The Inevitable Consequences of Sending Special Forces on Missions in 120 Different Countries-- Blowback on U.S. Soil

The expansion of U.S. special forces to conduct covert warfare sacrifices long term interests in peace, stability and the rule of law for short-term political gain.

September 13, 2012  |  

 

The United States has suffered three widely acknowledged military disasters since the end of the Second World War: in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. The American public responded to each crisis by electing new leaders with a mandate to end the wars and avoid new ones. But in each case, our new leaders failed to make the genuine recommitment to peace and diplomacy that was called for. Instead, they allayed the fears of the public by moving American war-making farther into the shadows, deploying the CIA and special operations forces in covert operations and proxy wars, sowing seeds of violence and injustice that would fester for decades and often erupt into conflict many years later.

Six months after taking office, President Eisenhower signed an armistice agreement to end the Korean War. But three weeks later, he unleashed the CIA's first covert operation, to overthrow the elected government of Iran. The nationalization of Iran's oil industry was reversed and U.S. oil companies gained a substantial share of Iran's oil production. Problem solved, right? Not exactly -- the U.S. coup and its support for the Shah's despotic rule led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and a hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy. Now the long-term breakdown of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran threatens to explode into a new American war.

A year later, the CIA followed up on its "success" in Iran by removing another elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala. The coup rescued United Fruit Company's ownership of 42% of the agricultural land in Guatemala from Arbenz's modest efforts at land reform, but the 42-year civil war that followed killed at least 250,000 people.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam led to ten years of relative peace, in which the U.S. avoided open warfare anywhere in the world. But once again, this concealed what senior U.S. military officers have called the  "disguised, quiet, media-free"  approach to war in Central America and Afghanistan. Proxy forces armed with American weapons and supported by small numbers of American "advisers" once again plunged millions of people's lives into chaos.
In El Salvador and Nicaragua, the political parties the U.S. fought in the 1980s have eventually won elections and come to power anyway. And in Afghanistan, mujaheddin that the U.S. armed and supported in the 1980s produced the most dramatic act of "blowback" ever on September 11th 2001, plunging America into a decade or more of war, economic crisis and global chaos that we have yet to find our way out of.
President Obama fulfilled the U.S. commitment to withdraw from Iraq that the Maliki government wrung out of the Bush administration, and he stopped the CIA from kidnapping people and bundling them off to Guantanamo. But even after his much-vaunted "withdrawal" from Afghanistan, there will still be twice as many U.S. troops there as when he took office. And he halted the parade of men in orange jump suits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine in Cuba, not by restoring the rule of law, but by ordering the extra-judicial execution of terrorism suspects -- a national policy of cold-blooded murder.
Not a week goes by without news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen, but the U.S. also conducts assassinations by helicopter-borne special forces like the ones who killed Osama Bin Laden. The former head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Admiral Eric Olson, told an  Aspen Institute conference  that SOCOM conducts a dozen such operations every night in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The total number of night raids in Afghanistan escalated from twenty per month in early 2009 to  over a thousand per month  two years later, and senior officers admit that  at least half of them target the wrong person or house

  

Sixty thousand U.S. special operations forces now conduct assassinations, night-raids, training missions, joint operations and exercises in  120 countries around the world , twice as many as when Obama came to power, with deployments in about 70 countries at any given time.
In The Politics of Heroin, Alfred McCoy described how the CIA formed secret alliances with Nationalist Chinese generals in Burma and Thailand, Corsican gangsters in Marseilles, Afghan warlords, Haitian military officers, Manuel Noriega in Panama and Nicaraguan Contra commanders. In every case, the CIA's partners exploited their impunity as U.S. allies to become major players in the global drug trade. Now former Mexican special forces trained at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning run the Zetas drug cartel, and the  new police chief  installed by a U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in Afghanistan in 2011 reportedly earns  $60 million a year from opium smuggling .

The current expansion of U.S. special forces to conduct covert and proxy warfare sacrifices U.S. long term interests in peace, stability and the rule of law for short-term political gain, just as when U.S. "advisers" were sent to Vietnam in the 1950s and to Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But which of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate will become the next Vietnam or Iran or Guatemala?
Could it be India, which holds  50 joint training exercises a year  with U.S. forces, the most of any country in the world, as it battles separatists in Kashmir and Assam and a "people's war" by Naxalites or Maoists in 7 other provinces?
Or what about Uganda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Djibouti or Kenya, where U.S. forces are training African Union "peacekeepers" to fight the Al-Shabab militia in Somalia? Or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic or South Sudan, where U.S. special forces have been sent to track down Joseph Kony but are suspected of planning a covert war against Sudan?
The pervasiveness and perversity of America's military madness could produce severe "blowback" from any one of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate. So how will we respond when the inevitable blowback comes? Will we once again fall in line as our leaders lash out at some new enemy? Or will we know enough of our own history to look in the mirror and recognize the real source of the violence and chaos that our irresponsible leaders keep unleashing on the world?

Why Does America Love Gossiping About Young, Drug-Using Women Like Cat Marnell?

