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AUGUST 2, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
The Kabul Execution: Action Without Actors
Who needs SEAL Team Six when a drone can do it all? Eventually, who'll
need any manual labor? And what will become of those who work with their
hands?
Precision aerial bombing has come a long way.
During World War II, a number of Allied bombing raids over Germany
missed, and bombed Switzerland instead.
This past weekend, by contrast, a CIA-controlled drone killed al-Qaeda
leader and 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri while he was standing on
the balcony of his safe house in Kabul, apparently without harming
anyone in or around the house-quite possibly, without doing damage to
any part of the house save, presumably, the balcony.
As such, the execution of al-Zawahiri stands in sharp contrast to that
of Osama bin Laden, which was carried out by SEAL Team Six. That was the
stuff of movies, and if
**Zero Dark Thirty** focused on the intelligence-gathering required to
establish where bin Laden was hiding, it also had the raid itself as a
climax, in accord with Aristotle's strictures on how dramas should
conclude.
The actual execution of al-Zawahiri, by contrast, required no SEALs at
all-just some anonymous drone operator whose superiors had given the
"fire when ready" order, with no risk whatever to that operator. To be
sure, that mode of killing had been necessitated by our withdrawal of
troops from Afghanistan, but it had also been made possible by advances
in surveillance and precision weaponry, as President Biden had made
clear when he ordered the withdrawal.
In that sense, this weekend's successful attack marked one more
advance in what is perhaps the most unsettling prospect looming over our
century: the cumulative reduction and eventual elimination of manual
labor.
The mechanization of warfare-which mechanizes the violence, even as
the victims remain human, of course-is just one small aspect of this
larger tendency. Does anyone doubt that Amazon will entirely replace its
warehouse workers with robots as soon as it becomes possible? Or that
mechanization has already reduced the number of workers it takes to
build a house? (One California building trades union leader has told me
that it took 20 electricians to wire a new school in 1980; it takes just
four today.) Or the number of workers it takes to produce the steel that
goes into a car or a bridge? (The CEO of U.S. Steel has told me that it
takes just two steelworkers to produce the same amount of steel that
required ten steelworkers in the 1970s.)
Our fantasies have already adapted to this change. G.I. Joe toys come
complete with robotized arms; superheroes with extra-human powers clog
movie screens while the human heroes of yesteryear are all on the
cutting-room floor. There is no 21st-century John Wayne or Gary Cooper.
Even if many of the manual workers of the past century were reduced to
cogs on factory assembly lines, a lot of them at least had the
collective power of unions behind them, compelling their bosses to pay
them adequately for a day's work. Now, most of them don't even have
that. Their diminished present and their even bleaker future feed into
what is variously termed the crisis of masculinity or the problems of
boys, into rage at a socioeconomic elite whose definitions of
meritocracy usually degrade or dismiss manual work altogether. Mix this
economic degradation and cultural irrelevance with factors like racism
and voila! You can't bring back John Wayne, but you can back Donald
Trump.
No John Waynes required to take out a jihadist mass murderer, and they
sure don't need that many of you to build an electric car. Send not to
know on whom the bomb bursts ...
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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Join leading figures behind the surge in union organizing as we discuss
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