Dirty Wars

[YorkNecromancer]

Has anyone here who has served in the US military seen this documentary? I watched it last night with a growing sense of sick horror.



I was wondering what their opinion on it was. I personally found it utterly terrifying. Not quite as scary as 'The House I Live In', but pretty close.

[Erik Setzer]

I'm going to look it up later and try to watch it, but I do wonder if it's actually real, or a guy piecing things together to create a story that isn't real. Hard to tell with the trailer.

The thing I'm not sold on is a "secret army" going everywhere fighting. That seems a bit far. I do know that we've had a lot of issues with civilian casualties in the "war on terror" and the attempts to fight an actual war have only led to more resentment and growing recruitment for groups who are anti-US (though some of them tend to run off said recruits when they prove they're more bloodthirsty and care less about civilian casualties than the most messed-up US military members). It's why I'm all for non-interventionism. If people have issues in their country, let them sort it out. If a country attacks the US, go destroy the military (or other entity) that did it, and then leave and come back home, no sticking around doing "nation building" or anything protracted. Then we can avoid these messes. Yeah, you can say it sucks for the people we're not "saving," but it's hard to name a situation where it ended up better off after a war in the area (see, for example, a lunatic band of murderers running around Iraq assaulting cities, which I can't for the life of me see as a better option than Saddam, even with as bad as he was).

[YorkNecromancer]

The thing I'm not sold on is a "secret army" going everywhere fighting. That seems a bit far.

Yeah the trailer oversells that. The 'secret army' is basically JSOC, the US army special forces group that killed Osama Bin Laden; they are real, they do exist, and it's not like there's a conspiracy of any kind. The film is more about how US 'targetted killings' are how the US conducts war nowadays, and how, due to the fact the killings aren't always based on solid intel, they breed the very terror threat they're supposed to contain.

One of the specific examples (out of many, many similar ones) that is used is the Khataba Raid.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khataba_raid[/url]

What basically happened was a group of US soldiers stormed an Afghan house on bad intel and killed Afghan civilians by mistake. They apologised for it, and their commander, William McRaven, came by personally to make the traditional offering of a sheep in conciliation for what happened. You know, which is nice and all.

But the fact is, one of the completely innocent civilians they arrested had watched as US soldiers appeared out of nowhere, killed his mother, his wife and his sister, and then took him away for 'enhanced questioning'. When they returned him, he openly says 'What did I have to go back to?' As far as he was concerned, all he wanted to do was strap a suicide vest on and walk into a group of American soldiers, because he's a man with nothing left to lose apart from his life, and he honestly doesn't want it any more. The rest of his family talked him down, but his father - who was also there - had to watch as his other two sons were killed, then had to nod and smile as this very powerful US commander offered him a sheep. As he says: 'I would not swap my two sons for the entire wealth of America. Why would they think a sheep would make this okay?'

And of course, this wasn't a deliberate war crime on the part of the US army; at no stage is it even suggested that the US is conducting anything so conspiratorial. It's just that to the US military, civilian deaths are kind of the price of doing business... which misses the point that every civilian death breeds a family who want revenge, and so the numbers of the enemies of the US grow. The film argues the problem is that the US is trying to kill its way to victory, which is an impossibility, because military intelligence will always be imperfect, and so innocents will always die, and their families will want revenge.

The statistical measure is that after 9/11, there were 7 people on the White House's 'kill list' - the list of people targetted for extrajudicial targetted killing. By the invasion of Iraq, there was the 'deck of cards' with 52. As of 2013, there were 1000 people, spread across 40 countries. The film's conclusion is that this list will never stop growing; every day, America will keep making new enemies as it kills its current ones at an exponential rate.

A retired special forces commander puts it best in the trailer: 'We've made a really, really effective hammer... it will spend the rest of its existence searching for a nail.'

I don't think the problem is that there's any malice in the US military's high command. I think they're sincere in wanting to make the world safer for US citizens. It's just their chosen methodology is utterly, utterly insane, and is completely incapable of achieving this goal. It's really, really good at killing people, but not at making the world safer.

A very bleak film.

[Erik Setzer]

Well, that's kind of like police raids, which all too often see guys bursting into homes with weapons drawn firing on people who aren't even remotely related to the suspects they're after (often for non-violent crimes, too). Heck, just see what they do when they *aren't* shooting up the place. It's amazing we don't have a bunch of people wanting to blow up cops in this country. And it seems most people have no idea about that all-too-often occurrence because it's never covered by the media.

The "war on terror," quite frankly, can't be won, at least through traditional methods. You can't kill them all, and trying to do so leads to a mess, which just increases the problem. In most cases, the attitude that breeds the terrorists is created by the interventionist activities that are then just expanded on as a result. It's sheer insanity. But no one wants to say, "We were wrong." And that leads to a continuation of doing the wrong thing, as well as hurt feelings all over the world. There's been too many cases in Germany of American service members being out too late at night and winding up missing, because the locals are still unhappy about Dresden... and that's a situation where they still try to explain it away as something that absolutely okay to do, while if you look up the orders for the attack and what happened in that town, it will horrify you. Yeah, indiscriminate attacks on civilians aren't that new, but at least now it's more "accidents."

You also have situations like where they turned a village to dust, literally, to stop some people from setting up shop in it and escaping American soldiers. That's a lot of people losing their homes. Doesn't matter that they were given warning and able to get out, they still lost their homes and likely almost everything they had, and for what? To them, those guys blowing up their village are a lot nastier than the guys who shack up in a tower and take pot-shots at foreign soldiers.

[YorkNecromancer]

More and more it seems American foreign policy has fallen victim to the 'Good money after bad' cognitive bias.

Like, so many soldiers have died and been mutilated, so many lives ruined, that they can't pull out now, because that would mean that their strategies were flawed beyond measure in the first place. So they keep sinking time and money into a fatally flawed, unwinnable campaign, in order to save face and feed the machine.

It seems related to the issues raised in 'The House I Live In', which pointed out how the War On Drugs has escalated to where it is today. Politicians lose votes if they speak out in favour of dealing with drugs any way except through longer sentences and more Draconian measures, and gain them for proscribing ever more insane measures, until you have the situation in the US now, where in certain places, you can be sent to prison for life without the possibility of parole for carrying 3 ounces of crystal meth.

That's the kind of sentence you give to a mass murderer, not a very minor drug dealer.

It's like, in the West? We've just lost all perspective on real dangers and imaginary ones. How many lives have been lost in either the War On Drugs or the War On Terror? How many Stephen Hawkings have we lost? How many bright and brilliant minds? All because we're so scared of one another. It's insanity.