The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Obama had said that if he had to take one book with him into the White House, it would be Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, which celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom in bringing his political rivals and personal detractors into his Cabinet. Obama followed those guidelines in choosing the hawkish Clinton and Gates, but he neglected to balance them with equally forceful critics of American empire.

  The results were predictable. In August 2009, neocon Elliot Cohen’s Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “What’s Different About the Obama Foreign Policy” reassured conservatives that very little had changed: “The underlying structure of the policy remains the same. . . . Moreover, because the Obama foreign policy senior team consists of centrist experts from the Democratic Party, it is unlikely to make radically different judgments about the world, and about American interests in it, than its predecessors.”55

  Gates was the principal guarantor of imperial continuity. A staunch Cold Warrior with close ties to the neocons, Gates’s involvement in several scandalous situations, including allegedly delaying the release of U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980 and facilitating arms sales to both Iraq and Iran during their disastrous war, have never been fully investigated. During the Reagan years, he was instrumental in revamping CIA intelligence gathering, purging independent-minded analysts who wouldn’t go along with the view of a menacing Soviet threat that justified an enormous U.S. military buildup. He was also a key proponent of Reagan’s murderous policies in Central America, advocating illegal covert measures against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.56

  Gates teamed with Clinton to frustrate those who hoped for reassessment of America’s role in the world. “People are wondering what the future holds, at home and abroad,” Clinton told the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “So let me say it clearly: The United States can, must, and will lead in this new century.”57 “We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation,” Gates concurred in November 2010.58 But in declaring a “new American moment” before the CFR, Clinton offered a version of American history stunning in its simplicity and vapidity: “After the Second World War, the nation that had built the transcontinental railroad, the assembly line, the skyscraper, turned its attention to constructing the pillars of global cooperation. The third World War that so many feared never came. And many millions of people were lifted out of poverty and exercised their human rights for the first time. Those were the benefits of a global architecture forged over many years by American leaders from both political parties.”59

  In speeches in Prague, Cairo, Oslo, and elsewhere, Obama articulated a more nuanced understanding of America’s role in the world. But his ultimate message was largely the same as that of Clinton and Gates. Nothing was more disappointing than his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in December 2009. That a president waging two wars would receive the prize was preposterous in the first place. But the selection committee members must have been even more chagrined when they heard Obama’s defense of American militarism in an address that came just days after announcing that he was sending additional forces to Afghanistan. An at times thoughtful speech about the complex problems facing the world was sullied by a defense of war, unilateralism, and preemption.

  Obama asserted presidential power in ways that must have made Dick Cheney jealous. In 2011, Obama defied his own top lawyers, insisting that he did not need congressional approval under the War Powers Resolution to continue military activities in Libya beyond the sixty-day limits inscribed in the resolution. Offering a bizarre, some would say Orwellian, interpretation reminiscent of George W. Bush’s definition of “torture” and Bill Clinton’s definition of “sex,” Obama insisted that the U.S. military engagement was outside the legal definition of “hostilities.” Even hawkish House Speaker John Boehner was taken aback by Obama’s assertion that prolonged bombing of Libya as part of an effort to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi and overthrow his regime didn’t constitute “hostilities.” “The White House says there are no hostilities taking place,” Boehner commented. “Yet we’ve got drone attacks under way. We’re spending $10 million a day. We’re part of an effort to drop bombs on Qaddafi’s compounds. It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.” Obama had rejected the views of Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson and acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel Caroline Krass. Disregarding the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel in such affairs was almost unprecedented.60

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates confer during a Cabinet Room meeting. A holdover from the Bush administration, Gates teamed with the hawkish Clinton to frustrate those who hoped for a reassessment of America’s role in the world.

  When asked, during the 2008 primary campaign, if a president could bomb Iran without congressional authorization, Obama responded, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”61 NATO went far beyond the limited UN resolution authorizing it to take steps to protect Libyan civilians, thereby establishing a very dangerous precedent.

  Despite regime change in Libya, signs abounded that the American empire was in serious decline. U.S. ability to control events had eroded. WikiLeaks’ November 2010 release of secret State Department cables prompted the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins to decry the sheer ineptitude and wrongheadedness of U.S. foreign policy: “The money wasting is staggering. . . . The impression is of the world’s superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.”62

