Reasonable Fears
A secretive, anti-ISIS US military unit justified killing scores of civilians as "self defense." They might have just as easily said they were Standing Their Ground.
By Elvert Barnes from Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 2020.
New York City is bracing for another winter of — we don’t know what exactly, but it’s not good. Omicron is racing through the city, even before the crush of holiday travel. Local elected officials announced record-breaking levels of positive covid tests on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and again on Monday. The constant caveat to those numbers is that they may not actually be higher than the community spread at the beginning of the pandemic before testing was widespread, but that’s cold comfort.
What we have to live with now, and what millions around the rest of country will experience in the coming days and weeks, is another round of uncertainty and isolation, as our delicate post-Normal-New-Normal starts to feel more like a return to the Bad Times. We have vaccines, and boosters, and strained-to-capacity testing systems, so it’s not actually like March 2020, a point that gets made on Twitter so frequently its beginning to feel like a spell of protection. But there’s no question that engaging in social activity is fraught with competing calculations: what’s my risk tolerance, what’s your exposure. The fear is palpable — not over the health risks to adults who’ve gotten their booster, necessarily, but more of a looming sense of dread about what comes next. Over the last 21 months our worlds have expanded slowly, cautiously, deliberately, and then contracted overnight.
The one exception to that dynamic was the George Floyd uprisings in June of last year, when, in the time it took for the 3rd Precinct to catch fire, the world changed again. Political and pedestrian life expanded parabolically. Police abolition could now be articulated in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and in the streets. The physical world opened as well. The protests were the first time my partner and I saw several of our friends in person. Economist often talk about pent-up demand: delayed plane tickets and hotel reservations, large purchases put on hold until things leveled out. June 2020 was that for racial justice.
First and foremost, the anger was directed at police departments and law enforcement throughout the country. These institutions have cannibalized city and state budgets while insulating themselves from any civilian oversight. “Defund” took its place alongside “herd immunity” and “vax” as a defining term of the year. Conservative Democrats reacted to police abolition as a direct assault on them, their way of life, and their ways of doing politics. Some progressives in the NGO space worked to assure these reactionaries that defund didn’t mean what it did, but the truth was that the alarm conservatives in both parties espoused was at least partially justified. They benefit from the existing social order, which requires police to enforce a racial hierarchy and to help keep poor people poor. Radicals called for a radical solution to these issues, and the backlash was substantial.
Along with this primary target was the complimentary rage at white vigilantism, never far from police power. The racist application of Stand Your Ground laws has been at the heart of Black Lives Matter from the beginning: from the killing of Trayvon Martin to the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. These laws are a sort-of civilian co-traveler to the “reasonable fear” defense afforded to police. If you’re a police officer, or a white man, and you can convince a jury of your peers you were legitimately afraid for your life, you’re likely to walk free. It is no small irony that the Manliest of Men Blue Lives Matter crowd finds sancutary in an appeal to vulnerability.
The writer Pat Blanchfield coined the term “gunpower” to describe a system for “preserving the prerogative of men to commit violence” in public and private spaces. Gunpower includes police and vigilante violence, as well as the seemingly separate — but in fact closely related — phenomena of mass shootings and intimate-partner violence. This system reinvests, doubles down, on gunpower as the solution to the death manifested by gunpower. The remedy for liberals can only be more cops in poor neighborhoods and in schools. For conservatives, its soaring gun sales and embracing the men who commit this violence and get away with it. The closed system churns on, indifferent to the death left in its wake.
As has been the case since before the United States was a country, the prerogative for individual men to commit violence has been mirrored in the systems and infrastructures they have controlled. It is not a coincidence that in the same year George Zimmerman offered a self-defense rationale for killing Trayvon Martin, the Obama administration was radically expanding their interpretation of the phrase “imminent threat” to justify their drone-based targeted killing programs in the name of national self-defense. Attorney General Eric Holder explained that the Constitution “does not require the President to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of planning – when the precise time, place, and manner of an attack become clear.” Whatever imminent legally meant to Obama and Holder, it didn’t mean imminent in any plain sense.
Obama broadened the definition of collective self-defense; Trump expanded it to its logical conclusion. “[W]here international law generally only countenances use of force in the territory of another state in response to an ‘armed attack,’ and the Obama administration stretched that concept to a ‘continuing and imminent threat,’ the Trump rules further departed from law by allowing force in response to a mere ‘threat,’” the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi wrote in May, 2021. Unsurprisingly, under Trump, civilian casualties skyrocketed in Iraq and Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
In most cases, the increased civilian deaths were a result of Trump’s easing of the rules of engagement. Battlefield commanders had more discretion and freedom to call in strikes, and they took it. But in some cases, officers dodged even the minimal formal restrictions that were in place. Last week, for instance, the New York Times exposed the existence of an anti-ISIS US military unit called Talon Anvil that “sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians” between 2014 and 2019. The secretive group, which at times consisted of no more than 20 commandos, played a central role in the air war the US waged against the Islamic State. When the group felt that it had stalled out, in 2017, “they found a way to strike more quickly: self-defense.”
The Times reports that the existing regulations only controlled offensive strikes. “There were far fewer restrictions for defensive strikes that were meant to protect allied forces under imminent threat of harm,” they write. “So Talon Anvil began claiming that nearly every strike was in self-defense, which enabled them to move quickly with little second-guessing or oversight, even if their targets were miles from any fighting.” The piece goes on to describe how the unit began to circumvent the existing rules as a matter of course, and soon categorized “nearly every strike as defensive.”
The logic of empire has always been intimately intertwined with the logic of domestic social control, which is to say policing. It’s no surprise that a country’s whose founding myths are defined by innocence and piety must describe and justify its violence, both large and small, as an act of self-preservation against an imminent threat, no matter how theoretical or abstract the danger. Fear, real or pretexual, is the emotional manifestation of a struggle for power. It’s fitting that so much of reactionary politics is experienced and expressed as fear, a response, that then gets re-imagined into an abstracted threat which can be acted on in advance. Self-defense becomes not reactive, but proactive. The irrational is made reasonable through politics.
The United States is facing a plethora of actual imminent threats right now: in Omicron, in a deteriorating political system unable to meet even the basic requirements of bourgeois liberalism, in climate change. Unlike in June 2020, the political possibilities have constricted. Over the weekend, a senator from West Virginia legislatively depantsed a sitting president in his own party by tanking the president’s signature bill. The party’s leadership weakened their own negotiating hand, reflexively punching left even as a handful of progressive hold-outs in the House attempted to save Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi from themselves.
What comes next is anybody’s guess. Every day a new Omicron study brings hope or fear, optimism or despair. The Democrats’ legislative hopes appear to be dead in the water, and the chance that the party will simultaneously control the White House and Congress again in the next decade are slim. The prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba says, “hope is a discipline.” We might add that fear is a refuge, almost always a demobilizing dead end, but those who look out on the United States with a looming sense of dread are nothing if not reasonable.