If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war. After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since the Vietnam War era, when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.
As a start, with no draft and so no citizens’ army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee notes, “[E]very U.S. soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.” And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.
If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind.
The Globalization of Death
Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come. There are now reportedly more than fifty countries that have purchased or are developing versions of those pilotless planes. In early 2010, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.
Right now, in what still remains largely a post–Cold War arms race of one, the United States is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. We’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. We may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike. We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of “terrorists,” we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.
In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization,” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the United States and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty business, this globalization of death.
Whose Hands? Whose Blood?
Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference on Thursday, June 24, 2010. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks as well as the person who had taken responsibility for the vast Afghan War document release at that site. “Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”
Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who, in school civics texts of my childhood, always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement. After all, a crucial revelation in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands.
The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes.” Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA Paramilitaries’ Role in Civilian Deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs, recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.” Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. Special Operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”
Admittedly, the events recorded in the WikiLeaks archive took place between 2004 and the end of 2009, and so don’t cover the Obama administration’s across-the-board surge in Afghanistan. Then again, Admiral Mullen became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2007, and so has been at the helm of the American war machine for more than two of the years in question. He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or planes took out an Afghan bridal party—seventy to ninety strong and made up mostly of women—on a road near the Pakistani border. They were “escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates.” The bride, whose name we don’t know, died too, as did at least twenty-seven other members of the party, including children. Mullen was similarly chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province was hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that killed at least ninety civilians, including perhaps fifteen women and up to sixty children.
Mullen was still chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the minister of agriculture, were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a special operations night raid; as he was—and here we move beyond the WikiLeaks time frame—when, in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of minibuses, killing up to twenty-seven civilians, including women and children. He was no less chairman in July of 2010 when residents of a small town in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan claimed that a NATO missile attack had killed fifty-two civilians, an incident that, like just about every other one mentioned above and so many more, was initially denied by U.S. and NATO spokespeople.
And this represents only a grim, minimalist highlight reel among rafts of such incidents, including repeated killings or woundings of innocent civilians at checkpoints. In other words, if your basic Martian visitor were to take the concept of command responsibility at all seriously, he might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the Guardian highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the WikiLeaks documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from Chairman Mullen.