The CIA & Foreign Policy

Dear Mr. President,

Got your letter on Afghanistan dated November 15, the same ones, word for word, you sent on October 24 and November 1. Either you get so many letters objecting to the Obamawars that you can’t keep up and created a standard form letter, or it’s meant to discourage people from writing to you by making us feel like we’re talking to a robot with a one-track response no matter what we say. Either way, not good for PR. But with your re-election, what do you care; we’ve served our purpose, so fuck the little people, right? Back to the business of America: war, and playing commander-in-chief. Today a New York Times article about your administration’s rush to standardize drone strikes—writing clear rules for when, where, how, and who to kill, rules none of us will see till you’re long gone or there’s a coup in America—so they’d be in place for Mitt if he won, but now that you’ve got another 4 years, no more urgency, to finish the process. This is not new news, it was first reported in The Washington Post, October 24, by Greg Miller, “Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent,” but it’s becoming clear how the Security State is now driving foreign policy. In this week’s New Yorker, Nicholas Schmindle—Talk of the Town, “Homecoming Dept: After Pakistan”—writes about Cameron Munter, ex-U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, who quit because “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.” Munter says in the article that he’s for judicious use of drones but “signature strikes” are uncomfortable. “When you kill people and you don’t know who they are, what are leaving yourself open to?” The Ray Davis incident—a muscle-bound, tattooed CIA contractor carrying unregistered weapons, shot 2 Pakistanis to death on a street in Lahore—highlights the extent to which the CIA is driving policy in Pakistan and other countries. “Ive been in interagency meetings where everybody got one vote. But there were, like 12 different intelligence agencies present, and 2 from State and one from the Pentagon. Gee, who’s going to win that vote?” Maybe the U.S. military hasn’t won a war since 1945, but the CIA has precipitated some of the worst foreign policy disasters in history—the Bay of Pigs, Iraq’s WMDs, countless coups, the Iran-Contra affair, etc.—and they’re determining foreign policy? A militarized America, planetary bully, terrorist nation which approves and re-elects war criminals and a dysfunctional Congress does not bode well for America or for the rest of the world.