Unintended Consequences and the U.S. Military by Tom Engelhardt

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/27

It wasn’t an everyday event, the arrival in TomDispatch’s email inbox of a letter of complaint from Colonel Tom Davis, director of public affairs at USAFRICOM. It began, “Greetings from U.S. Africa Command, we read the recent [Nick Turse] article ‘Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s ‘New Spice Route’ in Africa’ with great interest.” Colonel Davis suggested that his team had, in fact, found “inaccuracies and misrepresentations that we would like to address” in the piece (now part of Turse’s latest book, The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare). Col. Davis indicated as well that he expected us to make the necessary changes and so “correct the record,” and that Andy Breslau, the head of the Nation Institute, which supports TomDispatch, would certainly want to know about this as well! (And indeed, Col. Davis wrote him directly.)


What followed was a copious 3,000-word document, clearly researched by committee at AFRICOM. For some, such a letter and enclosure might have seemed like a polite attempt at intimidation. (“I would venture that the Nation Institute, with Andy Breslau as its president, would have those same ideals on professional reporting and would want the inaccuracies and misrepresentations addressed as well.”)

Me, I was thrilled. Hey, the folks at AFRICOM read TomDispatch! Better yet, our reporting had gotten under their skin -- enough for them to feel compelled to reply, and even better yet, those “inaccuracies and misrepresentations” were nothing of the sort, as Nick Turse indicated in his several-thousand-word, point-by-point response, published alongside Col. Davis’s critique at this site. It was a remarkably civil exchange about the changing world of American war-making, now laid out in full in Dispatch Books's The Changing Face of Empire, just published today. And it was a great hit for TomDispatch.

Think of it as just one more small, unintended consequence of the acts of the U.S. national security community. Take, on a far larger scale, the Obama administration’s decision that the CIA should facilitate the arming of Syria’s rebels through our Arab “allies.” Ever since, arms have been flowing from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Syrian rebel fighters. Only recently, however, the New York Times reported that Washington is increasingly disturbed -- again those unintended consequences -- that the weapons “are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”

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1. Worse, unintended blowback from the flow of Libyan Jihadis and antiaircraft missiles to Syria.

The Benghazi security issue that most people focus on is really a distraction from the larger question of whether it was wise policy for the US Ambassador to coordinate the armed opposition in tribal East Libya knowing that the place is swarming with al-Qaeda like groups, and that the region was the epicenter of Sunni suicide bombers who had been going into Iraq to kill Americans and the Shi'ia population.

Even worse, Stevens and the Administration were well aware of the fact that Gadhaffi had tens of thousands of portable anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADs) that would most likely fall into the hands of these same groups when the regime was overthrown. Of course, they did, and about 15,000 MANPADs are now in circulation and landing in Syria, Gaza and on international black markets.

But, here's the kicker. We did it anyway, with the expectation that they would turn those fighters and weapons against the Syrians in the event that the regime change operation turned into Sunni against Sh'ia religious civil war, which it did. That is exactly what has happened. The problem with that outcome, aside from the tens of thousands of people on both sides who have died in Syria, and the tens of thousands of Libyans who also died killing each other, was these weapons and Holy Warriors armed with SA-7 and SA-24 antiaircraft missiles can not be contained, and are coming to the Friendly Skies near you.

But, the overarching policy issue of regime change at the cost of arming terrorists and plunging the region into religious war -- and the resulting blowback -- hasn't even begun to be discussed, and the consequences haven't yet been fully realized. We need to start having that conversation, openly, now.

I just wish it wasn't in the middle of an election, and that the repugs -- who are utter hypocrites, and have even more blood on their hands -- weren't grabbing ahold of this to try to score political points.

I think the only way the Obama Administration is going to get out of this mess is candor.

The White House needs to tell us what Ambassador Stevens was really doing in Benghazi. If his last meeting with the Turkish Ambassador the evening of the attack was to try to reign in the Libyan fighters and weapons (particularly MANPADs) flowing to Syria, they need to tell us exactly what was said that night and to the local militia leaders who Stevens met with them the afternoon before.

If, however -- as has been surmised by some ex-CIA officers over the past couple of weeks -- the Ambassador was actually facilitating the continued flow of arms and fighters to Syria, the Administration needs to defend that policy. I rather think a large percentage of the American people will rally around him, even if I personally think it's a terrible mistake.

Either way, a lack of candor will sink him, which is exactly what I want to avoid, because Romney will only blindly escalate things into a regional war that will justify turning the US into a Right-wing police state.