'Back In The Business Of Killing'

Ever since September 11, the US - with the help of the CIA - has been carrying out a secret war that defies imagination, says New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti. And it's not just Washington giving the green light.

The campaign against America's enemies is silent and precise. Commanders fight without troops. They operate from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia - their "troops" in front of computer screens in Nevada or New Mexico. Their weapons are unmanned drones.

"The CIA, over the last 12 years, has very much been back in the business of killing," said Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Mazzetti in an interview with DW. "Since the September 11 attacks, the CIA has gradually transformed into very much of a paramilitary organization."

Just released in Germany, "The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth" contains evidence gathered by the New York Times journalist via interviews with intelligence operatives and politicians. Mazzetti speaks of a military complex catalysed by developments in drone technology.

"It's the military, it's the spy services, it's private companies that have in many ways created this new state where they can carry out these secret missions and secret eavesdropping," he said.

Blurred Boundaries

The new procedural structures followed in the wake of the terror attacks on New York's World Trade Center and Pentagon which resulted in more than 3,000 deaths. Anti-terrorism legislation enacted under President George W. Bush, Mazzetti says, circumvented earlier prohibitions on targeted killings.

"There's a whole new world that has emerged since the Spetember 11 attacks," he said.

Borders between the army and secret service became blurred. Roughly 60 percent of the CIA's current staff was hired after the 2001 terror attacks. Many of those hires have a simple task: hunting and killing people.

Bush's successor, Barack Obama, further pursued that policy - with the help of, among other things, a secret agreement with the Pakistani government. Local tribal areas in Pakistan were considered sanctuaries for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Since 2004, drones have been flying over such areas and firing rockets at the homes, vehicles and territories of supposed Islamists. Publicly, the Pakistani government has reacted with protests to violations of its sovereign territory. Quietly, Mazzetti says, Pakistan might have endorsed them.

"There are suspicions that privately, they have been giving their approval for the strikes," he said, "because the US has also gone after enemies of Pakistan." One example was Taliban leader Nek Mohammed. He became the first official target of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and his death, Mazzetti says, was a precondition for the US to receive flyover rights for further strikes.

Drone missions were then expanded - to Yemen as well as Somalia. Resulting mishaps are greeted by silence in Washington. Its successes are celebrated in the media.

Carte Blanche From Washington

In certain countries, Washington has given the CIA complete control over drone operations.

"In Pakistan, for instance, the CIA really has the authority to target individuals or groups of individuals without asking the White House's permission," Mazzetti said. In countries like Yemen, he added, President Obama has insisted that the White House have more control over the kill list. Those operations are first reviewed by task forces within the White House.

Less controversial are attacks on individuals who have been clearly identified. In "signature attacks," however, that is not the case.

"Signature strikes are based on patterns of activities. In other words, they look on the ground. They don't know specifically who these people are, but they suspect they're doing suspicious activities - they might be trying to cross the border into Afghanistan," Mazzetti said. "[The CIA] has the authority to carry out a strike."

Such attacks are controversial - particularly due to the increase in civilian casualties. One of the more notorious cases occurred in March 2011 in Pakistan. More than 40 civilians were killed during a drone attack on a suspected Taliban meeting in North Waziristan, an area considered by the Pakistani government to have been "Talibanized." The meeting turned out to be an open-air tribal gathering.

Further Developments

Over time, Pakistan's government began turning away from the attacks it once invited. Protests against America's "killer drones" took place both outside the government and within it.

Pakistani authorities refer to the latest UN figures citing 330 drone attacks. Approximately 2,200 people are thought to have been killed in those attacks, but according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent journalist network based in London, the figures are far higher. Among those killed, 400 were civilians, according to official statements from Pakistan. Another 200 were considered "non-combatants." The UN has called on the US to release its own statistics on civilian casualties resulting from drone strikes.

"President Obama has indicated, although he doesn't say it publicly, that these strikes in Pakistan will continue as long as there are American troops in Afghanistan. So that should be at least another year," Mazzetti said.

It's a policy Obama will have to clarify with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who will be visiting the White House on Wednesday (23.10.2013). It will be equally difficult, Mazzetti says, for the US government to justify arguments against other countries' use of military drones. In China or Russia, for example, the technology for unmanned warfare is already readily available.

For Mazzetti, the idea of the world turning into a "silent battlefield" is as frightening as the role drones might play in day-to-day America in the future.

With police already utilizing drones for criminal investigations, the journalist and author believes that in just five-to-10 years, weaponized drones will be used for domestic crime-fighting.

