The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers

PGM

2NC -- Ext: PGM Link

PGMs are tools to justify repeats of the “war on terror” for US capitalist gains - by giving the public a re-assurance that their weapons are “precise” the US government and arms agencies increase their influence on the market and lead the world to accumulation and eventually war

1 - PGMs are capitalist tools to wage “war on terror” on the innocent and facilitate militarized accumulation

Connolly 21 [CATHERINE CONNOLLY is a teaching fellow of foreign and international relations at Dublin City University and DCU is ranked 6^th nationally in Ireland for best studies, 5-14-2021, "“Precision” Weapons Are Often Nothing of the Sort," Teen Vogue, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/precision-weapons-war-on-terror] - EM
Still, the U.S. spends billions of dollars on these weapons every year. In 2020, the Department of Defense requested $5.6 billion for more than 70,000 precision guided munitions. For fiscal year 2021, the DoD requested $4.1 billion for more than 41,300 such weapons. Since 2014, the Air Force alone has used 139,000 weapons — nearly all of them PGMs — in combat operations in the Middle East, with more used in counter-ISIS strikes in Iraq and Syria. What we see under the Biden administration is the continuation of a cycle of violence that kills people and destroys infrastructure — while at the same creating continued demand for these weapons from arms manufacturers, who often have close political links with the White House. The U.S. war on terror will be 20 years old this September. While President Biden has announced that U.S. troops will withdraw from Afghanistan on September 11, 2021, U.S. air strikes in the country will likely continue. If, as military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said, war is the continuation of politics by other means, I have to ask: What politics are being continued here? To my mind, presenting U.S. aerial strikes as sporadic and disconnected yet also precise and strategic acts of violence does a number of things. First, it focuses analysis on these individual acts, when in reality the U.S. is carrying out a program of widespread violence, committed not only against individuals in militant groups, but against civilians and their communities, and the states in which they are situated. Secondly, the focus on and fetishizing of the “precision” of the weapons used helps to present U.S. war and violence as more “civilized” than that of other countries. Taken together, I see U.S. practices in the war on terror as indicative of a politics of neo-colonialism, and a capitalist politics of militarized accumulation. The “precision” drone strikes of the targeted killing program, for example, highlight the neo-colonial nature of U.S. actions in the Middle East and Africa: these “precision” strikes are justified in the name of U.S. security and self-defense, and arguably go far beyond what is sanctioned by international law; but these choices are available to the U.S. because of its privileged position in the international legal system, and because of the localities in which these actions are carried out, i.e. in the Global South, outside the “West” or the “Global North.” As Robert Knox, senior lecturer in law at the University of Liverpool’s School of Law and Social Justice, has pointed out, racialization and racism are intricately tied up in all of this. In terms of militarized accumulation, the ongoing war on terror supports the broadly defined interests of U.S. “national security,” which in turn represents the interests of transnational capitalism rather than the interests of ordinary people. Violence is integral to the continuation of capitalism, with the world economy now based, as University of California at Santa Barbara professor William I. Robinson writes, “More and more on the development and deployment of these systems of warfare, social control, and repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation.” In this sense, whether or not the war on terror succeeds is beside the point. Pacification — the process of creating security and order through the use of force — can be made productive for capitalism even when it appears to be failing.

Download 2.09 Mb.

Share with your friends: