Behind the results of this week’s elections and beyond the immediate questions of control of Congress and the states, fear is growing in Washington about our whole system shifting beneath us.
It’s not a fixed idea yet. One finds hints and warnings of it in articles, speeches and personal conversations, which have yet to be assembled into any coherent whole. Here is an ongoing list of the warning signs:
The fact that, more and more, our security is being decided and our wars fought by paramilitary-style troops and bodies outside the structure of our regular, uniformed and congressionally mandated military.
The strike by the United States into Yemen this week, which killed a major Al Qaeda operative and five of his associates. It was not even a volunteer Army strike, but a CIA missile fired from an unmanned Predator aircraft–and it was the first time such a strike has been made in an independent country outside of Afghanistan. The president authorized such offbeat actions months ago.
– The degree to which, in these same fields of warfare and security, what used to be purely military operations are being conducted by civilian operatives.
U.S. News & World Report has just reported, for instance, that in the Gulf War there was one civilian contractor for every 100 military personnel, while in Bosnia, the ratio was often one-to-one.
The Pentagon has “failed to come to grips with a number of profound legal and operational problems posed by putting civilians in the battlefield,” the article said. “And lurking in the background are longer-term consequences, as the military loses its own in-house ability to maintain and support its armies.”
What’s more, the article went on, “Similarly troubling issues are raised by a host of other American firms staffed with former soldiers who are landing jobs training and advising foreign militaries … contractors are even training the United States military itself.”
– The fact that the search for intelligence, too, is being taken away from traditional organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency and being potentially placed in politically malleable hands.
One dramatic instance of this was reported recently when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld formed a competing in-house intelligence agency under zealous supporters of invading Iraq, with the express purpose of finding intelligence to support such a strike. The New York Times further reported that the secretary also “wants to create a greater role for the Pentagon’s supersecret commando forces in covert operations traditionally under the control of the director of Central Intelligence. For more than two decades, those actions have been authorized by the president in writing and subjected to oversight by two select committees of Congress.”
This particular article quotes author Thomas Powers, a specialist on intelligence and biographer of the legendary head of the CIA Richard Helms, as posing this question: What will happen when the military’s new commandos are “used to big ends” and perhaps overthrow or assassinate leaders connected by such intelligence to terrorism?
– The employment of public relations efforts or gimmickry to take the place of serious news and informative efforts.
One can see this occurring in the replacement of the old Voice of America-type comprehensive news service to the Arab world with, for instance, the effort to bombard the Arab world with enticing American pop music, as well as commercials showing how happy Muslims are in America. All of this comes in place of policy rather than aside it.
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– The change from our traditional conception of what a citizen is and does and should be to a national creature who is merely a customer or consumer of government services and attention.
“Americans may still regard each other as fellow citizens with common causes and commitments,” Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, two professors of political science at Johns Hopkins University, wrote recently in The Washington Post. “But the candidates seeking votes … see us as something else; not a coherent public with a collective identity but a swarm of disconnected individuals out to satisfy our personal needs in the political marketplace.”
– Finally, our “defense”: the Bush administration’s conception that the U.S. has the right to strike anywhere in the world, any time that we see another state that could in the future threaten America.
The administration’s policy of pre-emption is antithetical to our traditional American idea of building coalitions of like-minded, principled nations to rule themselves in a collegial world.
Are we being changed? Are we changing ourselves? Do we want to be so changed? Stay tuned.
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