound for the region. Arms from Qaddafi’s looted arsenals have made their way into the hands of Islamist rebels and jihadist extremists from the
Sinai Peninsula to Mali, from
Northern Africa to
northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram is entrenched. It is even possible, as Nick Turse
has done, to trace the growing US military presence in Africa to the destabilization of parts of that continent.
4. The US military can’t win its wars. This is so obvious (though seldom said) that it hardly has to be explained. The US military
has not won a serious engagement since World War II: the results of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq ranged from stalemate to defeat and disaster. With the exception of a couple of campaigns against essentially no one (in Grenada and Panama), nothing, including the “Global War on Terror,” would qualify as a success on its own terms, no less anyone else’s. This was true, strategically speaking, despite the fact that, in all these wars, the United States controlled the air space, the seas (where relevant) and just about any field of battle where the enemy might be met. Its firepower was overwhelming and its ability to lose in small-scale combat just about nil.
It would be folly to imagine that this record represents the historical norm. It doesn’t. It might be more relevant to suggest that the sorts of imperial wars and wars of pacification the United States has fought in recent times, often against poorly armed, minimally trained, minority insurgencies (or terror outfits), are simply unwinnable. They seem to generate their own resistance. Their brutalities and even their “victories” simply act as recruitment posters for the enemy.
ho really are the fuck ups of the world ????