The Coming Era Of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts

By Tom Engelhardt

In terms of pure projectable power, there’s never been anything like it. Its military has divided the world – the whole planet – into six "commands." Its fleet, with 11 aircraft carrier battle groups, rules the seas and has done so largely unchallenged for almost seven decades. Its Air Force has ruled the global skies, and despite being almost continuously in action for years, hasn’t faced an enemy plane since 1991 or been seriously challenged anywhere since the early 1970s. Its fleet of drone aircraft has proven itself capable of targeting and killing suspected enemies in the backlands of the planet from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia with little regard for national boundaries, and none at all for the possibility of being shot down. It funds and trains proxy armies on several continents and has complex aid and training relationships with militaries across the planet. On hundreds of bases, some tiny and others the size of American towns, its soldiers garrison the globe from Italy to Australia, Honduras to Afghanistan, and on islands from Okinawa in the Pacific Ocean to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its weapons makers are the most advanced on Earth and dominate the global arms market. Its nuclear weaponry in silos, on bombers, and on its fleet of submarines would be capable of destroying several planets the size of Earth. Its system of spy satellites is unsurpassed and unchallenged. Its intelligence services can listen in on the phone calls or read the emails of almost anyone in the world from top foreign leaders to obscure insurgents. The CIA and its expanding paramilitary forces are capable of kidnapping people of interest just about anywhere from rural Macedonia to the streets of Rome and Tripoli. For its many prisoners, it has set up (and dismantled) secret jails across the planet and on its naval vessels. It spends more on its military than the next most powerful 13 states combined. Add in the spending for its full national security state and it towers over any conceivable group of other nations.

In terms of advanced and unchallenged military power, there has been nothing like the U.S. armed forces since the Mongols swept across Eurasia. No wonder American presidents now regularly use phrases like "the finest fighting force the world has ever known" to describe it. By the logic of the situation, the planet should be a pushover for it. Lesser nations with far lesser forces have, in the past, controlled vast territories. And despite much discussion of American decline and the waning of its power in a "multi-polar" world, its ability to pulverize and destroy, kill and maim, blow up and kick down has only grown in this new century.

No other nation’s military comes within a country mile of it. None has more than a handful of foreign bases. None has more than two aircraft carrier battle groups. No potential enemy has such a fleet of robotic planes. None has more than 60,000 special operations forces. Country by country, it’s a hands-down no-contest. The Russian (once "Red") army is a shadow of its former self. The Europeans have not rearmed significantly. Japan’s "self-defense" forces are powerful and slowly growing, but under the US nuclear "umbrella." Although China, regularly identified as the next rising imperial state, is involved in a much-ballyhooed military buildup, with its one aircraft carrier (a retread from the days of the Soviet Union), it still remains only a regional power.

Despite this stunning global power equation, for more than a decade we have been given a lesson in what a military, no matter how overwhelming, can and (mostly) can’t do in the twenty-first century, in what a military, no matter how staggeringly advanced, does and (mostly) does not translate into on the current version of planet Earth.

A Destabilization Machine

Let’s start with what the US can do. On this, the recent record is clear: it can destroy and destabilize. In fact, wherever US military power has been applied in recent years, if there has been any lasting effect at all, it has been to destabilize whole regions.

Back in 2004, almost a year and a half after American troops had rolled into a Baghdad looted and in flames, Amr Mussa, the head of the Arab League, commentedominously, "The gates of hell are open in Iraq." Although for the Bush administration, the situation in that country was already devolving, to the extent that anyone paid attention to Mussa’s description, it seemed over the top, even outrageous, as applied to American-occupied Iraq. Today, with the latest scientific estimate of invasion- and war-caused Iraqi deaths at a staggering 461,000, thousands more a year still dyingthere, and with Syria in flames, it seems something of an understatement.

It’s now clear that George W. Bush and his top officials, fervent fundamentalists when it came to the power of US military to alter, control, and dominate the Greater Middle East (and possibly the planet), did launch the radical transformation of the region. Their invasion of Iraq punched a hole through the heart of the Middle East, sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war that has now spread catastrophically to Syria, taking more than100,000 lives there. They helped turn the region into a churning sea of refugees, gave life and meaning to a previously nonexistent al-Qaeda in Iraq (and now a Syrian version of the same), and left the country drifting in a sea of roadside bombs and suicide bombers, and threatened, like other countries in the region, with the possibility of splitting apart.

And that’s just a thumbnail sketch. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about destabilization in Afghanistan, where US troops have been on the ground for almost 12 years and counting; Pakistan, where a CIA-run drone air campaign in its tribal borderlands has gone on for years as the country grew ever shakier and more violent; Yemen (ditto), as an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula grew ever stronger; or Somalia, where Washington repeatedly backed proxy armies it had trained and financed, and supported outside incursions as an already destabilized country came apart at the seams and the influence of al-Shabab, an increasingly radical and violent insurgent Islamic group, began to seep across regional borders. The results have always been the same: destabilization.