September 12, 2012  |  

 

 Beauty writer and self-proclaimed party girl Cat Marnell doesn’t give a shit. At least, that was the headline of a recent Vice magazine article about the “troubled drug-addicted beauty-queen.” A former beauty and health editor at the women’s lifestyle Web site xoJane, Marnell very publicly refused to enter rehab, got fired from xoJane and hired at Vice, where she continues to write shamelessly about her cocaine, Adderall and PCP binges.

Whether you love or hate her, Cat Marnell is unique because she not only accepts a role condemned by society, she actually flaunts this identity. As Sady Doyle writes, Marnell embodies the female “wreck” -- a hot mess of smeared lipstick, cigarettes and stumbling, perhaps best personified by the pop star Ke$sha, whose conflation of pleasure and downfall climaxes in her hit song “Your Love is a Drug.”  Marnell’s compliance with that role is what makes her different. It is also part of what so many find sad. Some envy Marnell’s talent, and her willingness to sacrifice health for excitement and attention. In the  New York Times magazine, former alcoholic Sarah Hepola wrote:

I would get these funny zaps of envy reading her prose. I should have done more drugs, I would stupidly think. I should have fallen deeper in the hole. I was just a garden-variety lush, so enamored of booze I didn’t even bother with hard drugs. And I saw in her drug use and her writing an abandon I never allowed myself, and it gave her articles that unmistakable thrill of things breaking apart.

After all, society loves, and loves to hate, a female whose life is spiraling out of control--and Marnell is well aware of this fact. “A blonde who's soaking wet and crashing down looks chic and trés Carolyn Bessette,” Marnell recently wrote.
What society loves most is the crash itself. Marnell’s readers and voyeurs anxiously await her demise as confirmation that, as Nathaniel Hawthorne taught us, bad girls are always punished with failure. This inevitable fiery end is presupposed, already written into the script. But what’s missing from the conversation about Cat Marnell is the idea that there could be a female drug user who doesn't end in a flame of self-destruction.
Drug use is an integral part of the ticking time-bomb party girl stereotype. The logic is as simple as it is puritanical: you can’t break too many social rules and still become successful; self-destruction punishes over-indulgence. But young girls need not be the perfect virgin nor the jezebel when it comes to both sex and drugs.
There has long been a double standard for substance use, and just as misogyny drives the fascination with female destruction, it is also the driving force behind the stereotyped female user. The supposed sanctity of women’s bodies has led society to frown upon women who “poison their temple” by participating in what are considered to be male vices. Women who use drugs are quickly scandalized in the tabloids as reckless party girls whose self-abandon is destroying both their personal and professional lives. But where are the male Paris Hiltons? Or better yet, the female Mick Jaggers?
“Where are the female Tommy Chongs, the Snoop Dog (Lion)s, and the Willie Nelsons?” Greta Gaines wrote in a recent AlterNet article. “They are out there, but they’re not talking.”
Would Marnell be a wreck if society did not insist on tearing her down? For women, the fears and stigmas of drug use often eclipse the reality. Women like Miley Cyrus may experiment with drugs without any problems, but they are nonetheless stereotyped as disgraced party girls, in part because a wreck is what many may wish upon them. To avoid the crash, women must create alternative endings for the drug-use narrative.

For example, mothers who smoke weed recreationally are “coming out” as stoned and proud, explaining to the public how smoking weed and being a good mom are not mutually exclusive. As many of the women point out, weed is safer than alcohol, and gets them buzzed just enough to relax, laugh and go about their day. Sick and tired of "being judged for doing something nontoxic and totally organic, enjoying a god-given plant, by moms who suck back two bottles of Chardonnay like sports drinks,” they are  taking to the Internet to defend their lifestyle choice.
“Anybody who thinks that weed makes parents ignore their children has clearly never been high around one,” an anonymous weed mom wrote on Jezebel . And she’s right; It’s not like moms are lighting up and getting reckless. To the contrary, pot-smoking moms say a little cannabis helps them focus and relax so that typically menial tasks like folding laundry become fun. Instead of “getting all crazy, hanging out of limo sun roofs,” wrote Anonymous, “I tend to ride out my buzz by giggling with my family, eating dinner, doing the dishes, putting the baby to bed and watching an episode of 'Friday Night Lights.'"
These kinds of stories about non-problematic drug use empower women to control their bodies and lives--from what they put into them to what happens after. As Anonymous wrote,

“...I know I'm not the only one , and I know I'm in good company , but I wish that more parents were open about smoking pot in order to reduce the stigma associated with it. You know, I'm a mom, but I'm also a person. Don't put me in a box. Unless it's a hot box.”

Opening up this conversation could benefit not just the Lindsay Lohans of the world, but society at large. The judgements and condemnation that afflicts celebrity female drug users extends far beyond the tabloid pages. The drug war gives the government room to meddle in women’s wombs, to take their children away for crimes as small as marijuana use and to chain imprisoned addicts giving birth to hospital beds (as if they would run away).
Rewriting this narrative, therefore, isn’t simply about saving Cat Marnell; it’s about protecting the basic liberties of millions of women in the United States. After all, as Marnell told Vice magazine , “I am a person in a woman’s body.”
The fact that she said those words when she was likely high on a cocktail of amphetamines doesn’t make them any less true.