Georgie Anne Geyer

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• WASHINGTON'S SHADOW WARS UNDERMINE AMERICAN POWER

  WASHINGTON -- Every article out of Afghanistan these days speaks primarily about the U.S. preparing to leave, but not until it can leave behind an Afghan army well-trained enough to police the country.

  Even President Obama, in his important speech from Bagram Air Base last week, stressed that although our troops would leave in 2014, the world should be assured that the Afghans were ready to take responsibility for their own security, a transition that will start next year.

  President Obama saw a new relationship between the two dramatically different countries, "a future in which war ends, and a new chapter begins." Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that the speech opened "a new chapter in the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan," one marked by "mutual respect."

  No one pretends the transition will be easy -- or even successful. A number of Afghan troops have murdered Western troops recently, for instance. Still, what is happening -- or better, what is supposed to happen -- is quite remarkable. If it works, the U.S. will leave behind, in the wild netherlands of that world, an institutionalized army.

  For the underdeveloped world, that would truly be an accomplishment. Yet it would come as an irony, for it is America, with its "most powerful army on Earth," that now is being DEINSTITUTIONALIZED.

  This means that, in any other adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan, or even in necessary wars with serious intent, America stands on the brink of using drone strikes, electronic surveillance and stealth engagements with special forces as the dominant military strategy. As professor Juan Cole, specialist on Afghanistan from the University of Michigan, wrote recently in The Nation:

  "... (D)ependence on private corporations, mercenary armies and terrorist groups are now arguably more common as tools of U.S. foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy. But these tools lend themselves to rogue operations that create peril for the United States when they blow back on us. And they often make the United States deeply unpopular."

  As Cole defines it, "blowback" is the common term for a covert operation that boomerangs on its initiator. One of the most bedeviled of the art was President Reagan, who indirectly provided funds to the Contras in Nicaragua and gave billions of dollars in arms and aid to the fundamentalist mujahedeen in Afghanistan; it was those "freedom fighters" who later devised and carried through 9/11!

  Yet in the world to come, military spokesmen have already revealed, American attacks on other countries will be conducted in the form of the military "irregular." What is this going to do to them, and to us?

  "American drone strikes on individuals and groups in the tribal belt of northwestern Pakistan, as well as in Yemen, also typify Washington's global shadow wars," Cole maintains. "The United States has 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles, which it has deployed in strikes in six countries. Both the CIA and the U.S. military operate the drones. Rather than being adjuncts to conventional war, drone strikes are mostly carried out in places where no war has been declared ... They operate outside the framework of the Constitution."

  Right now, relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, supposedly our most important ally in the deep Mideast, have been at total diplomatic deadlock. In fact, the latest high-level talks aimed at overcoming that deadlock ended in failure last week when Pakistan demanded an "unconditional apology" from the Obama administration for airstrikes last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border.

  Also, as a result of the successful SEAL attack that killed Osama bin Laden, aid groups in Pakistan, many of them manned by foreigners, have been attacked on all levels. And anti-Americanism in Pakistan has swelled to numbers never before seen. If Washington is concerned about preserving even a minimum of American popularity in the world, there is no question that this is not the way to get it.

  Think about the consequences of this 'irregular' warfare. You are in your house, or garden, or in the village square, and suddenly a bomb comes out of the sky like some mysterious winged killer, wiping out everyone nearby. Sometimes it kills the terrorist it is intended for, and many times it hits others, women and children. You imagine it is sent by America -- who else has the wealth to send such expensive vehicles around the world?

  Even when other countries or movements or tiny irregular groups do get weapons like drones -- and they will -- do we really think that the people they fall on will not think they came from the U.S? When they land in America -- and they will -- do we dare imagine that the peoples of the world will not applaud?

  Why can we never seem to consider a third way: Keep our institutionalized military, with its great traditions and its built-in restraints on the misuse of power, and use the special forces mode of irregular warfare only when necessary and when we are in a real war, like World War II? Why can't we better figure out when we are in true danger and when wars like Iraq and Afghanistan are really only the adventures of a few ambitious men?

  Fact: If we were not in these unnecessary, or as I call them, hypothetical, wars, we would not need to use these irregular forces and methods at all.

  It would be a strange world indeed if we were to look out and see Afghanistan's military organized and disciplined, and America's sneaking and snooping around the globe, droning on and on.

  ---

  COPYRIGHT 2012 UNIVERSAL UCLICK

  published Monday, May 07, 2012

  GAY SECRECY HARMS US ALL, IN WAYS LARGE AND SMALL

  WASHINGTON -- President Obama has jumped off the fence where he has been sitting so long and approved same-sex marriage. Telling ABC News that "same-sex couples should be able to get married" because all Americans should be treated equally, Obama's surprising words came only days after Joe Biden's jolting ones, with everybody thinking he was undercutting his president.

  This change marks perhaps the most difficult and sobering change in American thinking and law in decades. There is no question that, as Mitt Romney contends, marriage has historically and biblically been between a man and a woman, a male and a female, two people who could create a family and re-create the human race. But what does this mean in our time?

  I would like to suggest that perhaps we ought to look beyond the public nature of same-sex marriage, to seek in our own family structures other truths about same-sex coupling behind those Midwest stoops and Southwestern verandas. I know, because my own beloved family lived it all.

  I have never been able to say this publicly before, but the fact is that my wonderful only brother, Glen, who died in 2004 at 78, was gay. He was tall, handsome and immensely creative from the time he was a child and, thanks mostly to him, our household was one of the happiest you could imagine. All the kids gravitated there simply because it was so much fun (plus my dairy-owning dad loved to fix them milkshakes!).

  Then the war fell over us. Glen joined the Army in 1943 and was a hero in the Battle of the Bulge, Lightning Division, and survived only because he was wounded and sent to England, and then to the occupation of Berlin. It was after he came home that, year by year as he excelled in designing clothes for big manufacturers, we began to notice his fancy for men.

  No one told you, in those days, what to do. Being homosexual was definitely and prominently shameful. My beautiful mother and my hard-working dad just said nothing -- which was about the right thing to do at that time. A young reporter on the Chicago Daily News, I, of course, saw plenty of "different" things, but had no idea how to deal with the brother I so adored. So I, too, said nothing.

  Perhaps sometime, when all of this has become less difficult, someone will write about what the gay man or woman in a family does to influence them. Had Glen gotten married, would I have? I rather think so. Does homosexuality hurt the mother and father, not to speak of denying them grandchildren? I rather think that, too. Glen often spoke of having children; that part was very sad.

  I think now that the secrecy of it all was the most deleterious. Until the day he died, nary a word was spoken about it. He lived all his life with a man our whole family loved, and they had a group of gay friends who were dear to all of us and more fun than the circus. I felt myself very lucky to have them around.

  For the first time, after Glen's death, two of them spoke to me about being gay in general terms, but I wondered. Had he been happy with the secret he kept even from those of us who knew all about it? Had he wanted to share it? Had that secret changed his love for us?

  These things I will never know, but I do know that there must be some officially sanctioned basis for the love that Glen and his partner shared. And theirs was a real love, lasting 50 years. When Glen was ill at the end, we had a wonderful Filipino man with him every day in the home. The man, Jose, said to me once, "I've looked over all the world, and I find a real family in your brother's friends."

  So marriage doesn't bother me at all for same-sex partners. Or civil unions, as in France. I wouldn't have been so bewildered by what I didn't and couldn't know if Glen had been able to be more open. Our family would have been so much freer. And as for those who love in different ways, well, perhaps we might even learn something from them.

  ---

  COPYRIGHT 2012 UNIVERSAL UCLICK

  published Thursday, May 10, 2012

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