Consider Libya where, no longer enamored with boots-on-the-ground interventions, President Obama sent in the Air Force and the drones in 2011 in a bloodless intervention (unless, of course, you were on the ground) that helped topple Muammar Qaddafi, the local autocrat and his secret-police-and-prisons regime, and launched a vigorous young democracy… oh, wait a moment, not quite. In fact, the result, which, unbelievably enough, came as a surprise to Washington, was an increasingly damaged country with a desperately weak central government, a territory controlled by a range of militias – some Islamic extremist in nature – an insurgency and war across the border in neighboring Mali (thanks to an influx of weaponry looted from Qaddafi’s vast arsenals), a dead American ambassador, a country almost incapable of exporting its oil, and so on.

Libya was, in fact, so thoroughly destabilized, so lacking in central authority that Washington recently felt free to dispatch US Special Operations forces onto the streets of its capital in broad daylight in an operation to snatch up a long-sought terrorist suspect, an act which was as "successful" as the toppling of the Qaddafi regime and, in a similar manner, further destabilized a government that Washington still theoretically backed. (Almost immediately afterward, the prime minister found himself briefly kidnapped by a militia unit as part of what might have been a coup attempt.)

Wonders of the Modern World

If the overwhelming military power at the command of Washington can destabilize whole regions of the planet, what, then, can’t such military power do? On this, the record is no less clear and just as decisive. As every significant US military action of this new century has indicated, the application of military force, no matter in what form, has proven incapable of achieving even Washington’s most minimal goals of the moment.

Consider this one of the wonders of the modern world: pile up the military technology, pour money into your armed forces, outpace the rest of the world, and none of it adds up to a pile of beans when it comes to making that world act as you wish. Yes, in Iraq, to take an example, Saddam Hussein’s regime was quickly "decapitated," thanks to an overwhelming display of power and muscle by the invading Americans. His state bureaucracy was dismantled, his army dismissed, an occupying authority established backed by foreign troops, soon ensconced on huge multibillion-dollar military bases meant to be garrisoned for generations, and a suitably "friendly" local government installed.

And that’s where the Bush administration’s dreams ended in the rubble created by a set of poorly armed minority insurgencies, terrorism, and a brutal ethnic/religious civil war. In the end, almost nine years after the invasion and despite the fact that the Obama administration and the Pentagon were eager to keep US troops stationed there in some capacity, a relatively weak central government refused, and they departed, the last representatives of the greatest power on the planet slipping away in the dead of night. Left behind among the ruins of historic ziggurats were the "ghost towns" and stripped or looted US bases that were to be our monuments in Iraq.

Today, under even more extraordinary circumstances, a similar process seems to be playing itself out in Afghanistan – another spectacle of our moment that should amaze us. After almost 12 years there, finding itself incapable of suppressing a minority insurgency, Washington is slowly withdrawing its combat troops, but wants to leave behind on the giant bases we’ve built perhaps 10,000 "trainers" for the Afghan military and some Special Operations forces to continue the hunt for al-Qaeda and other terror types.

For the planet’s sole superpower, this, of all things, should be a slam dunk. At least the Iraqi government had a certain strength of its own (and the country’s oil wealth to back it up). If there is a government on Earth that qualifies for the term "puppet," it should be the Afghan one of President Hamid Karzai. After all, at least 80% (and possibly 90%) of that government’s expenses are covered by the US and its allies, and its security forces are considered incapable of carrying on the fight against the Taliban and other insurgent outfits without US support and aid. If Washington were to withdraw totally (including its financial support), it’s hard to imagine that any successor to the Karzai government would last long.

How, then, to explain the fact that Karzai has refused to sign a future bilateral security pact long in the process of being hammered out? Instead, he recently denounced US actions in Afghanistan, as he had repeatedly done in the past, claimed that he simply would not ink the agreement, and began bargaining with US officials as if he were the leader of the planet’s other superpower.

A frustrated Washington had to dispatch Secretary of State John Kerry on a sudden mission to Kabul for some top-level face-to-face negotiations. The result, a reported24-hour marathon of talks and meetings, was hailed as a success: problem(s) solved. Oops, all but one. As it turned out, it was the very same one on which the continued US military presence in Iraq stumbled – Washington’s demand for legal immunity from local law for its troops. In the end, Kerry flew out without an assured agreement.

