[General Battuta]

If you're an American citizen and you have an ounce of self-respect but you're not literate or rich enough to read Scahill's Dirty Wars, the documentary the book spawned is now up on Netflix Instant.

It covers the return of assassination to American foreign policy and the move over the last thirteen years (the Bush and Obama administrations have not really differed in this respect) to make assassinations faster, easier, and more directly linked to the executive branch.

Along the way (well, going off the book, at least!) you'll get to see American soldiers shoot apart the wedding of a major pro-American Afghan luminary, follow Donald Rumsfeld's efforts to build his own intelligence organization that would lose the CIA's pesky insistence on 'real world facts', explore America's rejection of its best chance at a secure Somalia and our willingness to be jerked around by a mid-level dictator who played us for chumps, and track an American imam's journey from critical anti-Al-Qaeda speaker to death in a drone strike. The adventure never ends!

I expect this thread will **** itself within six posts, but assuming we can scrape together enough sensitivity to nuance and complexity to talk about why this ****ed-up system emerged and whether it's actually achieving anything, we could have a good time. Dirty Wars did more than almost any single other book to help me make sense of American foreign policy and the incredible, paralytic inertia driving it.

So - American? Want to understand why your country adopted the Tarkin Doctrine? Check it out.

e: You will get to hear about a foreign journalist who'd written negatively about cruise missile strikes (he correctly identified the 'made in America' stamps on the debris as American, blowing the American cover story) being arrested at the request of the American government and held in jail when even his own military dictatorship of a government felt it had no cause because Barack Obama personally telephoned the dictator of the country and requested that his detention continue. The beacon of the free world

[IronBeer]

....I know you too well for any of that to be hyperbole. I have no words.

There is information I must obtain.

[yuezhi]

Does it also explain why the Death Star project was really turned down?

[StarSlayer]

I would recommend reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars for the Hilarious High Jinks that lead to 9/11. 

[General Battuta]

I would recommend reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars for the Hilarious High Jinks that lead to 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission Report is also pretty solid. I don't know if Ghost Wars covers some of the same turf, but it always felt like twice the tragedy because all the information was right there and the hijackers were so patently incompetent in the lead-up to the attack.

[StarSlayer]

I would recommend reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars for the Hilarious High Jinks that lead to 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission Report is also pretty solid. I don't know if Ghost Wars covers some of the same turf, but it always felt like twice the tragedy because all the information was right there and the hijackers were so patently incompetent in the lead-up to the attack.

It mainly deals with the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA's brilliantly short sighted intervention in said conflict and how it leads up into 9/11.  I assume if you read Ghost Wars you would find significant parallels in Dirty Wars. 

[Dilmah G]

This seems right up the alley of what I'm studying at the moment in school, will definitely give it a watch. As long as we don't try and lump about five different factors that contributed to targeted assassinations being part of US foreign policy as just 'drones' and slander a perfectly competent weapons platform (when it's being used responsibly anyway).

[Nuke]

war is what we are good at. i dont see why we are not taking over all the things.

[Phantom Hoover]

because what would be the point

[An4ximandros]

So, make the US a full blown HyperNeoAssyrian Empire?

[StarSlayer]

[General Battuta]

I could really get behind a War on Scarrans.

[Phantom Hoover]

the leather supplies would run dry in days though

[Flipside]

You know, it's scary enough when Governments seem to adopt the concept that 'the ends justify the means', it's even worse when they adopt that position and it's not even true.

[General Battuta]

Hahaha, I'd forgotten how unbelievable some of this **** was. Storm a pro-American figure's house during a wedding party, kill his wife, two sons, his daughter and his new daughter-in-law, dig the bullets out of the corpses with knives, prevent them from being taken to hospitals.

[swashmebuckle]

Will take a break from working about this song about targeted killing to watch this doc about targeted killing.

[swashmebuckle]

Well I dunno about you guys but that left me with a profound feeling of bitterness WRT my country's inexcusably short sighted behavior!

[General Battuta]

I'm always looking for multilateral discussion on these things so it was good to find a fairly substantive review of the book. The gist of it is that Scahill makes a one-sided and simplistic case about the broad efficacy of targeted killing, and that - most damningly - his treatment of Anwar al-Awlaki is selective.

But it seems like Scahill's individual case studies of mistaken attacks and their toxic aftereffects are generally solid, that his analysis of the horn of Africa is pretty decent, and that his expose on the botched raid in Gardez are all solid.

[swashmebuckle]

I definitely got the impression from the film that al-Awlaki became a major mover in the jihad business, so maybe that's something Scahill addressed when putting the movie version together? In any case, I think it's a little strange that the reviewer thinks the author should be obliged to present the benefits of these killing programs alongside their drawbacks. The core of the movie is an emotionally resonant story about how we turn normal people into terrorists. The ratio of terrorists to civilians killed in a given strike and whether that translates into tactical gains or not is sort of the opposite of what the movie is trying to be about I think. I recognize that the presentation is rather Michael Moore-ish in its one-sidedness and the manipulativeness of the imagery, but frankly, if you kill people's children (you being the US Government), you're gonna get images of people's children. You don't win hearts with spreadsheets*

As an aside, the piece they played at the end was pretty spot on—first time in a long time I've listened all the way through the credits of a movie. Kronos Quartet knows how to tune their chords.

*You can win hearts with pie charts.

[Grizzly]

*You can win hearts with pie.

Fixed that for you :3.

I am currently not able to view this documentary, although it actually is in line with things I already know (Learn even one line about the fire-bombing of north vietnamese villages and you tend to be very skeptical about US foreign policy *sigh*). However, it might be a good documentary to point people towards when a soul wonders why many people are so skeptical about the US.