The Election Outcome

Well, what did you expect?

Panetta, a former director of the CIA, gave a strong defense of counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids, calling them “the most precise campaign in the history of warfare,” and indicated strongly that they’re only going to intensify in the coming years.

“This campaign against al Qaeda will largely take place outside declared combat zones,” Panetta said in his prepared remarks, “using a small-footprint approach that includes precision operations, partnered activities with foreign Special Operations Forces, and capacity building so that partner countries can be more effective in combating terrorism on their own.” He referenced “expanding our fleet of Predator and Reaper” drones and beefing up Special Operations Forces by another 8,000 commandos in the next five years. Even if combat is ending for most conventional units, those forces —already frequently deployed — aren’t in for any respite.  (emphasis added)

The euphemism here is rather amazing.  What does one call it when military combat takes place “outside declared combat zones”?  The word that comes to mind for me is “unconstitutional”, you know, owing to that little part of the Constitution that gives Congress the sole power to declare wars and all, but maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy in my 31 years. 

But notably, Panetta isn’t talking anymore about killing another “10 to 20 key leaders” and declaring victory in the war on terror, as he did in 2011. The “cancer” of the terrorist network has “metastasized to other parts of the global body.” Talk of the Arab Spring demolishing al-Qaida’s “narrative” has given way to fears that al-Qaida is taking advantage of the fall of regional dictators “to gain new sanctuary, incite violence, and sow instability.”

Killing people, who may or may not be militants themselves, does not occur in a vacuum, as those who lose loved ones, but may not have been militants before may be incensed to take up arms in revenge (metastasis, perhaps?) Indeed, there are consequences.

He said that although Obama had initially retreated from Bush’s “global war paradigm” — which viewed the struggle against terrorism as a permanent war — he said a similar mind-set has “reared its head” in the past 18 months. He cited figures compiled by the London Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which alleged that at least 474 civilians have been killed in Pakistan alone and that at least 50 civilians have died in follow-up strikes, in which civilians who came to the aid of victims of previous strikes were killed.

Officially, the drone program is still “classified”, which of course insulates the government from having to “officially” be accountable for the inevitable acts of barbarity that occur when you fire rockets on targets from halfway around the world via computer monitor and joystick.  The American public will remain in blissful ignorance about the drone program, since it has bipartisan support in Washington, and those things that have bipartisan support are generally not talked about, so that the hoi polloi never get a whiff of what their elected officials are up to.  From the Washington Post article linked just above:

Emmerson also waded into the White House election, noting that both President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, appear to be in agreement on the covert use of drones. He expressed surprise that the issue of accountability for torture or other abuses of detainees has not featured in the presidential campaign and “got no mention at all” in Monday night’s foreign policy debate.

Imagine that, a United Nations “special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights” being shocked, shocked I tell you! that the topic of holding our country’s prior leaders accountable for human rights violations did not come up in a debate between the two men running to lead the country!  Accountability is a foreign term to modern American society, at least for those elites at the top of the food chain.  Why give the public any ideas about what true accountability would look like?  Why even provide a rhetorical opening to be questioned about one’s views on charging human rights violators with human rights violations?  The coverup has gone on long enough (ahem, we have been “looking forward, not backward”) long enough that those helping to coverup the crimes may well be implicated themselves.  We have what is called a credibility trap:

A credibility trap is when the regulatory, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform or even honestly address the situation without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

The impetus for changing these policies, for ending the prosecution of wars overseas against unnamed, undeclared enemies, must come from the American people.  Our leaders will not stop, for they are all implicated as well.  Such is the way of the world at the close of 2012.