Making Sense of War in the Twenty-First Century

Whether the US military does or doesn’t last a few more years in Afghanistan, the blunt fact is this: the president of one of the poorest and weakest countries on the planet, himself relatively powerless, is essentially dictating terms to Washington – and who’s to say that, in the end, as in Iraq, US troops won’t be forced to leave there as well?

Once again, military strength has not carried the day. Yet military power, advanced weaponry, force, and destruction as tools of policy, as ways to create a world in your own image or to your own taste, have worked plenty well in the past. Ask those Mongols, or the European imperial powers from Spain in the sixteenth century to Britain in the nineteenth century, which took their empires by force and successfully maintained them over long periods.

What planet are we now on? Why is it that military power, the mightiest imaginable, can’t overcome, pacify, or simply destroy weak powers, less than impressive insurgency movements, or the ragged groups of (often tribal) peoples we label as "terrorists"? Why is such military power no longer transformative or even reasonably effective? Is it, to reach for an analogy, like antibiotics? If used for too long in too many situations, does a kind of immunity build up against it?

Let’s be clear here: such a military remains a powerful potential instrument of destruction, death, and destabilization. For all we know – it’s not something we’ve seen anything of in these years – it might also be a powerful instrument for genuine defense. But if recent history is any guide, what it clearly cannot be in the twenty-first century is a policymaking instrument, a means of altering the world to fit a scheme developed in Washington. The planet itself and people just about anywhere on it seem increasingly resistant in ways that take the military off the table as an effective superpower instrument of state.

Washington’s military plans and tactics since 9/11 have been a spectacular train wreck. When you look back, counterinsurgency doctrine, resuscitated from the ashes of America’s defeat in Vietnam, is once again on the scrap heap of history. (Who today even remembers its key organizing phrase – "clear, hold, and build" – which now looks like the punch line for some malign joke?) "Surges," once hailed as brilliant military strategy, have already disappeared into the mists. "Nation-building," once a term of tradecraft in Washington, is in the doghouse. "Boots on the ground," of which the US had enormous numbers and still has 51,000 in Afghanistan, are now a no-no. The American public is, everyone universally agrees, "exhausted" with war. Major American armies arriving to fight anywhere on the Eurasian continent in the foreseeable future? Don’t count on it.

But lessons learned from the collapse of war policy? Don’t count on that, either. It’s clear enough that Washington still can’t fully absorb what’s happened. Its faith in war remains remarkably unbroken in a century in which military power has become the American political equivalent of a state religion. Our leaders are still high on the counterterrorism wars of the future, even as they drown in their military efforts of the present. Their urge is still to rejigger and reimagine what a deliverable military solution would be.

Now the message is: skip those boots en masse – in fact, cut down on their numbers in the age of the sequester – and go for the counterterrorism package. No more spilling of (American) blood. Get the "bad guys," one or a few at a time, using the president’s private army, the Special Operations forces, or his private air force, the CIA’s drones. Build new barebones micro-bases globally. Move those aircraft carrier battle groups off the coast of whatever country you want to intimidate.

It’s clear we’re entering a new period in terms of American war making. Call it the era of tiny wars, or micro-conflicts, especially in the tribal backlands of the planet.

So something is indeed changing in response to military failure, but what’s not changing is Washington’s preference for war as the option of choice, often of first resort. What’s not changing is the thought that, if you can just get your strategy and tactics readjusted correctly, force will work. (Recently, Washington was only saved from plunging into another predictable military disaster in Syria by an offhand comment of Secretary of State John Kerry and the timely intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin.)

What our leaders don’t get is the most basic, practical fact of our moment: war simply doesn’t work, not big, not micro – not for Washington. A superpower at war in the distant reaches of this planet is no longer a superpower ascendant but one with problems.

The US military may be a destabilization machine. It may be a blowback machine. What it’s not is a policymaking or enforcement machine.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture(now also in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note: A deep bow of thanks to Nick Turse for his continuing help and, above all, inspiration.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

The New Wave Of "Soft Invasions"

No-Fly Zones and Covert Ops Are Just As Bad As Large-Scale Interventions.

By Gary Brecher
Courtesy Of "The American Conservative Magazine"


The newest fad in foreign intervention is the slim-line approach. I swear, it really is like fashion news. A few years ago, the neocons were pushing a full-figured style of intervention, which ended up with us wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives in Iraq. Since that went so badly, the fashion has swung the other way, and the same idiots who brought you Iraq are pushing for a smaller, smarter style of intervention that leans on small groups of special-forces troops and covert operations.

Watch this play out with Libya: it starts with Sen. John McCain saying we should just impose a no-fly zone. Before you know it, there’s talk about a few airstrikes, providing logistical help to the rebels, maybe sending some troops with NATO or the UN—you know, to keep the “peace.”

