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Super Weapons And Global Domination
by Alfred McCoy and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Recently by Tom Engelhardt: Monopolizing War? What America Knows How to Do Best
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Cold War was commonly said to have partially plunged “into the shadows” as a secret, off-the-grid, spy-versus-spy conflict fought between the planet’s two superpowers. No one caught this mood better than John le Carré in his famed Smiley novels which offered a riveting portrait of Soviet, British, and American spies locked in mortal combat, yet with more in common with each other than with either of their aboveground societies. So many decades later, with the Soviet Union long gone, it’s strange to discover that, in the case of the United States at least, those “shadows” have only lengthened. Increasingly, as the Iraq War fades into history (and out of memory) and the Afghan War winds down, the American way of war itself is being drawn into those shadows.
Admittedly, since World War II, control over war – who to fight, when to wage it, and how to fight it – has been on a migratory path into the White House and the national security bureaucracy, leaving Congress and the American people out in the cold. In the last decade, however, a high-tech, privatized, covert version of war has become presidential property, fought at the White House’s behest by robots, warrior corporations, and two presidentially controlled “private” forces (a paramilitarized CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command). With this transformation has gone a series of decisions that have plunged American-style war ever further into darkness. In the last few years, for instance, two presidents, enveloped in a penumbra of secrecy and without the knowledge of the American people or possibly much of Congress, deployed the latest in experimental weaponry – weapons that could someday unravel our world – in the first cyberwar in history. They wielded what someday will undoubtedly be reclassified as weapons of mass destruction against Iran, paving the way for future global cyberwars which could devastate this country.
