Over the past decade, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have tied down 80 percent of special operations forces. If the White House and the Pentagon are now discussing shifting their expanded use to become a more global strike force, it is because they anticipate not a "receding tide" of war, but rather an explosion of US militarism.
The Obama administration has relied ever more heavily on these elite military units, which have become what amounts to a secret army under the command of the US president and accountable to no one. JSOC, like the CIA, has been empowered to draw up kill lists of alleged terrorists and launch assassination missions. Unlike the CIA, it is not required to secure a "presidential finding" authorizing lethal covert operations, or submit to congressional oversight.
The increasing reliance on such methods has been facilitated by the embrace of militarism and imperialism by a layer of the affluent upper-middle class that previously was identified with anti-war sentiments. Typical of this milieu is Newsweek editor Tina Brown, who penned a nauseating editorial recently praising Obama for being "the Caped Crusader when it comes to commanding America's killing machine." She described a recent exploit by American special ops forces in Somalia as "like hearing from afar the lost chords of 'America the Beautiful,'" adding that "Seal Team 6 has become a more vivid symbol of the power of the great American idea than positive GDP statistics."
Those prepared to extol the exploits of elite killing squads abroad as the essence of the "American idea" will not shrink from the use of similar methods in suppressing any challenge to the rule of the financial elite at home.
The deepest global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s once again confronts mankind with the threat of world war and dictatorship. A successful struggle against these threats can be waged only by means of the independent political mobilization of the working class against their source, the capitalist profit system.
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