The 2020s are shaping up to be one of the most violent decades in modern history, with American-sponsored proxy conflicts and shadow wars smoldering all over the world, from Ukraine to Yemen to Gaza. The United States enables and prolongs these wars not by sending troops to fight in them, but by trafficking arms to the belligerents, providing intelligence to its favored proxies, and using covert operations, especially assassinations, to shape geopolitical conditions. At the forefront of these clandestine US military machinations is the Fort Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which despite its relative invisibility to the public is far and away the most powerful organization in the military, and one of the most influential institutions in the US government. But it was not always this way.
As I discuss in my new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, the rise of JSOC does not date back to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or the wars that the United States waged in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. Rather, the origins of JSOC’s takeover from within are traceable to the darkest days of the Iraq War, about five years after 9/11, when things were going considerably worse for American war planners and foreign policy officials, and—in a backlash that would lead to the election of President Barack Obama—the public was turning sharply against US involvement in foreign wars.
This excerpt tells part of that story.
On just one day in June 2006, the Associated Press reported that shootings and bombings killed 12 people in Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed four and wounded 27 at the funeral of a Shiite soldier, seven bullet-riddled bodies were pulled from the Tigris River, two who had been tortured to death were fished out of the Euphrates, and police found the body of a teenage girl who had been raped and murdered in Kirkuk. Amid this horrible paroxysm of revenge killings, auguring Iraq’s descent into outright civil war split along sectarian lines, President George W. Bush and his national security council pulled together a host of new advisors in an attempt to revise their failing strategy. It was at this juncture that a number of ambitious officials in the special operations community stepped up to offer a new path forward. The plan of action that they developed, which Bush’s successor would adopt and expand in Afghanistan, forever transformed the American way of making war, and goes a long way toward explaining how Fort Bragg, North Carolina, even more than the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, came to be the United States’ national nerve center of invisible imperial power.
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Stanley McChrystal, then a two-star major general, was the most important figure in this revolution in military affairs. McChrystal, a West Point graduate and the son of a distinguished general, had risen through the ranks in the 75th Ranger Regiment and was groomed for some of the Army’s most sensitive missions. Smart, shrewd, charismatic, and press-savvy, McChrystal first came to prominence as a Pentagon spokesman, and in 2003, was tapped to lead black ops JSOC, which until then had been relegated to important but limited roles. Consistent with the emphasis laid on psychological operations in the Special Forces, the most important warfighting innovation that McChrystal developed while serving in this position was not primarily tactical or strategic but ideological and mediatic.
Although there were relatively few foreign fighters in Iraq and most came from neighboring Syria, McChrystal was the primary proponent of the view, quick to spread among Washington policymakers, that the enemy was not a nationalist rebellion against outside occupation, but one node of a global conspiracy of America-hating terrorists. To describe this nebulous and inherently malignant foe, McChrystal and his staff invented the term “al-Qaeda in Iraq” or AQI. At the top of this dubious organization, which they themselves had done more than anyone else to conjure into being, JSOC analysts placed the dopey Jordanian criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a mysterious Bedouin bogeyman, much hyped by deceitful Pentagon spooks in the runup to the war, who may not have even been in Iraq at the time. To explain away the paucity of tangible contacts between insurgents in Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s organization, the remnants of which were now scattered around Pakistan and Yemen, McChrystal and his aides redefined al-Qaeda as a concentric grouping of decentralized “franchises” operating on a “blind cell model.”
In his memoir, McChrystal admits with remarkable if belated frankness that JSOC produced intelligence assessments “that inflated al-Qaeda’s role,” and “problematically used ‘AQI’ as a catchall designation for any Sunni group that attacked Americans.” This narrative, he acknowledges, was a way to “sidestep the reality” that most Iraqi insurgents were primarily motivated by “earthly grievances,” not Islamist ideology. There’s no indication, however, that he shared these important caveats with President Bush, who seized upon the imaginary influx of foreign jihadists into Iraq as an after-the-fact vindication of his discredited case for war. By grossly exaggerating Zarqawi’s importance, McChrystal and his deputy, Vice Admiral William McRaven, convinced the Bush administration that it was possible for the United States to kill its way to victory in Iraq through a massively stepped-up campaign of targeted assassinations. This was an essential precondition for the rise of JSOC.
Another of the advisors whom Bush called upon to reformulate the war effort in late 2006 was Michael Vickers, the top Pentagon official in charge of the larger umbrella organization over JSOC, the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, known by the comically unwieldy acronym “ASD SO/LIC & IC,” for Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities. In his memoir, Vickers recalls how the Bush administration scrapped its existing playbook and instituted a new policy that put JSOC firmly in charge of the fight in Iraq.
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