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Modern war is rarely a classic confrontation between the armed
forces of two or more states. The huge imbalances
in political and economic power and military might have led to the development of new forms of waging conflict that
challenge the conventional view of war.
Armed
conflicts
The
Cold War marked a change from the way war was conducted during
World War I and II. The United States and the Soviet Union prepared
their arsenals and armies less for combat than to ensure that
the other side would be annihilated in the event of a military
confrontation. The deadlock led to 'low intensity' conflicts
in the nations of the South, in which the superpowers acted as
hidden agents, arming, training and financing the adversary,
such as occurred in Vietnam, where the USSR supported the Vietcong,
and in Afghanistan, where the United States supported the efforts of the
mujahidin against the Red Army. Most of the conflicts since 1945
have been civil wars, and many of them involved guerrilla warfare,
on a reduced scale, which diminished the strategic advantage
that, a priori, the large national armies would enjoy.
The advent of asymmetric war
In
the 1990s, the concept of 'asymmetric conflicts' began to gain
favor among military analysts, who asserted that, when forces
in confrontation do not possess the same level of military power,
they adopt dissimilar tactics. In such cases, the military objectives
are no longer the systematic pulverization of enemy lines but
rather, in many cases, the erosion of popular support for the
war within the society of the enemy. For analysts at the Pentagon,
for example, the dividing line between governments and citizens,
armies and civilians, public and private has dissipated.
Asymmetric war is basically a concept of
conflict that eludes the rules of the international pact that
entered into force with the League of Nations first, and then
with the United
Nations
(UN). It is as
old as war itself, because it is about a confrontation between
the powerful and the weak. Since the Cold War, say analysts,
examples of asymmetric war have included the struggles of the
separatist Chechens against the Russian army and the Palestinians
against the Israeli army, but also the use of terrorism. Today, they
say, non-national and transnational groups, motivated by ideology,
religion, cultural
beliefs or 'illicit' economic activities, have pushed
'a large portion of the world into anarchy'.
According to asymmetric war theorists, the use and management
of publicity is usually part of the strategy of the David confronting
the Goliath or the armed giant of the moment. For the theorists,
in the asymmetric conflict not only can television
news programs
be turned into an operative weapon that is more powerful than
the armed divisions, but also through them the distinction between
war and peace begins to blur and the battlefields and frontlines
become indefinable. At the same time, while terrorist tactics
are perceived as crimes under international law, these are an
almost privileged form of asymmetric war.
Marwan Bishara, professor of international relations at the American
University of Paris, believes that the threat posed by terrorists
has its departure point in the 'incredible quantitative difference
in power and wealth between the North and South'. When people
feel so militarily and economically inferior, he adds, they adopt
asymmetric, not conventional, means to achieve their objective.
There is agreement among Pentagon strategists that Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein was the last to have the 'poor judgment' to engage
a military superpower in non-asymmetric conflict, the 1991 Gulf
War where the US deployed 'smart' technologies- but in many ways
it was a conventional war with tanks and soldiers.
Privatization
of war
While
analysts were theorizing about the new type of war, the US army
began to privatize, subcontracting out many of its military operations.
This practice, known as outsourcing by its proponents, is described
by its critics as the hiring of mercenaries. As a result of this
privatization, the scale of US military intervention in other
countries is often underestimated. Increasingly it is private
citizens who carry out military actions, traveling internationally
as if they were simply business executives or tourists. Democrat
Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky said that this process, in which
military contractors are not held accountable, 'uses taxpayers'
money to fund secret
wars that could suck us into a Vietnam-like conflict'.
Currently, there are several private US firms that conduct Washington's
military anti-drug policy in South America. DynCorp, a
company based in Reston, Virginia, manages much of the air component
of the anti-drug activities in the Andes, including spraying
herbicides onto alleged plantations of coca and marijuana. According
to Corporate Watch, DynCorp, with more than 20,000
employees and 550 offices worldwide, is the private company receiving
by far the most money from the Pentagon, though it also gets
funding from the FBI, CIA, the US departments of Justice and
State, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency,
the Federal Communications Commission and others. In addition
DynCorp assisted the UN forces in Angola. In 1999 it won a contract
from the State Department to monitor the ceasefire in Kosovo, all the while
training police forces in Panama, Somalia, El Salvador, Bosnia
and Haiti.
The privatization of an army is, in itself, an asymmetrical practice
that confuses the individual with the state.
Rewriting
the rules
Within
the current context, in which the US as the only true superpower
categorizes other states as 'rogue' or 'criminal', denying them
the sovereignty that defines the international pact embodied
in the creation of the United Nations after World War II, it should
come as no surprise that wars can be treated as abstractions
-as occurred with the 'War on Terror' declared by US President
George
W Bush
in 2001, following the attacks on the Pentagon and the World
Trade Center.
In effect, one can discern a declaration of the end of symmetric
and international wars given that, by denying other states their
sovereignty, the transnationalization - or globalization- of conflict
prevails in the political-military practice of the US and its
close allies.
In declaring other states 'rogues' or 'criminals', the US and
its ally the United Kingdom have unilaterally taken on the policing
role. They have made the sovereign state an individual, in many
cases a criminal, and tried to convert themselves into the agents
of an intangible, or at least non-judicial, order. Even that
concept has been overtaken, however. If the US and the UK earlier
attempted to turn themselves into the world's police force, through
NATO and the bombings of former Yugoslavia, hiding behind an international
tribunal, then the war on terror has transformed
them into vigilantes who serve no law. The last rupture of the
international pact was President Bush's branding terrorist
Osama bin Laden
a criminal with a price on his head. Any regulatory or legal
framework -the true counterweight to asymmetric war- was abandoned.
The US superpower certified the end of the international pact:
there could be no trial, only an extra-judicial settling of accounts
between private parties.
*Published
in The World Guide
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