  Nowhere was this more apparent than Afghanistan, where U.S. forces had been bogged down since 2001 with the stated goal of defeating Al-Qaeda. Obama shared this commitment, having promised during the campaign to end the war in Iraq so he could throw more resources into Afghanistan. Many tried to dissuade him from such folly. On June 30, 2009, Obama dined in the White House with nine of America’s leading presidential historians, seeking their insights into what had enabled past presidents to succeed and what had caused them to fail. Because Obama indicated that he wanted such dinners to become an ongoing event, participants maintained their silence about what was discussed. More than a year later, Northwestern’s Garry Wills finally broke his silence. “There has been no follow-up on the first dinner, and certainly no sign that he learned anything from it,” Wills wrote in frustration. “The only thing achieved has been the silencing of the main point the dinner guests tried to make—that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson.” As the meal was winding down, Obama had asked them to go around one more time for final words of advice. Wills recalled, “When my turn came, I joined those who had already warned him about an Afghanistan quagmire. I said that a government so corrupt and tribal and drug-based as Afghanistan’s could not be made stable. He replied that he was not naive about the difficulties but he thought a realistic solution could be reached. I wanted to add ‘when pigs fly,’ but restrained myself.”63

  By the time of that June meeting, Obama had already doubled down on the mess he inherited from Bush, regarding which a senior U.S. military commander informed the Washington Post during the final days of the Bush administration, “We have no strategic plan. We never had one.”64 When Obama took office, the United States had 34,000 troops in the country. In February, he ordered 34,000 more “to stabilize a deteriorating situation.”65 In May, Gates, upon the urging of regional commander General David Petraeus, fired General David McKiernan as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and replaced him with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal.

  McChrystal appeared to have been cast for the part by Stanley Kubrick. The Times described him as an “ascetic who . . . usually eats just one meal a day, in th
e evening, to avoid sluggishness,” operates “on a few hours’ sleep,” and runs “to and from work while listening to audiobooks on an iPod.” He oversaw “secret commando operations” in Iraq for five years as head of the secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), running what Sy Hersh called an “executive assassination wing” out of Cheney’s office. According to the Times, “former intelligence officials say that he had an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists, and that he pushed his ranks aggressively to kill as many of them as possible.” Some thought of him as a “warrior-scholar,” others as a “driven workaholic.”66

  McChrystal implemented a Petraeus-like counterinsurgency strategy inside Afghanistan, though he took greater pains to limit civilian casualties and adopted a much more aggressive stance vis-à-vis Pakistan. Unlike McKiernan, McChrystal viewed Afghanistan and Pakistan as “one thorny problem,” having supported commando attacks on Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.67 Although McChrystal’s days were numbered, targeted assassination would become the sine qua non of U.S. global strategy.

  Obama understood the strategic importance of Pakistan. “The cancer is in Pakistan,” Obama acknowledged at a November 25, 2009, Oval Office meeting. Succeeding in Afghanistan was necessary, he insisted, “so the cancer doesn’t spread there.”68

  The U.S.-Pakistani relationship was marked by opportunism on both sides. In the 1980s, the United States worked closely with Pakistani intelligence—the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—to train and supply the “holy warriors” who battled the Soviets in Afghanistan. In appreciation for Pakistani assistance, the United States turned a blind eye toward Pakistan’s then nascent nuclear program, which expanded at breakneck pace throughout the Bush/Obama years. By 2011, Pakistan possessed an arsenal estimated at 110 nuclear weapons with enough fissile material to make 40 to 100 more, replacing France as the world’s fifth largest nuclear power. Despite substantial U.S. assistance in securing those weapons and materials, lax security made theft of bomb-making ingredients a real threat in a country rife with Islamic extremists, many of whom had been hardened, with U.S. backing, on the battlefields of Afghanistan.69

  The U.S.-Pakistani alliance was a fragile one. Following Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, it took U.S.-backed mujahideen three more years to finally overthrow the Soviet-allied Najibullah government in 1992. Thereafter, U.S. interest in the region waned. President Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani army chief who took power in a 1999 coup, said that Pakistanis felt that they had been “used and ditched” by the United States. U.S. restoration of sanctions during the 1990s because of Pakistan’s nuclear program further exacerbated tensions.70

  After 9/11, the United States again sought Pakistani assistance. But this time the Pakistanis weren’t so eager to lend a hand. The United States threatened to bomb them “back to the Stone Age” if they didn’t comply with U.S. demands, including ending support for the Afghan Taliban.71 The United States paid Pakistan over $2 billion per year for assistance in driving the Taliban out of sanctuaries in the remote frontier areas near the Afghan border, from which the Taliban waged war against NATO forces. Pakistan proved a reluctant partner, targeting insurgents who struck within Pakistan while covertly harboring the two largest Taliban groups operating in Afghanistan.

  While the Pakistanis dragged their feet, the United States acted unilaterally. U.S. special forces and the CIA’s Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams—a three-thousand-man Afghan secret army—launched assaults into the ungoverned tribal regions where insurgents clustered.72 Pakistanis were outraged by U.S. violation of their sovereignty.

