Phase Four of the war began with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the pretext that Saddam was in possession of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction which he intended to use in an immanent attack on the United States.
One thing you may recall is a story, later proved incorrect, that Saddam had obtained, or had attempted to obtain, of perhaps wished he could obtain something called yellow cake uranium. But just what is yellow cake uranium?
Two things keep a bomb hobbyist from assembling an atomic bomb in their basement: getting enough uranium and getting rid of almost all of the U238 to get a very high concentration of U235. The vast majority of uranium is U238. The aspiring bomb maker needs to separate U235 to a very high concentration.
So, what is yellow cake? It is the first step in the refinement process. The yellow cake is later made into uranium hexafluoride, a gas. This then needs to be spun in specially-made high-speed centrifuges for a very long time. This gradually separates the heavier U238 from the slightly lighter U235.
So, even if Saddam had yellow cake uranium, which he didn’t, and he somehow managed to buy suitable centrifuges on the black market, it still would have taken years to get enough enriched U235 for a bomb and then he would need a way to deliver it.
Of course we knew that, at least at one time, Saddam was in possession of nerve agents. Even if he still had some, which he didn’t, there would have remained the matter of the 8000 miles separating him from us. I do not mean to minimize the horror of nerve gas, but short of having the ability to deploy immense quantities across the nation it doesn’t measure up to the status of a Weapon of Mass Destruction,
Nevertheless, the Bush administration flogged the idea that there might only be minutes, at most days, to spare before Saddam would unleash a catastrophic attack. This despite UN inspectors roaming the country and coming up with nothing.
It appears that Bush and friends had decided to transform the Greater Middle East into a series of parliamentary democracies that would be friendly towards the U.S. and who would buy significant quantities of American-made products; an ever-present dream since the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century.
They decided to start with Iraq out of an apparent belief that militarily it would be a pushover and that somehow the Iraqis would strew rose petals in the path of our army while they cheered wildly. They apparently were so certain of being welcomed as liberators that no plans existed for what to do when the Iraqis were not happy to see us. Nor did anyone seem to understand that, with the iron fist of Saddam removed, the Sunni and Shiites would commence killing each other.
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The title of this course is America’s War for the Greater Middle East. From the beginning my emphasis has been on us. I said in class one that I wanted to look into how we got to this point and what it has done to us. I hope that I have made a case that various aspects of our history and national character, while they did not make this outcome inevitable, did predisposed us towards this outcome.
I think invasion of Iraq in 2003 will come to be seen as the greatest foreign policy blunder any president has ever made. Let me count the ways this has corrupted us:
- TORTURE – who would have imagined that American government figures would one day proudly assert the value of torture. Yes, everyone has heard the hypothetical case where (a) we know with certainty a bomb is about to be detonated, (b) we know with certainty that person x knows the details of this attack, (c) we know with certainty that person x is in possession of knowledge that could thwart this attack, and (d) we know with certainty that extracting this information from person x in timely fashion would save the day. Consequently we are now empowered to use any means necessary to obtain this information. I claim that it is all but impossible to meet all of these criteria. But we do not even claim to have even come close to meeting this burden. Instead we have cases where someone is repeatedly tortured who might know something that might be useful and we feel virtuous for having done so.
- MERCENARIES – Rumsfeld and Cheney believed they could fight this war cheaply with reduced forces. When this proved wrong they resorted to what is called in the business Private Military Companies. These were thought to have numerous advantages. Since they were contract workers they could be hired and laid off at will. Although PMCs initially cost much more than American armed forces, there are no continuing costs: you don’t have to keep paying them when the war is over, there are no medical expenses, there are no retirement benefits. And perhaps best of all, you are good friends with the guy who owns the company who will get rich on American tax dollars and who will owe you big time down the road. Of course there is a downside, a steep downside. A lot of mercenaries are psychopaths who can’t believe the good luck in getting a job killing people. Many of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison were PMFs. Specifically they worked for CACI (Consolidated Analysis Center Incorporated). [Many PMFs have bland-sounding names that offer no hint as to what they actually do.] The worst thing about our government’s response to the revelation about what had happened at Abu Ghraib was to direct more fury at the people who made it public rather than at the people who committed the atrocities.
- DRONES – these were another way to fight a war on a tight budget. Pilots sitting at a computer in Las Vegas controlled drones flying over the Greater Middle East. Most of these were reconnaissance flights gathering information. But many of the drones were armed with missiles that were used to kill designated individuals. This program began in 2000, well before the 9/11 attacks. To me, and perhaps it is just a personal idiosyncrasy, killing by remote control from a computer in an air conditioned office half way around the world seems coldly surreal. Real people are killed as if they were characters in a video game.
