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by Robert Dreyfuss
A parallel new Bush doctrine is emerging, in the last days of the
soon-to-be ancien régime, and it needs to be strangled in
its crib. Like the original Bush doctrine – the one that Sarah
Palin couldn’t name, which called for preventive military action
against emerging threats – this one also casts international
law aside by insisting that the United States has an inherent right
to cross international borders in “hot pursuit” of anyone
it doesn’t like.
They’re already applying it to Pakistan, and this week Syria
was the target. Is Iran next?
Let’s take Pakistan first. Though a nominal ally, Pakistan
has been the subject of at least nineteen aerial attacks by CIA-controlled
drone aircraft, killing scores of Pakistanis and some Afghans in
tribal areas controlled by pro-Taliban forces. The New York Times
listed, and mapped, all nineteen such attacks in a recent piece
describing Predator attacks across the Afghan border, all since
August. The Times notes that inside the government, the U.S. Special
Operations command and other advocates are pushing for a more aggressive
use of such units, including efforts to kidnap and interrogate suspected
Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders. Though President Bush signed an order
in July allowing U.S. commando teams to move into Pakistan itself,
with or without Islamabad’s permission, such raids have occurred
only once, on September 3.
The U.S. raid into Syria on October 26 similarly trampled on Syria’s
sovereignty without so much as a fare-thee-well. Though the Pentagon
initially denied that the raid involved helicopters and on-the-ground
commando presence, that’s exactly what happened. The attack
reportedly killed Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, an Iraqi facilitator
who smuggled foreign fighters into Iraq through Syria. The Washington
Post was ecstatic, writing in an editorial:
“If Sunday’s raid, which targeted a senior al-Qaeda operative,
serves only to put Mr. Assad on notice that the United States, too,
is no longer prepared to respect the sovereignty of a criminal regime,
it will have been worthwhile.”
Is it really that easy? To say: We declare your regime criminal,
and so we will attack you anytime we care to? In its news report
of the attack into Syria, the Post suggests, in a report by Ann
Scott Tyson and Ellen Knickmeyer, that the attack is raising cross-border
hot pursuit to the level of a doctrine:
“The military’s argument is that you can only claim sovereignty
if you enforce it,” said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “When
you are dealing with states that do not maintain their sovereignty
and become a de facto sanctuary, the only way you have to deal with
them is this kind of operation.”
The New York Times broadens the possible targets from Pakistan and
Syria to Iran, writing (in a page one story by Eric Schmitt and
Thom Shanker): “Administration officials declined to say whether
the emerging application of self-defense could lead to strikes against
camps inside Iran that have been used to train Shiite ‘special
groups’ that have fought with the American military and Iraqi
security forces.”
That, of course, has been a live option, especially since the start
of the surge in January, 2007, when President Bush promised to strike
at Iranian supply lines in Iraq and other U.S. officials, including
Vice President Cheney, pressed hard to attack sites within Iran,
regardless of the consequences.
On October 24, I went to hear Mike Vickers, the assistant secretary
of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, speaking
at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli
think tank in Washington. He spoke with pride about the vast and
growing presence of these commando forces within the U.S. military,
noting that their budget has doubled under the Bush administration
and that, by the end of the decade, their will more than 60,000
U.S. forces in this shadowy effort. Here are some excerpts of Vickers’
remarks:
“If you look at the operational core of our Special Operations
Forces, and focus on the ground operators, there are some 15,000
or so of those – give or take how you count them – these
range from our Army Special Forces or our Green Berets, our Rangers,
our Seals, some classified units we have, and we recently added
a Marine Corps Special Operations Command to this arsenal as well.
In addition to adding the Marine component, each of these elements
since 2006 and out to about 2012 or 2013 has been increasing their
capacity as well as their capabilities, but their capacity by a
third. This is the largest growth in Special Operations Force history.
By the time we’re done with that, there will be some things,
some gaps we need to fix undoubtedly, but we will have the elements
in place for what we believe is the Special Operations component
of the global war on terrorism.
“There’s been a very significant – about a 40 or
50 percent – increase in operational tempo, and of course more
intense in terms of the action since the 9/11 attacks. On any given
day that we wake up, our Special Operations Forces are in some sixty
countries around the world. But more than 80 percent or so of those
right now are concentrated in the greater Middle East or the United
States Central Command area of responsibility – the bulk of
those of course in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Notice what he said: operating in 60 countries. The very invasion
of Iraq was illegal in 2003, and it flouted international law. So
some may say these cross-border raids are small potatoes. But they’re
not. This is a big deal. If it becomes a standard part of U.S. military
doctrine that any country can be declared “criminal” and
thus lose its sovereignty, then there is no such thing as international
law anymore.
And what of Defense Secretary Robert Gates? As quoted in the Washington
Post article cited earlier: “Gates said that he was not an
expert in international law but that he assumed the State Department
had consulted such laws before the U.S. military was granted authority
to make such strikes.”
Not an expert in international law? He’ll leave it to the State
Department? And this is the guy that Barack Obama’s advisers
say ought to stay on at the Pentagon under an Obama administration?
Robert Dreyfuss is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine,
and the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan).
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