  Pakistanis particularly bristled at increased U.S. drone attacks inside Pakistan, which, the Washington Post reported, had left between 1,350 and 2,250 dead in Obama’s first three years in office. Drones, which could be used for surveillance or attack, when equipped with Hellfire missiles, had increasingly become the U.S. weapon of choice in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Obama authorized as many drone attacks in his first nine months as Bush had in the preceding three years, leading to deaths of many innocent civilians.

  David Kilcullen, who had served as a counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus from 2006 to 2008, and Andrew Exum, an army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004, provided insight into Pakistani rage in May 2009. They cited Pakistani press reports indicating that over the past three years U.S. drone strikes had killed 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders, which equated to 50 civilians for every militant, “a hit rate of 2 percent.” While noting that U.S. officials “vehemently” denied these figures and acknowledging that they likely exaggerated the proportion of civilian casualties, Kilcullen and Exum warned that “every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased” and that “visceral opposition” was being expressed in areas of Pakistan far from where the strikes were occurring.73

  An accurate count of civilian casualties was hard to come by. Pakistan photographer Noor Behram, who hailed from the tribal region of Waziristan where most of the strikes were occurring, held an exhibition in London in summer 2011 of graphic and grisly photos from twenty-seven drone attacks. Behram lowered the ratio of civilians to terrorists a bit. “For every 10 to 15 people killed,” he found, “maybe they get one militant.” The New America Foundation placed the civilian toll at 20 percent. Behram’s account of the aftermath sounds strikingly similar to the effects of U.S. bombing in other wars: “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims. The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they’re doing is far greater.”74 Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born U.S. citizen who is best known as “the Times Square bomber,” is a case in point. Shortly after his arrest, he asked, “How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan.” At his trial, when asked by the judge how he could risk killing innocent women and children, he responded that U.S. drone strikes “don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody.”75 To the Pakistanis, the victims were human beings. To the drone operators, they were “bug splats.”76

  No wonder 97 percent of Pakistanis told Pew researchers that they viewed U.S. drones negatively and the number who saw the United States as an enemy jumped from 64 percent in 2009 to 74 percent in 2012. No wonder so many were incensed at the smug indecency of President Obama’s comment at the May 2010 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner upon spotting the popular teenage Jonas Brothers band members in the audience. Referring to his daughters, Obama quipped, “Sasha and Malia are huge fans but, boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” In spring 2012, only 7 percent of Pakistanis held a positive view of Obama.77

  Obama’s tasteless remarks were at least an attempt at humor, though one on a par with George Bush’s feigned search for WMD under his oval office desk six years earlier. In June 2011, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan claimed with a straight face that for almost a year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death” from the drone attacks, an assertion that drone supporter Bill Roggio, who followed the strikes closely as editor of The Long War Journal, dismissed as “absurd.” Shortly thereafter, Britain’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that based on interviews in the tribal areas, at least forty-five civilians had been killed in ten strikes in the past year.78 Brennan could make such a ludicrous claim in part because Obama had classified any military-age male who happened to be in a strike zone as a combatant. That apparently included civilians who had tried to help rescue victims or had the bad judgment to att
end funerals of combatants, dozens of whom had been killed by CIA drones, the Bureau reported in February 2012.79

  In 2010, with Pakistani anger exploding, U.S. ambassador Cameron Munter complained that the operation was “out of control.” “He didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” a colleague said.80 Obama and Biden saw increased use of drones as a way to punish the Taliban and Al-Qaeda without an expanded troop commitment, but others recognized the questionable legal status of such targeted assassinations and worried about the future implications of a world in which such lethal technology was widely dispersed. In fact, prior to 9/11, the United States had opposed “targeted killing” by other nations. In 2000, U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk condemned Israeli targeting of Palestinians. “The United States government,” he said, “is very clearly on the record as being against targeted assassinations. They are extrajudicial killings and we do not support that.”81

  Obama signaled his intention to not only aggressively pursue Bush’s war on terror, but to expand the use of drones in doing so even before he took office. A former CIA official disclosed that Obama’s transition teams assured agency personnel that “they were going to be ‘as tough if not tougher’ than the Bush people. . . . They basically shitcanned the interrogation board. But they wanted to make it clear that they weren’t a bunch of left-wing pussies—that they would be focusing and upping the ante on the Predator program.”82

  Drone usage would expand on Obama’s watch from Pakistan—the only country targeted when Bush left office—to six countries over the next three plus years as the United States added Islamic rebels in the Philippines to the list in February 2012. Critics agreed with Tom Engelhardt’s astute observation that “drones . . . put wings on the Bush-era Guantánamo principle that Washington has an inalienable right to act as a global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so remain beyond the reach of any court of law.”83