The changing face of empire

With ongoing military operations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, the Obama administration has embraced a six-point programme for light-footprint warfare relying heavily on special operations forces, drones, spies, civilian partners,cyber warfare and proxy fighters. Of all the facets of this new way of war, the training and employment of proxies has generally been the least noticed, even though reliance on foreign forces is considered one of its prime selling points. As the State Department's Andrew Shapiro put it in a speech earlier this year: "[T]he importance of these missions to the security of the United States is often little appreciated… To put it clearly: When these peacekeepers deploy it means that US forces are less likely to be called on to intervene." In other words, to put it even more clearly, more dead locals, fewer dead Americans.

The evidence for this conventional wisdom, however, is lacking. And failures to learn from history in this regard have been ruinous. The training, advising and outfitting of a proxy force in Vietnam drew the United States deeper and deeper into that doomed conflict, leading to tens of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese. Support for Afghan proxies during their decade-long battle against the Soviet Union led directly to the current disastrous decade-plus American War in Afghanistan.    

Right now, the US is once again training, advising and conducting joint exercises all over the world with proxy war on its mind and the concept of "unintended consequences" nowhere in sight in Washington. Whether today's proxies end up working for or against Washington's interests or even become tomorrow's enemies remains to be seen. But with so much training going on in so many destabilised regions, and so many proxy forces being armed in so many places, the chances of blowback grow greater by the day.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and regularly at TomDispatch.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128128345053728.html

Honduras has become the newest front in the US war on drugs in Latin America. The US has provided financial support for both the police and the military there in spite of its deep corruption issues.

Furthermore, members of both institutions have been linked to a range of killings. Political dissidents, human rights workers and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community have all been killed at alarming rates.

In May, a mission in the Moskitia region, which was led by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), left four innocent civilians killed and four others wounded. It was followed by two more incidents where a US DEA agent shot and killed an alleged drug trafficker. Local communities have demanded a thorough investigation but so far nothing has been done.

The US has a long and controversial history in Honduras. In the 1980s, the US built a base there and trained an elite Honduran military unit. That unit went on to carry out tortures, kidnappings and killings.

Who is responsible? What should be the role of the US in Honduras? And what happened that night in the Moskitia when a US raid ended up leaving innocent people dead?

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/faultlines/2012/08/201281381310569607.html

The US "war on drugs" is actually a proxy way to dictate and maintain US "friendly" governments in wherever. Nothing else... It's a fabricated explanation for maintaining profitable influence.

Imagine this. The BBC appoints a prominent radical leftist, a lifelong Bennite, the chairman of the publisher of a prominent leftwing publication no less, as its flagship political presenter and interviewer. This person has made speeches in homage of Karl Marx calling for the establishment of full-blooded socialism in Britain, including a massive increase in public ownership, hiking taxes on the rich to fund a huge public investment programme, and reversing anti-union laws. They appear on our “impartial” Auntie Beeb wearing a tie emblazoned with the logo of a hardline leftist thinktank. Their BBC editor is a former Labour staffer who moves to become Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief. They use their Twitter feed – where they have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers thanks to a platform handed to them by the BBC – to promote radical leftist causes.

This would never happen. It is unthinkable, in fact. If the BBC establishment somehow entered this parallel universe, the British press would be on the brink of insurrection. And yet, the strange case of Andrew Neil, the ultra-Thatcherite former Sunday Times editor who is the BBC’s flagship political presenter, is an instructive example about how our media works.

Neil is a formidable political interviewer in many ways: forensic, unrelenting, quick-witted, sardonic. But consider the background of this former Conservative party researcher. When Jeremy Corbyn had the audacity to meet with leftwing Jewish group Jewdas, Neil smeared them as “nutters”; last year, he made a speech denouncing antisemitism on the left. To be clear, leftwing antisemitism exists and must be vanquished. But Neil has no moral authority on this issue. As editor of the Sunday Times in 1992, he hired Britain’s foremost Holocaust denier, Nazi apologist David Irving, to work on the Goebbels diaries. To hire a sympathiser of Hitler and denier of the worst atrocity in history to do respectable work for a national newspaper – to offer a reputational lifeline to a man who should have been treated as a pariah – was a disgrace for which he has never apologised. As the Wiener Library, the oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, said at the time: “David Irving denies the gas chambers. Anyone who deals with him is tainted with that.”

Not long after becoming a high-profile BBC presenter, Neil made a speech in homage to rightwing radical Friedrich Hayek, in which he called for a “radical programme to liberalise the British economy; a radical reduction in tax and public spending as a share of the economy” as well as a flat tax “and the injection of choice and competition into the public sector on a scale not yet contemplated”. During last year’s general election, he presented the Daily Politics wearing a tie emblazoned with the logo of the hardcore neoliberal Adam Smith Institute. His editor was Robbie Gibb, a former adviser to Michael Portillo – another longstanding colleague of Neil on This Week. Last year Gibb became Theresa May’s head of communications.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/bbc-andrew-neil-me...

Meanwhile The Guardian has also rushed to the right... in its fight for survival.

See toon at top.