An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:If all goes as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A. Only the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will ever filter back to our world.
After all, American war is
heading for the
"shadows" in a big way. As news articles have
recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration's global spear will increasingly be shaped from the
ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces. They are so secretive that they don't like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of
Wired's Danger Room blog
notes, "not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act." By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.
Although the special ops crew (66,000 people in all) exist on our tax dollars, we're really not supposed to know anything about what they're doing -- unless, of course, they choose the publicity venue themselves, whether in Pakistan
knocking off Osama bin Laden or
parachuting onto Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard to promote
Act of Valor. In case you somehow missed the ads, that's the new film about "real terrorist threats based on true stories starring actual Navy SEALs." (No names in the credits please!)
Of course, those elite SEAL teams are johnnies-come-lately when compared to their no less secretive "teammates" in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia -- our ever increasing armada of drones. Those robotic warriors of the air (or at least their fantasy doppelgangers) were, of course, pre-celebrated -- after a fashion -- in the
Terminator movies. In Washington's global battle zones,
what's called our "traditional combat role" -- think big invasions, occupations, counterinsurgency -- is going, going, gone with the wind, even evidently in Afghanistan by 2013. War American-style is instead being inherited by secretive teams of men and machines, both hunter-killers who specialize in assassination operations, and both of whom, as presented to Americans, just couldn't be sexier.
Comment: They've been doing this sort of thing for years as COINTELPRO, only now they are going high-tech.