The notion of not intervening, period, never enters the neocons’ heads. I got the shock of my life going through theWeekly Standard a couple of years ago when I saw the headline, “The Case Against Intervention.” But it turned out to be about the American economy. I should’ve realized, the only place these people don’t want us to pour money into is the USA.

When it comes to sending American GIs into harm’s way, they never met an intervention they didn’t like. Some of their proposed military interventions are so crazy you have to wonder if they weren’t chuckling to themselves over at Bill Kristol’s magazine when they wrote this nonsense. Craziest of all was the flurry of calls a couple of years back for us to intervene in Zimbabwe.

Too Stupid For Bush

If you actually know anything about contemporary military doctrine, you have to laugh at this notion. Zimbabwe has every deal-breaker in the book. For starters, it’s landlocked. America is and always has been an air/sea power; projecting that kind of power to a landlocked country is a nightmare. Zimbabwe is also mired in one of those endless ethnic feuds that just don’t respond to foreign pressure—in this case, deep and abiding hate between the two biggest tribes, Shona and Ndebele.

There’s also the fact that the dictator we’d have intervened against, Robert Mugabe, is a former guerrilla who still commands the allegiance of a tribal/irregular army. That’s the last thing U.S. conventional forces want to face. And finally—the factor that should veto any intervention—Mugabe has a long history of using foreign threats to prop up his regime. In fact, a foreign intervention is just about the only thing that could make Mugabe popular in Zimbabwe again, just as a foreign invasion to depose Obama is the only thing that would make him popular in Texas—well, maybe not Texas but, say, North Carolina.

So you think that stopped the neocon “let’s you and them fight” propaganda machine? Not for a second. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, living proof of the old saying that “there’s an idiot born every second, but unfortunately they take much longer to die,” wrote a column calling for us to use cruise missiles fired by an unmanned drone, the ultimate in “smaller, smarter” interventions, to kill Mugabe, in a column with the supposedly humorous title “Predator For a Predator.”

But Cohen didn’t go far enough for James Kirchick, the same genius who once wrote an article called “Hail, Mauritania” lauding the Coup Capital of the Sahara, often nominated for worst place in the world, as a beacon of democracy. He wrote an impassioned plea for full-scale military intervention in Zimbabwe, based on the fact that his Zimbabwean guide/lackey had broken down and cried, right in front of poor Kirchick, about the local situation.

Luckily, not even Bush was stupid enough to take that idea seriously. But the neocons never stop, and they don’t have a very high opinion of the American public’s memory or IQ. So they’ve developed new ad campaigns specifically designed for the wary buyer who has a bit of a problem with the Iraq lemon they sold us last time around. They’re using the notion of “smaller, smarter” interventions to lure us onto the lot the way car dealers use subcompact base models, sold at a loss, so they can talk us into the all-options luxury model intervention.

Small Wars, Big Mistakes

All “limited” interventions suffer from something the armed services call “Mission Creep.” They’ve seen it happen so many times: you go into some country promising to get ’er done, pack up and leave. But once you’re there, the mission starts creeping toward total occupation. The most obvious and insane example of mission creep is Vietnam. It’s hard to believe, but in the beginning, that was supposed to be a small, smart intervention too.

I don’t have to tell you, it suffered from a severe case of mission creep. In fact, missions don’t get much creepier than that one turned out to be, and all for nothing; Ho Chi Minh’s people won just like they would have if we’d left the place alone. Everyone else lost: the ordinary people of South Vietnam, the taxpayers of the United States, and 57,000 trusting working-class American kids who were too decent to go for the sleazy college deferment like Cheney did, along with a few thousand other chickenhawks who always love interventions that get other, braver and more honest people killed and maimed.

The closer you look, the worse all of our small-scale interventions appear, even the ones that supposedly succeeded. Take Clinton’s mini-war on Serbia in 1999. The official version is that we did a great job, stopping a Serbian massacre of Kosovo Albanians without losing much. Wrong on both counts.

For starters, you may have noticed that the Chinese air force is deploying a new stealth fighter. And how’s that related to the war against the Serbs? Well, a brand new F-117 stealth fighter went down over Serbia on its way to bomb the afternoon reruns. The stealth tech from that downed fighter found its way to the China’s aircraft designers, who reverse-engineered it to make radar-invisible fighters. America was never in any danger from the Serbs; China’s another matter.

That’s what happens when you start indulging every pundit and ethnic lobby’s pet interventions: you lose sight of what the real job of American security is supposed to be. I mean: keeping America secure.

