“Have a care when fighting monsters – lest ye become a monster yourself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.
WAS “MONGOOSE” the word that flashed through Bobby Kennedy’s
brain when he received the awful news of his brother’s assassination in Dallas?
Like JFK, Bobby knew all about the activities of “Mongoose” – the top-secret CIA operation
dedicated to killing the revolutionary Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Was it
possible that the ruthless and criminal tactics sanctioned by “Operation
Mongoose” had blown back in the Kennedy brothers’ faces?
The temptation to join the dots must have been very strong –
especially after it became known that the man identified as President John F.
Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been an active member of “Hands Off
Cuba!”, a political organisation dedicated to keeping the Castro regime safe
from US intervention?
“Blowback” is the name given to the unintended and often
disastrous consequences of officially-sanctioned behaviour which crosses the
line separating legitimate public policy from unethical, and, all-too-often,
criminal behaviour.
Sometimes blowback is spectacular: as when Osama Bin Laden,
the man the CIA helped to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan, turned his
murderous talents against the USA. More often, however, blowback describes the
insidious effects of unethical and/or criminal practices on the integrity of the
people and institutions who initially gave them sanction.
Nietzsche’s oft-quoted aphorism: “Have a care when fighting
monsters – lest ye become a monster yourself.”, sums up the dilemma very
nicely.
When evil strikes, the temptation to “fight fire with fire”
is always very strong. Indeed, to suggest anything less is all-too-easily
construed as evidence of insufficient zeal, or, even worse, abject weakness.
This impetuous inclination to embrace the monstrous methods of one’s enemies is
nowhere more pronounced than in the institutions of national defence and
security. And those leading the charge will, invariably, be drawn from the most
elite and aggressive “special forces” units.
The great danger in these circumstances is that
policy-makers begin to confuse tactical weaponry with viable strategy.
The whole ethos of the special forces is based upon their
self-characterisation as the point of the national security spear. Not for them
the ponderous deliberation of the innumerable variables that constitute a
sensible and morally defensible foreign policy. A spear, and most especially,
the point of a spear, is only useful if your prime purpose is to thrust
something deadly into your enemy’s body. It’s usefulness as an instrument for
debating and determining durable international relationships is considerably
less apparent.
Unless, of course, the nation’s political and military
leadership can be persuaded that careful deliberation and debate, far from
being the solution to the problem of national security, should be counted among
its principal causes. When terrorists fly airliners into tall buildings, people
don’t want debate – they want action. When politicians are being pressed to
exact vengeance upon “evildoers”, their first instinct is not to reach for the
compendiums of international law, or to consult the history books. Their
over-riding priority is to close their fingers around the hilt of a sword.
The only problem, of course, is that, to a sword, every
problem looks like an exposed belly, or a vulnerable neck. In the eyes of
special forces personnel: their intelligence gatherers and the officers who
plan their special operations; the only thing that matters is the mission. If
the mission is to defeat terrorism, then anything, or anyone, who gets in the
way risks being lumped-in with the terrorists.
In the context of a working democracy, this sort of
professional tunnel-vision can lead to catastrophe. Independent journalists,
for example, investigating in-theatre and asking too many awkward questions, are
not seen as symbols of the democratic institutions that soldiers are sworn to
protect, but as persons capable of compromising the mission. To “neutralise”
these actual or potential enemies, special forces will not hesitate to deploy
all the weapons of psychological warfare: misinformation, rumour-mongering,
false allegations, fake news.
And if a particular operation fails? Or something terrible
happens in the course of carrying out that operation? Well then, in order to
prevent outsiders from interfering or (worst case scenario) cancelling the
mission, it may prove necessary to withhold potentially compromising
information from unfriendly eyes. That those “unfriendly eyes” might belong to
Members of Parliament, Cabinet Ministers, or even the Prime Minister, matters
much less than safeguarding the mission from any and all external “threats”.
This is how a “sword” thinks. And, perhaps, it would be
unreasonable to expect our sword, The NZ Special Air Service, to think in any
other way. What we, as a democratic people, cannot allow, however, is for
sword-like thinking to take over the mind of the NZ Defence Force, or to
deflect our political representatives from the responsibilities and duties of
democratic government.
Attacking journalists, suppressing evidence of civilian
deaths, misleading the civilian power: such behaviour would confirm the serious
moral degeneration of our armed forces. The blowback from that could be
devastating.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 28 March 2017.
