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According to testimony by Olson before the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, approximately 85% of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen

With control over budgeting, training, and equipping its force, powers usually reserved for departments (like the Department of the Army or the Department of the Navy), dedicated dollars in every Defense Department budget, and influential advocates in Congress, SOCOM is by now an exceptionally powerful player at the Pentagon.  With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops. 

Tasked to coordinate all Pentagon planning against global terrorism networks and, as a result, closely connected to other government agencies, foreign militaries, and intelligence services, and armed with a vast inventory of stealthy helicopters, manned fixed-wing aircraft, heavily-armed drones, high-tech guns-a-go-go speedboats, specialized Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as well as other state-of-the-art gear (with more on the way), SOCOM represents something new in the military.  Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive’s private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad

U.S. Special Operations forces were approximately as large as Canada’s entire active duty military.  In fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the nations where America’s elite troops now operate each year, and it’s only set to grow larger

When missions are subject to scrutiny like the bin Laden raid, he said, the elite troops object

They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”

In Afghanistan, the U.S. military was trying to defeat the Taliban and install a new government, while the C.I.A. was primarily focussed on killing members of Al Qaeda. At times, Special Operations Forces and intelligence officers coördinated on highly effective raids. But tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.

“People thank cops for their service, but they should be thanking McDonald’s workers,” Skinner told me. “They’re way more likely to have a gun in their face than I am.” He added, “The only place that doesn’t really get hit is the late-night liquor store. People are thinking, If this place gets shut down, how will we get in drunken fights?”

Last year, Bradley McClellan confiscated a Kalashnikov and several pistols from two juvenile pot dealers in Savannah. Although police-issue bulletproof vests can stop rounds fired from a handgun, they are useless against assault rifles. “After seeing what little kids can get their hands on, I went out and bought hard plates,” designed for use in war zones, McClellan told me. The plates cost him more than five hundred dollars—a week’s salary.

The prevalence of high-powered weapons in America is creating an arms race between citizens and the authorities. Each year, dozens of cops are shot dead, and officers kill around a thousand members of the public—often after mistaking innocuous objects for weapons or frightened behavior for threats. Meanwhile, peaceful protesters are increasingly confronted with snipers, armored vehicles, and smoke and tear gas. In the past twenty years, more than five billion dollars’ worth of military gear has been transferred from the military to state and local police departments, including night-vision equipment, boats, aircraft, grenade launchers, and bayonets. “If we wanted an MRAP”—a military vehicle, designed to protect soldiers from ambushes and mines—“we would just have to submit an application to the federal government,” Skinner told me.

“The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out.

Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed—and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs.

Skinner always drives with the windows down: he tries to maximize the number of encounters people have with the police in which they feel neither scrutinized nor under suspicion. “You sometimes hear cops talk about people in the community as ‘civilians,’ but that’s bullshit,” he said. “We’re not the military. The people we’re policing are our neighbors. This is not semantics—if you say it enough, it becomes a mind-set.”

The agency’s use of black sites, rendition, and torture had become the subject of intense public scrutiny, and the enhanced-interrogation program, which relied heavily on contractors, had been scrapped. According to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, the torture sessions had extracted no actionable intelligence.Skinner, like most case officers, got results through “rapport-based elicitation.” “You can build great relationships with some unsavory people,” he said. “In any terrorist group, there’s dysfunction, usually some jealousy. It’s literally a job—they get a salary. So you’re looking for the guy who feels underappreciated, the guy who’s getting dicked on expenses.”

should the young doctor somehow pass along actionable intelligence against Al Qaeda, the C.I.A. would have drones ready to strike. In recent years, the agency’s vocabulary had shifted: a “target” was no longer someone to be recruited; it was somebody to be tracked, kidnapped, rendered, or killed.