Take a look at what that supposedly successful intervention in the Balkans actually did. The Serbs had been having a problem with a so-called army of Albanian irregulars called the KLA, “Kosovo Liberation Army.” These guys couldn’t fight at all and had already been beaten by Serb militia, tired middle-aged cops and veterans. But they realized that with the gullible Beltway pundit crowd, losing can be your fastest way to win. They took the corpses of their men who’d been killed by the Serb cops and militia, stripped them of weapons, and showed them to the international press as victims of Serb massacres. This being the Balkans, where massacres have been every tribe’s way of making war since the glaciers retreated, nobody doubted them.

The American press took it from there. The Beltway pundits can’t imagine a situation without a good guy and a bad guy, so they made the Serbs the bad guys and the Albanians the good guys. Now, I have no trouble with the Serbs as fairly bad guys when provoked—though I wish more people remembered what happened to the Serbs in World War II, so they’d understand why the Serbs are so easy to provoke—but the idea that the KLA were ever anything even slightly resembling good guys was just ridiculous. The KLA is a gang of bloodthirsty tribal killers who make it a policy to kill any Serb civilians they catch and have also been involved in heroin smuggling, human trafficking, and even organ sales. They actually harvested Serbian prisoners for organs to sell on the black market. And unlike Saddam, the KLA are genuine about their Muslim militancy and have tight connections with al-Qaeda.

At least the Serbs weren’t pro-al-Qaeda. That might have counted for something if anybody in D.C. had actually been thinking about us, the Americans they’re supposed to be protecting. But it didn’t figure into the decision to help the KLA. It never does.

One of the lessons you could learn from Kosovo, if anybody inside the Beltway was into learning lessons, is to take a look at the world you’re butting into. Kosovo is the heart of the Balkans, where tribal warfare is a way of life. What are the odds yougoing to find one tribe of totally evil people and another of totally good, gentle people in a region like that? But that’s the idea behind interventions like Clinton’s: bad, bad Serbs and good, sweet Albanians. God, just imagine how the rest of the Balkan tribes laughed at the idea of the Albanian mafia as noble victims.

Most American interventions come from two closely related childish fantasies: first, that one side in a tribal war is all good and the other all bad; and second, that the weaker tribe are the “underdogs” and therefore the good guys. Just look at those two ideas and you’ll see that they’re a series of disasters waiting to happen. The first one is bad enough, idealizing one bunch of desperate killers—but idealizing the weaker bunch of killers is even worse. That means you’re stuck propping up totally evil people who can’t even fight, like the KLA.

There are no good guys in tribal wars. The novelist V.S. Naipaul has a good line about that kind of world in Bend in the River, his surprisingly cool novel about the Congo War: “It’s not that there’s no right or wrong here. There’s no right.” The best thing to do about a place where everyone’s wrong is stay the hell away from it.

If the world had enough sense to do that, even Congo might not be so bad. If the Europeans and the do-gooders had left Congo to sort itself out, it’d be at peace now—a Roman-style peace, under the strongest and best-organized tribe, the Tutsi, hardcore warriors, the only tribe in that part of the world that can fight and stay disciplined.

Instead, the First World keeps clawing at the Tutsis every time they get stronger. They must be evil because they’re strong; that’s how the argument went. So when almost a million Tutsis were hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda, there really wasn’t much complaining from those compassionate Euro-lefties, or Bono, or any of the usual suspects. But oh, the minute the Tutsis organized a relief force and entered Rwanda to save the few of their people who were still alive, you should have heard the screaming from Paris! Aggression! Actual military progress, actual accomplishment! Mon dieu, we can’t have that! And so General Nkunda, the Tutsi leader and the one man who could have brought a kind of peace to Central Africa, is on trial for “war crimes,” while most of the Hutus who hacked up his people are sitting pretty.

Playing Castro’s Game

That’s the argument I’d make against “compassionate” or “humanitarian” intervention: it doesn’t work because it’s based on some of the most childish ideas in history. Of course not all intervention claims to be compassionate—though when it’s America doing the intervening, we almost always say so, at least. The funny thing is, when you look at more cold-blooded intervention, done strictly for reasons of state, it’s not very effective either.

Once again, take the case of a supposedly successful small, smart intervention: the CIA overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. That succeeded short-term: the CIA got rid of a nationalist leader and replaced him with Reza Shah, aka the Shah, the guy who fled Iran in 1979 to be replaced by Khomeini. The trouble with these cool James Bond coups is that when you suavely overthrow a democratic government like we did in Iran, people don’t forget. Every Iranian I ever met can give you every detail about the coup that overthrew Mossadegh, like any red-blooded Southerner can give you the starting lineup for Pickett’s Charge. Those bitter memories have a lot to do with all the hate we’ve been getting from Tehran ever since. When you consider that the “reasons of state” behind the coup were to please the Brits, who’d been stealing the Persians’ oil in their usual style and didn’t like getting their hands slapped by Mossadegh, you have to ask: was it worth it?

