Posted by John Grant
I was just reading an 1898 essay by Leo Tolstoy on the Spanish American War in which he satirizes the United States for defeating the “decrepit and doting old man” that was the Spanish Empire and, as “a young man in full possession of his strengths,” taking over Spain’s imperial role in Cuba and, especially, in the Philippines. The US beats this “decrepit old man” (known for his cruelty) and “knocks out his teeth, breaks his ribs, and then ecstatically tells his exploits to a vast public of just such young men as he is, and this public rejoices and praises the hero who has maimed an old man.” This from a writer who saw real bloody combat in several places and wrote War And Peace. This is late Tolstoy, when, in the eyes of many, he had gone off the deep end to preach Christian pacifism. War to him at this stage is organized “murder.” He is disgusted with governments who tell their citizens their wars are undertaken to protect them. “What you (governments) say of the threatening danger and of your concern about protecting us against it is a deception.” Sounds familiar, given the past nine years, when our leaders launched two major wars, one of which we are escalating in spite of opposing popular opinion — a war our military commanders have begun assuring the occupied Afghans is about “protecting the Afghan people.”
Now we must absorb the idea of assassination orders for US citizens. Our leaders now openly declare the right to murder American citizens deemed “enemy combatants” — or some such label worked out by PR-savvy lawyers aware of the post-9/11 fear and the lynch mob state of mind in parts of America. First we were worried about warrant-less wiretapping of citizens. Then, it was the three-year “slow torture” of a US citizen in a brig in South Carolina. Now we have graduated to warrant-less assassinations. The President says it’s OK, so sit back on the couch and watch the rest of Hitman4. And the current Supreme Court is probably fine with assassination hits of anybody as long as they are in the pursuit of American Power & Wealth.
The target dejure is the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemini Muslim cleric who had conversations with both the Fort Hood shooter and the underpants bomber. US intelligence has him pegged as Satan’s child, but, let’s be honest, US intelligence is not the most reliable arbiter of truth and they have been good at providing popular fodder for demonization campaigns. Al-Awlaki has told reliable Arab journalists he did not encourage either of the above to commit the acts they did, though, after the fact, he said what they did was honorable. Al-Awlaki is currently in hiding for his life, but he seems to argue he was a sympathetic ear to these disturbed men, not their instigator. Like the many people involved in some fashion with the loosely confederated global insurgency we are currently engaged with, al-Awlaki is clearly angry at our invasions and on-going occupations of Muslim lands, our support of Israel for its occupation of Palestine and a perceived general war against Islam. The argument for assassinating people like al-Awlaki is the exact same reasoning used in the Phoenix Program to assassinate nationalist Vietnamese leaders opposed to the US occupation of Viet Nam. The difference is the current war is being played out in a globalized context and our assassinations are done by the CIA or by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the hunter-killer teams commanded so well by General Stanley McChrystal and now operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. They currently favor the use of drones directed by some operator in Arizona with a Diet Pepsi on the console next to him to assassinate people by taking out entire buildings. Of course, no one gets a trial; guilt is established in secret by … well, no one is sure.
It’s becoming easier to understand why Tolstoy ended up where he did relinquishing literary and commercial success to take on the war powers of his day. Think back to the 1980s and the outrage in the nation over “war off the books” by Oliver North and his patriotic warriors during the Reagan years. One’s head spins at the moral distance we have traveled since those innocent days. Thanks to rapid technological advances and stagnant human morality, the notion of war off the books is now beyond steroids as a metaphor and approaching some kind of secret robot dystopia in which the soma of the age is a popular culture where The Killer reigns supreme as an iconic figure of comedy and romance.
It’s been 112 years since Tolstoy wrote about how the US employed a campaign of “murder” to supplant the Spanish and create its own fledgling empire out of the spoils. That empire is now in full plumage and its leaders are ordering the assassination of people around the world based on their motivational influence. That our imperial wars are the prime motivational element in these speaker’s arguments is rarely mentioned. Given the distance we have come in the past 20 years, it’s interesting to imagine where things might go in the next 20 years.
John Grant