The car weaved through three unmanned barriers and approached the C.I.A. annex, where Matthews, LaBonte, and the others were waiting outside with Balawi’s cake. Balawi had some difficulty climbing out of the car. He started limping toward the greeting party, muttering a prayer, and then reached for a detonator attached to his wrist. There was enough time for everyone to understand what was about to happen, but not enough time for anyone to run away.The explosion killed the driver, bin Zeid, and seven C.I.A. officers and contractors, including LaBonte and Matthews. In martyrdom videos that were released after the attack, Balawi explained that Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives had worked with him to pass along exclusive and accurate information, in order to win the C.I.A.’s trust.

The agency, in its desire to kill Al Qaeda targets, had overlooked a fundamental rule of espionage: that an ideologue can’t be turned

Baghdad, Skinner was mired in politics and violence. It had been six years since the American invasion and subsequent dismantling of the Iraqi Army had led to a full-blown insurgency. Skinner had spent many evenings in Amman drinking Johnnie Walker Black with Iraqi tribal sheikhs, trying to recruit their support. “These guys had fled the war and stolen all the Iraqi money,” he told me. “We would try to develop them as assets for what became ‘the surge.’ ” In 2007, Bush sent an additional twenty thousand troops to Iraq to quell the insurgency, but, two years later, car bombs were killing hundreds of civilians in Baghdad each month. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, was stacking the security forces with loyalists who carried out sectarian massacres. “We were focussed on Al Qaeda,” Skinner said. “He was focussed on Sunnis.”

ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul and beheaded aid workers and journalists on camera. As the United States became consumed with fear of the group, Skinner grew uneasy in his role. He fielded phone calls from reporters who seemed more interested in citing a former C.I.A. officer than in what he had to say. “One journalist called me up and said, ‘My deadline is in ten minutes, but ISIS is bad, right?’ ” Skinner recalled.

In March, 2016, while visiting his aunt in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he gave a lecture on terrorism at the local World Affairs Council. “We have become the most fragile superpower ever,” he told the audience. While Al Qaeda aims to carry out what its operatives call “spectacular attacks,” he explained, ISIS obsesses over creating a “spectacular reaction.” As an example, he recounted an incident in Garland, Texas, in which two wannabe jihadis were killed after attempting a raid on a provocative anti-Muslim convention. The men had no coherent affiliation with ISIS; they merely followed its instructions—which have been widely disseminated by the American media—to post online that they were acting on behalf of the group. “If you strip the word ‘terrorism,’ two idiots drove from Arizona and got shot in a parking lot,” Skinner said. The real threat to American life was the response. “We shut down cities,” he said. “We change our laws. We change our societies.” He went on, “We’re basically doing their work for them.”

“Getting killed by ISIS in Savannah is like expecting to get hit by a piano falling from an asteroid,” Skinner said. “It’s batshit insane. Day to day, it’s the people who are kicking in doors and stealing cars who are actually making life unbearable.”

Because local police departments pay poorly, “the people who have been trained to do this work best are never going to be doing it,” Skinner said. According to a study by Brown University, since 2001 the average American taxpayer has contributed more than twenty-three thousand dollars to veterans’ care, homeland security, and military operations in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “I used to spend more money on meals and entertainment for a couple of sources in Amman, each year, than the Savannah Police Department has to spend on cars,” Skinner told me. “And whatever the American people got out of my meals in Amman had way less impact on their lives than what was happening down the block.”

in the nineteen-sixties a new chief started requiring officers to write reports. “The black officers—we were educated,” White said. Some of the white officers couldn’t write, and many of the more racist cops left the force. White became a detective, and when Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Savannah he served as his bodyguard. But, when people took to the streets after King’s assassination, White was forced to become the “principal arresting officer for eight hundred and seven demonstrators,” he recalled; his superiors thought that it would be better if white cops were not involved.

neighborhood gang violence, which accounts for most of the shootings in Savannah, is driven not only by small-group dynamics, the availability of weapons, and obsessions with vendettas but also by alienation from authorities. “It’s a fundamental break in the social contract,” he said. “If you’re in trouble, you have to take care of it yourself, because you can’t ask the police for help. So that becomes another shooting.” In high-crime areas, he continued, “the networks of perpetrators are essentially the same as the networks of victims.”

