Yemen? How did we get here?

I think something is broken. Ever since a Nigerian set his underpants alight aboard an international aeroplane, there have been mutterings of war with Yemen, or war in Yemen, or bombing Yemen with the support of their government. Stuff along those lines.

I heard on the news today that an envoy from Yemen was in Ottawa, asking for military aid against Al-Qaeda. More likely, they will use it for domestic purposes, including fighting their non-al Qaeda rebellions.

I could write you a whole post on why this is likely to be a bad, counterproductive policy, on how the Yemeni government will likely manipulate the west for its own purposes, produce kills of alleged high value targets, and cite Al-Qaeda as a bugbear to extract money, weapons and training. And that would be the less scary story.

The scarier one involves our involvement creating an anti-western backlash, and the propaganda related to that pushing the US into yet another quagmire of a war.

But that's not what I want to write about. Why are we even having this discussion in the first place? This is happening without much of a fuss, with a fairly minor event serving as the trigger.

It's just sort of assumed that it's natural and normal to send drones to bomb Yemen, send them some military advisors, and, if it comes to it, I'm sure the main impediment to sending ground troops would be that the US army is already stretched thin. There likely wouldn't be many moral objections voiced in the mainstream press, or worry that the American people might not support the deployment of troops abroad.

How did we get here? It used to be much harder to start a war.

I think the campaign to invade Iraq changed America. And us, as we're so exposed to their media, and the words of their presidents and government officials. I remember prior to the invasion, people talked about the Somalia syndrome. The minimal US casualties in that country had caused a public outcry, and scared politicians away from any troop deployment which could lead to the loss of American lives.

That has now been entirely overcome. No one talks about that anymore. The US losses in Mogadishu now seem trivial.

Something happened. I'm not sure if it was 9/11, the propaganda campaign, the steady normalization to losses suffered in the Iraq and Afghan wars*, the slow drumbeat of militarization throughout the Bush presidency. Abu Ghraib played a large part as well. They led to desensitization, and eventually resensitization, to the idea that torture was a good idea. The fact that no one of any importance was punished played a great role in allowing this.

I don't think there is any single cause. But we're in a new normal. Obama is continuing most of Bush's policies, in a less bellicose manner. People seem to think this constitutes change. These policies don't seem strange to people any more.

Predator drone attacks absent declarations of war, blase violation of sovereignty, secret prisons, torture, full body scanners in airports, the increased and continued use of paramilitary contractors, escalation of a war, highly secretive legal tactics, claims of executive and national security privilege. There's more, but I can't even remember it all.

This is now largely taken for granted, if its mentioned at all. I have a rough idea of how we got here over the past nine years (has it really been that long?), but it's hard to remember what things were like before, what people thought, how the norms have changed.

A decade ago, those things I listed would have been much more scandalous. Unamerican, even. Some of them might have been done, but they weren't taken for granted as they are now. If you're reading this, and you consider any of the things I listed as not all that shocking, why? Did you always think that way? If not, what changed?

I don't consider them shocking anymore, they're standard operating procedure now. But at one time, I would have considered them extreme, and so would most people.

Why aren't we shocked anymore? And can we go back to being shocked? I think it may be too late. By continuing Bush's policies but in a more respectable tone, Obama is locking these things in as the new "normal".

Right now, I don't know very much about Yemen. I'm hoping I won't have to learn more, by reading dispatches from the Yemeni front in the near distant future.

* This has affected Canada as well. We've lost 139 soldiers in that country. America lost but 18 in Somalia. People care, but they now consider it acceptable. This would not have been true a decade ago. That this is so I believe is due in large part to events and words spoken south of the border.