A year after overthrowing Mossadegh, the CIA took down another democratically elected head of state who was messing with a big industry: Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. Arbenz nationalized land owned by United Fruit, who called some Agency friends, got them to recruit a little mercenary army, and pushed Arbenz out of office. That short-term success didn’t benefit anybody except United Fruit. It hurt the U.S. and it hurt Guatemala. For one thing, as an article in the National Catholic Reporter once said, “the overthrow of Arbenz inspired the beginning of the Guatemalan resistance, the first guerrilla movement in Latin America after Cuba’s rebels.” And it led to a bad case of mission creep, with the CIA spending more and more to suppress the Resistance. Oh, and there’s the fact that about 250,000 Guatemalans died violent deaths.

You could say those people would have died even if we hadn’t bankrolled the right-wing paramilitary gangs. Maybe so: for obvious reasons, the places where the U.S. has intervened are weak states with bloody histories. But speaking for myself, I’d kind of feel better if that happened without our help. Because when you look at the records for some of these limited interventions, you start to get a little sick. The quarter-million dead in Guatemala isn’t anywhere near a record for messy CIA-funded operations. That goes to the Indonesian generals’ coup that overthrew Sukarno in 1965. About 500,000 people died in that one. In per capita terms, the bloodiest was El Salvador in the 1980s, where 75,000 people died out of a population of four or five million, nearly all of them killed by death squads the Agency was funding to the tune of $1 million per day of your tax money.

That was the “Red Dawn” era. I remember worrying as a kid about Communist armies conquering Colorado in alliance with Soviet paratroopers. It seems a little ridiculous now, like the idea we really needed to hold South Vietnam. Vietnam went over to the Communists and now it’s a major beach destination; El Salvador stayed out of Communist hands and half the population poured into L.A. If we’d stayed out of both, we’d still probably have way too many Salvadorans in L.A., but we’d have a lot more cash, too, and a lot less wasted blood, ours and theirs, on our hands.

So in the long term, even the successful interventions get pretty damn messy. Worse yet, the successful interventions always seem to come against soft targets, relatively democratic governments like Arbenz’s or Mossadegh’s—exactly the kind we probably shouldn’t be messing with anyway. When you look at the U.S. record against hardcore totalitarian regimes, you don’t see even temporary success, just one long series of disasters.

You can sum up our rotten record in trying small, smart interventions in police states with one word: Cuba. All the downsides of intervention are in our record down there. The most obvious flaw is sheer Three Stooges incompetence. If you ever believed in the CIA as big, bad covert warriors, just read up on what they came up with against Castro. The BBC realized that this stuff was comedy gold years ago and made a “Spinal Tap” mockumentary called “638 Ways to Kill Castro.” The sad thing is, that number isn’t a comic exaggeration. There really were 638 attempts by the Agency to rub out The Beard.

And some of them were stupider than anything you came up with in junior high. Everybody’s heard about the exploding-cigars plot, but how about exploding coral reefs? Yup: the CIA scouted all the pet shops in D.C. looking for a Caribbean shellfish big enough to blow Castro out of the water on one of his scuba-diving trips. They were going to paint the shell in bright day-glo colors so Castro would notice it and swim over, and then kaboom! If you ask me, they were way too subtle. Should’ve gone for a big underwater neon sign: “Hey Fidel! Check out this amazing clam here!”

But the most painful of all is a scene right out of Sean Connery’s outtakes: the CIA sent a woman to have sex with Castro and then slip him a poison pill while he was snoring. This genius decided to hide the pills in her cold cream, where they melted. She didn’t think she could get away with stuffing cold cream in The Beard’s mouth while he slept, so she confessed everything. That’s bad enough, but what happened next was the final blow to American manhood: Castro actually handed her his pistol and said something like, “Cara mia, mi Corazon, here is my pistol! If you wish to kill me, this will do the job!” Well, either he’s great in bed or she didn’t like her chances of getting out of the palace after firing that shot because she collapsed in his hairy arms. Score another for Latin lovers and socialism, which makes it 638 for Castro’s team and a big goose egg for the Anglos.

Maybe Castro’s score is even higher than that. I don’t want to jump in the black lagoon of “Who Killed JFK?” but Castro is a prime suspect. Oswald was a KGB asset, the theory goes, the Kremlin passed him on to the Cuban intelligence agency, CGI, and after a few hundred failed attempts on his own life, Castro lost his sense of humor and gave the go-ahead. That was Edwards Jay Epstein’s conclusion in Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it’s supported by new German research.

