I want to quote from Jeremy Scahill’s interview yesterday with Amy Goodman. Scahill is doing the rounds in promotion of his new book: Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. Whatever else you want to say about the book, it took a lot of personal courage to do the research. Scahill actually went to many of the places where we are conducting covert military operations and talked to the warlords or the militants or the families of the deceased. He also talked to a lot of Special Ops soldiers who are carrying out these missions in the field. I hope that this book plays a positive role in getting more people involved in questioning the assumptions of U.S. foreign policy, even under President Obama. The excerpt is about the almost inevitable blowback from our covert operations.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, I think that we have rolled back the clock, in some ways, to an era where you have multiple covert paramilitary forces that are operating in secret away from—largely away from journalists or congressional oversight, and they’re engaged in actions that are going to cause blowback. This is going to boomerang back around to us. You can’t launch these so-called signature strikes, killing people in pre-crime, you know, in countries around the world, and think that we’re not going to create a whole new generation of enemies that have an actual grievance against us—not that want to kill us for our McDonald’s or our freedom, but have an actual score to settle.
I mean, a lot of the al-Qaeda leadership—you know, Obama likes to talk about how he—you know, “Ask the top 20 leaders of al-Qaeda that I’ve taken down, you know, if I have resolve,” was something that he said during the campaign. And fair enough, they’ve—you know, they killed Osama bin Laden. They’ve killed heads of al-Qaeda in East Africa twice. They’ve killed the number three man in al-Qaeda, you know, probably a dozen times. All that’s very true. But, to me, they’re—out of the ashes of all of this could rise a force that is much more difficult to deal with, and that is disparate groups of people that have actual scores to settle with the United States. And I think we’re going to see more asymmetric war on our own—in our own country. And I think some of it is going to be inspired by what we’ve done over these past 10, 12 years.
And I’m—I mean, as a New Yorker, too, I mean, I think that you can’t be paralyzed by the fear of an explosion happening. I mean, we’ve all of course watched, you know, with great horror what happened at the Boston Marathon. And, you know, I haven’t said anything about it, because I don’t think—I think it’s not right to comment on motivations of people until you actually know. And I think that there was a lot of racism in the response that happened after Boston, and I think there was a real rush to judgment, and I think there’s still a rush to judgment that’s going on. We need to understand all of the facts. But separate from that, I think we’re living in a world where we are not going to be immune to the payback for some of the things that we’ve done. And unless—unless we, as a society, completely re-imagine what an actual national security policy would look like, one that recognizes the dignity of other people around the world or the rights of people to practice their religion or determine their form of government, unless we’re willing to re-imagine how we approach the world, we’re doomed to have a repeat of a 9/11-type attack or something that’s smaller-scale but constant.
I think it’s useful to try to think about distinctions between people who “hate us for our freedoms,” people who are violently opposed to our foreign policy, people who are just evil and want to harm us, people who are led on by nations or groups that are really just competing with us for influence and resources, and people who actually have a score to settle.
We can’t be a positive influence in the world without rubbing elbows with the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Europeans. Sometimes there are going to be conflicts between great powers. There will be jockeying for influence and access to resources and markets. Great powers will set radicalized proxies against each other from time to time. Some of this is unavoidable unless we want to retreat from the world stage and operate more in the mold of Canada or Australia (who are still not immune to terrorism). But we have much more control over whether or not we turn whole villages against us and create scores of people who now have a score to settle.
You don’t deter attacks by inciting them. You just create a very dangerous and expensive game of whack-a-mole.