[Note: How does Las Vegas figure in this story? The control station for the drones is located at the American base in Ramstein, Germany. But the Germans were (understandably) queasy about extra-judicial remote control executions. So there was a fiber-optic link to an Air force base near Las Vegas, thus the executioner’s button is not on German soil. The CIA also ran a drone program. Their fiber-optic link was to their headquarters in Langley, Virginia.]
The next thing to note is that drone program was significantly expanded during the Obama administration where drones were used to kill people in countries we were not at war with. The first attack in Somalia killed 150, the next attack in Yemen killed 40. The drone strikes were portrayed as “surgical” and “precise,” but how many of the 190 killed were innocent bystanders? Drone strikes in Yemen occurred about once every six days with at least 490 killed. Drones immediately proliferated with Israel, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, and Nigeria joining the club. China would offer to sell lethal drones to anyone with $1 million.
By 2010 there was a list of 744 people scheduled for execution and the drones were working their way down the list. David Cole in an article in the New York Review of Books on August 18, 2016 cites 48 drone strikes during the Bush administration killing between 377 and 558 people, and 355 strikes during the Obama administration killing between 1907 and 3067 people. Obviously, most of those killed were not the designated targets. They had the misfortune to be nearby. A leaked government document asserts the estimate that nine in ten were bystanders.
As I said in class most of the targets were identified and located via their cell phones. Every phone has a unique IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) number. A phone broadcasts this number periodically to the nearest cell tower. This is how the system knows how to direct calls to them. The drones were equipped with devices like the StingRay. This is essentially a cell-site simulator that fools nearby phones into revealing their IMSI number. These are then matched with a database of IMSI numbers of individuals on the hit list.
A missing ingredient here is how someone got to be on the hit list. Both the Bush and Obama administrations fiercely resisted efforts to discover what criteria were used or to reveal the identity of who made the decision to put people on the list. Both administrations used the September 18, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force as a justification for the program and as a shield against revealing how individuals were chosen for inclusion on the list.
Anwar al-Awaki, was an American citizen born in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He got a degree in civil engineering from Colorado State University and was a graduate student at San Diego State at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was recruited by CNN to talk about how the attacks were contrary to Muslim law. He moved to Britain where he was unable to secure a scholarship to continue his studies and moved to the ancestral home of his family in Yemen. For undisclosed reasons he was arrested upon arrival on orders from the US government. After 17 months he was released after pressure from his family. He was placed on the hit list and was killed in a drone strike on September 30, 2011. No grounds for his inclusion on the list were ever revealed. Two weeks later his 16 year old son, also born in the US, was executed in another drone strike. So at least two American citizens were executed by drone for undisclosed offenses with no discernible due process.
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A number of people in the class have asked me to provide an assessment or solution to our situation. Bear in mind that what I say here (and have said in the preceding nine weeks) is strictly in the realm of personal opinion. Fell free to disagree as I have no claim to expertise or special knowledge in this field.
I’m not sure we want to get out. We very much want to be the “indispensable nation.” We like the idea of being able to steer events in such a way as to benefit us. There may be some remaining neo-conservatives who still dream of Westernizing the Greater Middle East, but I think most Americans are reluctant to let other countries decide their own paths – paths that might be at odds with American interests.
After WWII we saw ourselves as the good guys with clean hands who always played by the rule of law and defended the oppressed against the oppressor. It is hard to see how we can pretend any of this is still true. Since then we have overthrown governments, invaded countries without declaration of war, abducted people who were tortured and held without charge, executed people (including some US citizens) by remote-control drones, hired mercenaries and even defended them in cases of wanton random killing sprees, passed laws giving government agencies unprecedented abilities to search our homes and electronic records, and asserted our alleged right to torture people on the grounds they might know something we want to know.
What do we have to show for this? We went from having almost every country on earth in our corner after 9/11 to being variously hated, mistrusted, or laughed at by most of the planet. Yet many, perhaps most, Americans continue to see us as innocent victims. These Americans think we are hated, not because of what we have done, but because other countries hate our love of freedom. Well, if the freedom we love is the freedom to invade, overthrow, torture, and execute by remote control–then maybe it’s true.
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I know this post is very long. I started typing and suddenly there were nine pages of text. Perhaps some of it is useful.
I want to thank those of you who stuck with my bloviating the past ten weeks. There were a lot of good questions and comments showing you were listening and engaged in the subject matter.
For those who might be interested, I plan an encore presentation of the Empire of Cotton in the next school year. I know the title is uninspiring, but I believe it is the most interesting and best course I have ever done. The story of cotton is the story of the industrial revolution, the story of capitalism, the story of the start of the chemical and munitions industry, the story of slavery in the American south, and the story of the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse. Other than that, cotton was unimportant.
