The Devil in the Drone

It was announced this Monday (Aug 30) that the United States had fully militarized its southern border with predator drones. [ here ]. The Secretary for Homeland Security announced with pride that the border was more secure than ever.

The reaction from "progressive" quarters was predictable. Typical was an opinion piece in Truthout.Org which disclosed that various Congressoids who had been pushing for the militarization were themselves been humped by military contractors.

But paid-for-political whoring is not really the issue. The border is being militarized because that is American geo-political strategy. Drones will patrol the border regardless of whether congressoids get themselves greased.

This Gazette has discussed the issue so many times before, it is pointless to spill more ink on the matter yet again. Suffice to call attention to our latest survey of neo-con doctrine in December of last year [ Obama's Jihad II ]. The issue may be summarized succinctly as follows.

1. United States' strategic thinking is based on the idea of creating concentric defensive perimeters. The sanctum behind the inner-most perimeter is called "the homeland". This is the land of the Folk-Righteous. Beyond the wall of this inner perimeter, American security is carried forth by creating layered "zones of democratic freedom".

2. Zones of democratic freedom are neither democratic, nor free. In fact they are not very secure. They are areas "secured" by so-called "constabulary" or "multi-disciplinary" military forces -- working with or through subservient regimes -- whose task it is to "shape the security environment". The shaping usually takes the form of degrading civil society and making the zone itself less viable and less secure on the theory that a weakened zone presents less of a "potential threat" (as policy pleonasms would have it) than a strong one. Gaza and Afghanistan are good examples of "extended zones of democratic freedom." It is not a coincidence that where American troops go, chaos follows.

3. The outermost cordon sanitaire encirles Russia (remember Georgia?) and skirts along gas pipelines through China's Xianjing province. Ibero-America comprises what might be called an intermediate perimeter with Mexico and Columbia as second and third level moats. Although the police and military-assistance pacts known as the Plan Mérida (Mexico) and Plan Columbia are falsely billed as neighborly help in narcotics interdiction, the real aim is to reduce those regions to ongoing zonal war. This much was admitted when an Air Force doctrine given behind closed doors to congressional committees was leaked to the public. Per the US Air Force document,

“Access to Colombia will further its strategic partnership with the United States. The strong security cooperation relationship also offers an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America to include mitigating the Counternarcotics capability.” [See source "Preparing for War..."]

Although the U.S. press duly (if cryptically) reported that the base at Planquero (Columbia) was in fact to be used for full spectrum ops they did not explain what that term meant. As a result the ever-dumbed American populace got barely a whiff of the cat in the bag. (See here and here if you don't want to take the Gazette's word for it.) Note the word "include". Advertising has acculturated Americans into thinking that "include" refers to the all the goodies you get for the price. But "include" actually points to all the things over, around, on top of the goodies, which you might not want. Full specturm operations refers to the entire range of U.S. military options and operations from targetted assasinations to thermonuclear war. One does not use conventional theatre attacks to fight drug dealers; thus, the full spectrum operations, over and above drug interdiction, also include "shaping zonal security envirionments" as part of an integrated and graduated military responses "in space and cyber-space," contra mundum.

4. What this means is that the United States is getting reading to Iraqify and Afghanisize Mexico. Drones are not needed to protect against ragged immigrants, illegal as they may be. Drones are not really needed to guard against drug smuggling because most smuggling occurs in ways that are impervious to surveillance drones. Drones are needed as inner-sanctum insulation against a break-out of all out chaos in Mexico. Put another way, the border is being militarized for military purposes... in anticipation of full spectrum ooops.

5. Most people are too damn stupid to realize that every wall has two sides. A wall that keeps them out, also serves to keep us in. The "securitization" of Mexico necessarily implies a correlative securing within the United States; "extending democratic freedom" south of the border is the other side of "extending a police state" north of it. We at the Gazette reported this back on September 12, 2001, when we warned that "the 'war on terror; will be used to undo what remains of civil liberty and stampede the populace into a police state." As of 2003, the FBI and US agents were patrolling inside Mexican airports. Perhaps the point needs to be bludgeoned home for those who think "the whole world is a map of America". Mexico is (or ought to be) an independent nation in charge of its own police and security. Once US agents take up securty operations inside a foreign country, such "cooperation" becomes the first step towards "constabularization" of the zone. And so it is that as we yin into them they yang into us.

6. In this way the whole notion of "security zones" becomes a massive, heteronomous self-contradiction. People are suckered into accepting walls because they think that whatever grit and grief it will take to keep the enemy out will at least take place out there. From their arm chairs they smirk, "Yeah well, war is hell...." What people do not understand is that every "extension" of the zone of democratic freedom produces an equalization of functions on both sides of the perimeter. The wall, the perimeter, exist but the "securitization" entails the same modalities and functions on boths sides. Far from having "them foreigners" pay the price for "our peace and freedom," both sides end up loosing both. As we reported back in February 2008, the inevitability of this compromise was demonstrated when CIA Chief, Mike McConnell, told Congress that Al Qaeda had improved its ability to recruit, train and position operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the United States, with new Western recruits, capable of blending into American society and attacking domestic targets. Blendables. What this meant was that the proverbial “potential terrorist” included people just like you and me, indistinguishable from those other swarthy rag head types. To hell with racial profiling! Scan 'em all!!!! O'Connell entirely confirmed, what we Chipsters said in 2001, that the "war on terrorism" meant

"...the Government will have to presume is that everyone is at least a potential terrorist. In the most fundamental sense that is a presumption that is entirely antithetical to the concept of civil friendship, i.e., societas. "

7. No moat ever protected against anything. It destroys natural life on the inside in pursuit of a vainglorious and inevitably breached protection against the outside. What we witness in Mexico today is merely a harbinger of things to come if this spectral policy is pursued. Americans derisively laugh at Mexico but when American "constabulary" troops are sent into Mexico they will rue their hubris, for the savagery of the natives appalled even Cortez. War in Mexico is and always has been a festival of gore. One way or another, despite drones, the full spectrum of civil chaos and social securitization will recoil on us as on our victims. By pursuing a strategy of layered perimeters the U.S. Government pursues a policy that, by its inherent nature, subverts the very foundations of human civilization and will, in the end, be the funeral wreath for mankind.

You were warned.

©WCG, 2001, 2003, 2008, 2009, 2010

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