This book is an artifact that gives perfectly rational permission to fall into paranoid insanity. War and espionage blend with reality, forever smudging out lines that have always been arbitrary. There is a mythology here. Modern day berserkers and janissaries unleashed upon the world like Wotan’s wild hunt, slavering and bloodlusted. Again and again, Germanic and blazing white as bone but secret. Secret beyond all else, out in the desert or atop mountains, beyond any naive impotent gestures toward standard transparency. By the end of this book you will fear them. They will whisper to you from the margins and dark corners. They will manifest themselves between the anodyne filler words that only reveal themselves to be great spells of ancient power by their tendency to break down into persistent acronyms. JSOC. SOF. F3EAD. CIA. PTSD. GWOT. AQI. DEVGRU. SFOD-D. An amphetamine crazed stripping out of all but the skeletons of language. Like so many cell phones stripped for parts and turned into bombs; like countries robbed of democracy and agency and left fluttering in the wind—bed sheets hung on a web of wiretapped phone lines that lead nowhere, off into the clandestine abyss.
The U.S. military has, of course, been a cartel for about the last 100 years. Here’s Eisenhower talking about it in his farewell address, a coward’s complicit suicide note before a historical stool-kicking:
“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”