Jeremy Scahill

Presents an exposâe of secret war programs being conducted behind the scenes of the War on Terror, revealing the human consequences of night raids, drone strikes, and other unofficial "dirty-war" tactics.

The World Is A Battlefield

Dirty Wars

Coleman McCormick

Enjoyed this one, but thought it was too long, and belabored a number of issues. Most of the book focuses on US involvement in Yemen and Somalia, with some attention paid to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was interesting to read more about the recent history of Somalia and the other nations in the Horn, but the obsession with the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki got tired for me about halfway through. I thought the story of Ray Davis in Pakistan was more interesting, personally, and the muddy US relationship with Pakistan is almost ignored in this book. Overall, an entertaining read, but would've been better if it was edited down further.

Bryan Alexander

Dirty Wars describes America's war on terror, with a specific focus: campaigns and operations waged by special forces from 2001-2011. It's a detailed, impassioned, sometimes frightening book, and one of best accounts I've read of what has become the longest war fought by the United States.

Scahill focuses on the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSCOC), whose powers and relationship developed rapidly during the post-9-11 decade. The Bush administration expanded JSOC's resources and ambit, partly to create a force without the CIA's political baggage. In so doing Bush created a secret war-fighting machine with little accountability and significant capacity for human rights abuse.

Dirty Wars is critical of this phase, but become scathing when the Obama team takes office. Scahill takes the pre-White House Obama at his word, allowing for the possibility of ending Bush-era abuses. Instead, Scahill argues, the Obama administration confirmed and extended Bush's global war apparatus (250 331). Black sites, rendition, collateral damage, secret actions without oversight, the use of mercenaries all continued or grew (252, 295, 473). Worse, perhaps, is that Obama's war policies elicited less criticism domestically than did Bush's. For example, "[t]he fact that the president had authorized an assassination strike against a US citizen went almost entirely unchallenged by Democrats and Republicans alike." (314)

To make this case Dirty Wars traces campaigns and operations throughout the Middle East and Africa, including Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. The non-Iraq chapters are especially useful, given how much American attention focused on Baghdad during this period. Scahill outlines developments very clearly, drawing characters and politics in a very accessible way. The American war on terror had enormous impacts on these countries that didn't often win a great deal of journalistic attention. I especially found useful Scahill's explanation of our involvement in Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia (2006-7), and the long-running relationship between Yemen's wily leader and American efforts against al Qaeda.

Paralleling these major movements is a biography of Anwar Awlaki, an American assassinated by drone strikes. Scahill uses Awlaki's tale to humanize the often complex and shadowy special forces operation, giving us a believable human character. The author also argues that the Obama administration erred (at best) or simply lied (at worst) in proclaiming Awlaki to be a serious threat to the United States.

The charges Scahill levels against two American administrations are not new, at least not to those of us who've followed the wars and/or who pay attention to critical/left observers, but Dirty Wars does a fine job of building up the evidence. Namely: many war on terror efforts backfired, expanding hostility to American power and swelling jihadist ranks, as with turning Al-Shahab into a major Somali player (229). Other efforts succeeded in reducing al Qaeda forces, but gave rise to massive popular unrest, perhaps sowing the seeds for anti-American politics for decades to come, as occurred in Pakistan. The strategy of targeting individuals made American openly embrace assassination as a tool of statecraft (as opposed to doing it with deniability), including sober legal arguments for whacking US citizens without a trial (for example). The wars also built up an Orwellian/Phildickian apparatus of death:the kill list became a form of "pre-crime" justice in which individuals were considered fair game if they met certain life patterns of suspected terrorists... [I]t was no longer necessary for targets to have been involved with specific plots or actions against the United States... At times, simply being among a group of "military-aged males" in a particular region of Pakistan would be enough evidence... to trigger a drone strike. (352)There is also the idea of acting against a person solely due to their speech. Scahill cites a chilling Eric Holder (Obama administration attorney general) commentary on the necessity of "neutralizing" someone for their online activity (403); this concept seems to have won more support in the US this year, with bipartisan advocates including Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

(Perhaps the weirdest moment concerns the publication of a jihadist magazine's first issue:The sixty-seven page issue only contained four actual pages of the magazine. The other sixty-three contained a computer code that, when deciphered, turned out to be cupcake recipes featured on the popular US daytime talk show Ellen, hosted by gay comedian Ellen DeGeneres. It is unclear how the file was corrupted, though some reports suggested it was a cyberattack by anti-AQAP hackers, MI-6, or the CIA itself. (378))

And yet... I was inclined toward these views before I began Dirty Wars, and was confirmed in them by the book. But there was little in the way of counter-argument. We don't get much sense of why American leaders would select these strategies; those rationales are murky, or mockable. There's no sense of how effective they were, at least in terms of the goals they sought. For example, Charlie Savage apparently sees the underwear bomber affair as playing a major role in driving the Obama team towards a hardline on terror, partly due to fears of being help culpable for similar attacks (one review). Scahill doesn't see this challenge, at least not in this book. 

Dirty Wars is a large book crammed with information. I initially thought to read it quickly, but there is no padding here. It's worth every reader's careful attention.

Dirty Wars The World Is A Battlefield

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