“We’ve invaded countries on worse information. But, if the C.I.A. taught me one thing, it is to always be acutely aware of the tremendous amount of shit I don’t know.”

New Year’s Eve, locals launched fireworks out of abandoned lots, and Cuyler-Brownsville erupted in celebratory gunfire. “Good trigger pull,” Skinner noted, as someone emptied what sounded like a .40-calibre pistol about thirty feet from the car. “Trigger control is half the battle.”Shots fired into the sky take about forty-five seconds to hit the ground. Less than ten minutes into 2018, two other officers, parked a few blocks over, fled Cuyler-Brownsville when bullets took out a street lamp overhead. All through the neighborhood, pavements and doorsteps glistened with brass shell casings. We heard hundreds of rounds—from shotguns, pistols of all calibres, a Kalashnikov.

Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it’s a factor in a high percentage of police calls. A few hours earlier, Skinner had checked on a schizophrenic man who calls the police multiple times each night, reporting paranoid hallucinations; the department can never ignore a call, because he is the legal owner of a .357 Magnum revolver, and officers told me that he once tried to execute an intruder in his front yard. At times, Skinner feels as if the role of a police officer were to pick up the pieces of “something that has broken in every single possible way.”

Police officers are increasingly filling the gaps of a broken state. “They do it essentially on their own, usually without adequate training and preparation, often without the skills they need, and overwhelmingly without the resources and institutional connections that it would take to do those things well.”

Mr. Modi has approached Indian Muslims, the world's largest minority and its largest Muslim minority, in much the same way that Mr. Orban envisions a racially and religiously pure Hungary

Mr. Orban asserted that mixed-race countries "are no longer nations: They are nothing more than conglomerations of peoples" and are no longer part of what he sees as "the Western world."

Romanians may be more concerned about Mr. Orban’s racial remarks than his territorial ambitions, described by one Romanian Orban watcher as a "little man having pipe dreams.”

Mr. Orban shares Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi's resentment of perceived historical wrongs that need to be rectified irrespective of international law and the consequences of a world whose guardrails are dictated by might rather than the rule of law.

Mr. Orban left no doubt that his definition of the Hungarian motherland included Transylvania and other regions in the Carpathian Basin beyond Hungary's borders that ethnic Hungarians populate.

Mr. Orban implicitly suggested a revision or cancellation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which deprived Hungary of much of its pre-World War I territory.

So far, Mr. Orban’s support of Russia has isolated him in Europe with the de facto demise of the Visegrad 4 or V4 in its current form in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine and the threat of an economic recession.

Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger has pledged to use his current six-month presidency of the European Council to return the Visegrad 4 to the roots of its founding in 1991 as the four countries emerged from communism: respect for democracy and a commitment to European integration.

Throughout the five-hundred-year history of Western empires, the security of European colonizers has trumped the security and independence of the colonized.

The historical record shows that, however terrible, violent anticolonial uprisings were invariably smashed with far greater violence than they unleashed. The violence of the “civilized” is far more effective than the violence of the “barbarians” and “savages.”

civilian destruction tends to be greatest when security retaliation reaches the level of what I have called “permanent security”—extreme responses by states to security threats, enacted in the name of self-defense. Permanent security actions target entire civilian populations under the logic of ensuring that terrorists and insurgents can never again represent a threat. It is a project, in other words, that seeks to avert future threats by anticipating them today.

Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” argument from 1923, in which the Revisionist Zionist leader argued that Palestinian resistance was understandable, inevitable—and anticolonial. Speaking of Palestinians, Jabotinsky wrote that “they feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.” Because Palestinians could not be bought off with material promises, Jabotinsky wanted the British Mandate authorities to enable Zionist colonization until Jews, then a tiny minority of Palestine, reached a majority. “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population,” he concluded. “Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

to ensure that Palestinian militants can never again attack Israel, its armed forces are subjecting two million Palestinians to serial war crimes and mass expulsion

If Western states support this solution for Israeli permanent security—as the United States appears to be with its budgeting of refugee support in neighboring countries under the guise of a “humanitarian” gesture—they will be continuing a venerable tradition. During, between, and after both twentieth-century world wars, large-scale population transfers and exchanges took place across the Eurasian continent to radically homogenize empires and nations. Millions of people fled or were expelled or transferred from Turkey, Greece, Austria, Italy, India, Palestine, Central and Eastern Europe. Progressive Europeans reasoned then that long-term peace would be secured if troublesome minorities were removed. This ideology—which the governments of Russia, China, Turkey, India, and Sri Lanka share today—maintains that indigenous and minority populations must submit to their subordination and, if they resist, face subjugation, deportation, or destruction. Antiterrorism operations that kill thousands of civilians are taken to be acceptable responses to terrorist operations that kill far fewer civilians

Hamas thus reasons that Palestinians have nothing to gain by conforming to a U.S.-led “rules-based international order” that has forgotten about them.

When state parties to the UNGC negotiated in 1947 and 1948, they distinguished genocidal intent from military necessity, so that states could wage the kind of wars that Russia and Israel are conducting today and avoid prosecution for genocide. The high legal standard stems from the restrictive UNGC definition of genocide, which was modeled on the Holocaust and requires that a perpetrator intend to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (the dolus specialis) in at least one of five prescribed ways (the actus reus). The words “as such” are widely regarded as imposing a stringent intent requirement: an act counts as genocide only if individuals are targeted solely by virtue of their group membership—like Jews during World War II—and not for strategic reasons like suppressing an insurgency.

Together, the United States and Russia have killed many millions of civilians in their respective imperial wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Chechnya; so have postcolonial states like Nigeria and Pakistan in fighting secessions. Genocide allegations were leveled in some of these cases in global campaigns like the one we see now, but none stuck, and they are largely forgotten in the annals of mass violence against civilian

Adding to the difficulty of establishing genocidal intent is the uncertainty in international humanitarian law about the legality of civilians killed “incidentally” in the course of attacking legitimate military targets. While the majority of international lawyers agree that civilian deaths are acceptable so long as they are not disproportionate in relation to the military advantage sought, others argue that bombing crowded marketplaces and hospitals regardless of military objective is necessarily indiscriminate and thus illegal.

They go far in excusing all Israeli conduct in the name of its legitimate self-defense; the US even seems to have demurred on whether the Geneva Conventions are applicable to Palestinian territories. It is thus unsurprising that they have not pressed the Israeli government to explain how cutting off water, food, and power to Gaza—a “war of starvation” as the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor put it—is a legitimate military tactic, one not covered by the UNGC, which declares one genocidal predicate act to be “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” But if so-called humanitarian pauses are occurring to allow in a little, if grossly inadequate, aid, and the “total siege” is lifted after the military defeat of Hamas (should it happen), it will be difficult to argue in a legal context that Israel’s strangling of Gaza was a genocidal act.

the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which, they argue, dictates “disproportionate attacks, including against *civilian* structures and infrastructure.” This is clearly illegal.

Excessive reprisals, we should recall, are a staple of colonial warfare and state consolidation

Since genocide is a synonym for the destruction of peoples, whether the killing and suppression of their culture is motivated by destruction “as such” or by deterrence, the experience is the same: a destructive attack on a people, and not just random civilians. But the UNGC does not reflect the victim’s perspective. It protects the perpetrators: states that seek permanent security.

Unless the conditions of permanent insecurity are confronted, permanent security aspirations and practices will haunt Palestinians and Israelis.