That’s the kind of thing that happens when a democratic country starts playing with the dark, nasty stuff that totalitarian regimes are very good at. The CIA has never had anything like the Cubans’ finesse with assassination and probably never will. I remember William F. Buckley joking about an assassination attempt on Sukarno, way back in the 1960s, saying in that cool stutter of his, “Yes, it was, er, quite … quite clear that it was an, ah, CIA plot because … chuckle … the bomb killed everyone in a crowded room except, ah, Sukarno.” Buckley knew what he was talking about; he worked for the Agency in Mexico City.

When we intervene against democratic governments we make enemies with long memories; when we intervene against totalitarian states we play to their strength and our weak points. It’s always, always worth considering the option of not getting involved at all.

What would have happened if we’d just told the Soviets to get their missiles out and otherwise ignored Castro? Well, if we’d called off the embargo, Castro’s island would’ve been flooded with cheap, cool stuff and it’s a good bet his people would have gotten damn sick of socialist austerity when what they wanted was new cars and better stereos. By imposing the embargo, we managed to let Castro survive a half-century in never-never land. The Cubans even have this great joke about his Toyota-pickup stamina: Somebody gives Castro a present of a giant tortoise, telling him they live 100 years. Castro sighs and says, “That’s the problem: you get attached to them and they die on you.”

And if you look at paramilitary operations, the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961, usually called “The Bay of Pigs,” is the most obvious example of why America should just say no. The invasion was over in a few hours. A couple hundred anti-Castro Cubans hit the beach, ran into opposition, and were killed or captured. Castro’s propaganda services had a great time playing up this latest case of gringo interference, and everyone else was shocked at how just plain inept it all was.

In fact, the whole fiasco was so ridiculous that it may have been designed to fail to make JFK, the new, young president, look bad. Which raises another very dangerous side-effect of all these interventions: they put a little gang of generally creepy guys right at the center of power, leaving the rest of us totally out of the loop. And these guys, contrary to what you see in spy movies, are not usually the best and brightest. Take E. Howard Hunt, who planned two of the dumbest operations in America history more than a decade apart: Bay of Pigs and the Watergate burglary. That freak couldn’t have been elected to the Kern County Mosquito Abatement District; I sure wouldn’t want him deciding my country’s foreign policy with a few of his throat-slitting buddies.

Yanqui, Stay Home!

Like the embargo, the Bay of Pigs made Castro much stronger. That’s what usually happens when a foreign power interferes: the locals get furious and unite against the outsider. And when the country’s had a history of being messed with by foreign powers, the anti-intervention backlash is much more intense. That’s why the people who said we should intervene in Egypt were crazy. The Turks, British, and French screwed with Egypt so many times that foreigners trying to overthrow Mubarak is about the only scenario that could have made him a local favorite.

Which brings us to the latest neocon project, Libya. Right on cue, here’s Judith Miller—the New York Times’ Cheney conduit who assured everybody that Saddam had WMDs in every walk-in closet—back to her old tricks by pushing for a nice, quick, clean intervention in Libya:

One of the options [Obama] should consider is to create a ‘no-fly zone’ over the capital, Tripoli, and the eastern part of the country which Qaddafi-loyal troops still control. President George H. W. Bush imposed such a zone over the Kurdish part of Iraq in 1991 after the Gulf War to prevent another monster, Saddam Hussein, from punishing the Kurds for rising up against him.

Pentagon friends tell us that shutting down Libyan air space to prevent Qaddafi from using his air force to bomb his own people would be relatively simple to do in a few hours. Radar-homing missiles could target Libyan radar, and the country’s 13 airstrips could be bombed to prevent them from being used to land aircraft. Americans could also target Libyan Air Force planes on the ground, along with their contract Ukrainian pilots. Only about half of the 400-plus-plane Libyan Air Force is estimated to be operational, the expert said.

If you wanted proof that neocons never learn anything, this is it. Just as I was writing, there was news that the Libyan resistance has managed to shoot down one of Gaddafi’s planes on its own. That’s going to be a heroic accomplishment that will live in Libyan memory forever. Imagine if we’d gone in with our multi-billion-dollar air force and done it for them. They might have been sullenly grateful for a while, but nobody really wants to be liberated by foreigners. The Libyans want to do it themselves.

If we intervene in Libya, we might manage a clean, quick regime change, though I doubt it, based on our record. But we might also accomplish the impossible: turning Gaddafi a hero to his people, denying the locals the chance to make their own destiny—and making ourselves look like fools doing it.

Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, is the alter ego of John Dolan, a poet and novelist.