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xocet

(3,870 posts)
Fri May 17, 2013, 12:08 PM May 2013

Greenwald: Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent

Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent
Senior Obama officials tell the US Senate: the 'war', in limitless form, will continue for 'at least' another decade - or two

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 May 2013 07.54 EDT

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted "disposition matrix", a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be "disposed of": indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

"Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."


On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this "war" - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired's Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US's national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

"Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America's Thirty Years War."


...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/17/endless-war-on-terror-obama



Here is a passage whose context is the war in Algeria from 1954-1962: the passage is excerpted from Counterinsurgency Warfare by David Galula:


"Essential though it is, the military action is secondary to the political one, its primary purpose being to afford the political power enough freedom to work safely with the population."

(Counterinsurgency Warfare (Praeger, 2006), p. 63)


http://www.amazon.com/Counterinsurgency-Warfare-Theory-Practice-Classics/dp/0275993035



For more on the late David Galula, one may see this retrospective:


DAVID GALULA: HIS LIFE AND INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT
Ann Marlowe August 2010

INTRODUCTION

It is a safe bet that if the United States had not found itself—or to be more accurate, identified it-
self—as fighting an insurgency in Iraq sometime in 2003, “David Galula” would still be a nearly forgotten
name. In 2003, his two books on counterinsurgency had been out of print for forty years. One, Pacification
in Algeria
, had never really been published at all; written as a study for RAND, it was classified until 2005.

One of the characteristics which makes Galula’s work so robust—its infusion with both the French and
Anglo-American counterinsurgency traditions—also left him an intellectual orphan. In his lifetime, Galula
had the bad luck to be an expert who wrote in English about a conflict mainly of interest to the French. Still
worse, the Algerian war was tainted for Americans by the shadows of colonialism and torture. Though Galula
was in the United States during the early years of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, he
seems to have had only a fleeting influence on those who formed our strategy.

In France, counterinsurgency theory had enjoyed a great flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s, as the French
Army fought successively in Indochina, Suez, and Algeria. But the stars of this movement, a group of colonels
including Roger Trinquier and Charles Lacheroy,were already famous before Galula began to write. In
the context of the French tradition of guerre revolutionnaire, there was little novelty in Galula’s approach.

By 2006, when FM 3-24 brought Anglophone writers back into the game, the French had less reason to be absorbed in counterinsurgency studies. So even after Galula’s works were republished in English — and translated for the first time into French, nearly 40 years after his death—he remains almost unknown to the nation whose uniform he wore for most of his adult life.

...

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1016.pdf
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Blue Owl

(49,937 posts)
15. Hell yes
Fri May 17, 2013, 03:19 PM
May 2013

This obsession is killing us, and it's just an excuse for private stakeholders in the MIC to get rich.

 

byeya

(2,842 posts)
3. It's a permanent war economy and the losers are the inhabitants of disfavored nations;
Fri May 17, 2013, 12:50 PM
May 2013

countries where the USA has large military bases; the American taxpayer; and, the winners are war profiteers and their stooges; the officer corps of the military; and politicians who front the system.

KG

(28,749 posts)
4. and, as recently shown, not a bit safer...
Fri May 17, 2013, 12:53 PM
May 2013

tho I'm sure the palace guard will be here soon to lecture us as to how ok it is w/ obama in charge.

oh, and Greenwald! ermagawdargleblargleblarg!

 

Rex

(65,616 posts)
7. Why not!? They got away with the idiotic War on Drugs
Fri May 17, 2013, 01:04 PM
May 2013

so why not have perpetual War on XYZ? The MIC must be fed!

bvar22

(39,909 posts)
9. How do we get rid of this cancer?
Fri May 17, 2013, 01:34 PM
May 2013

How do we end this nightmare?

Some have taken The Blue Pill,
and are blindly cheering the descent into madness,
and that seems to work for them.

I can't "go gently into that good night".
I remember a better dream.

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."


cprise

(8,445 posts)
13. In a nutshell: Wealth inequality is at the core of the problem
Fri May 17, 2013, 02:29 PM
May 2013

An unending 'terrorist emergency' would be a way for the ultra-rich to translate their disproportionate wealth into hard power, and to cement that disparity.

The other trends they are pushing--'free trade' pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom, and pro-'rentier' legislation including the protection of the 'too big to fail' debt peddlers--are the scams that let the corporate aristocrats get richer forever off an increasingly disenfranchised population. The background for this activity is their dedicated promotion of consumerism (Bernays, et al) since at least the 1950s as the way to pacify the population.

The way to combat the above is to convince people the problem lies with an overgrown and lawless financial sector, and build enough support so that people are willing to unionize/co-operatize, go on general strike, and boycott the consumer culture (stop buying stuff and paying to watch Hollywood garbage including their "news&quot . Technological components to the solution would include the development of distributed renewable power (put people like the Koch's out of business) aka 'energy democracy', more distributed IT systems along the lines of Diaspora (as opposed to facebook) and mesh networks, etc.

 

OnyxCollie

(9,958 posts)
10. It's the second term.
Fri May 17, 2013, 01:54 PM
May 2013

Just you wait. Any day now, Obama's gonna release his inner liberal and go Bulworth on all this!



Suckers!

 

Tierra_y_Libertad

(50,414 posts)
11. People don't get slaughtered in wars anymore. They get slaughtered in "low intesity conflicts".
Fri May 17, 2013, 02:09 PM
May 2013
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? Gandhi

Solly Mack

(90,740 posts)
12. I think anyone who has been paying attention knows the WOT
Fri May 17, 2013, 02:23 PM
May 2013

was intended to be permanent, in one form or another, from the get-go.



 

Hell Hath No Fury

(16,327 posts)
14. Imagine if we spent that amount of time and money -
Fri May 17, 2013, 02:30 PM
May 2013

building schools and hospitals in those countries instead. Bettering their lives. Empowering their people.

You cannot "win" a "war" on an emotion.

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