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Category: iraq war

  • Putin’s George W. Bush Problem: or Bush’s Putin Problem?



    V. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is a war crime. Although the “NATO expansion” is an apparent effort to encircle Russia on its western border with new NATO members, despite the promise of the Bush I administration not to do so, may be considered on the issue of appropriate punishment, it is no defense to the crime. In fact, aggressive war, or a war of invasion, is the “ultimate war crime” according to the Nuremberg Tribunal and the US Prosecutor Justice Jackson.

    Recent precedent supports that Putin is subject to prosecution for the invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal and Commission were established under the Laws of Malaysia; they had a pre-existing Statute and Rules of Procedure. They also paid for a qualified Team of Malaysian Barristers to defend the Defendants. They put on as vigorous a Defense as could have been made.

    Despite that excellent defense, the accused–George W. Bush and Tony Blair–were convicted of war crimes based on overwhelming evidence of their guilt. In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict (2011) that found George W. Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, among others as a result of their roles in the Iraq invasion.

    George W. Bush, the former US President, and seven key members of his administration were found guilty of war crimes: Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee, and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

    In addition to the crime of aggressive war, the trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan following the illegal invasions and wars of aggression.

    At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their key legal advisors, who were all convicted as war criminals.

    Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements, and other relevant material have been sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council, apparently in support of “official criminal prosecution” by that body.

    Mr. Putin ought to be concerned that this precedent, along with the Nuremberg Tribunal’s rulings, indicates a serious judgment by informed members of the international community that wars of aggression, and the other crimes that unavoidably follow such invasions, will be met with condemnation and legal action. The people of the world will demand and expect accountability, as no person is above the law.

    Although, as of yet, Mr. Bush and his fellow defendants have not been brought before any “official” bar of justice, their status as War criminals will follow them and dog their days should they leave the “protection” of nations arguably complicit in their crimes. They travel internationally at risk of arrest by nations committed to the rule of law. They are branded with the “mark of Cain” indelibly and arguably even more odiously.

    Of course, the condemnation of Mr. Putin’s like crime by US and Allied Officials would carry more moral force should Mr. Bush et al. be charged officially by those nations in which they have sought refuge—all such nations bear a duty to do so under the law of nations. Mr. Putin should not take solace in the lack of their prosecution. The unequal application of the law, especially the law of war, has long been one of its major defects. Both “victor’s justice” (no consequential prosecution of a prevailing power) and superpower impunity (no documentable legal consequences for superpower war crimes or crimes against humanity) are at issue now as in the past.

    However, the Israeli example of hunting down War Criminals from the Nazi regime despite their evasion of the official Nuremberg Tribunal is but one example of what the future may hold for such criminals. Lead amongst these was Simon Wiesenthal, ironically born in Ukraine. The great mass of humanity yearns for justice, despite being burdened with “leaders” whose arrogance erroneously enables them to conclude they are immune from justice. In this regard, universal jurisdiction over war crimes has the potential to ensnare war criminals and is very threatening to the Kissingers and Rumsfelds of this world, who have curtailed their travel schedules apparently out of fear of arrest in some nations that prefer the rule of law to war and justice for all to justice for some.

    Perhaps, if brought to trial, Mr. Putin will call Mr. Bush as a witness for his defense. If Mr. Bush eludes accountability, Mr. Putin may argue, then I cannot be held accountable for the invasion of Ukraine without violating the principle of “equal justice under law.” On its face, this claim has some force, especially against US efforts, if any, to prosecute Mr. Putin, as it is foundational in US law that the law applies equally to all.

    If Mr. Putin is guilty, then so is Mr. Bush. Selective prosecution in War Crimes cases makes a mockery of the rule of law and supports the claim that Nuremberg and all such efforts are mere “victors justice” that ignores the war crimes of victors while punishing losers, an extreme example of “might makes right.” Surely, it falls short of Abe Lincoln’s aspirational aphorism: “right makes might.”

    Or perhaps, the prosecution would call Mr. Bush as an “expert” witness on what it takes to plan and commit a war of aggression, an illegal invasion, to lay a foundation for the tribunal to evaluate Mr. Putin’s plans and acts. This could be problematic, as Mr. Bush could elect to “plead the fifth,” taking the position that his testimony could open him to criminal prosecution for the same crime as Mr. Putin—a criminal war of aggression. And were Mr. Bush to testify his own words could convict him, thus taking the fifth is valid.

    Regardless of the legal morass, the foregoing creates, humanity clearly owes a debt to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal. It provides a compelling precedent for the assertion that the law of the international community repudiates “victors’ justice” and that wars of aggression are crimes.

    Even Mr. Bush appears to support that view. The 43rd president was making a presentation to an audience at his presidential library in Dallas on Wednesday, May 18, 2022 when he condemned “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq – I mean Ukraine.” With such a declaration against his interest, Mr. Bush ratified the legitimacy of the Tribunal’s indictment and judgment of conviction.

    The law of humanity is bending the moral arc of the universe towards justice, no matter how obstructionists like Mr. Putin, and Mr. Bush, try to stop it. On second thought, perhaps these “birds of a feather” ought to be “tried together?” Were it so, right could make might, and the rule of law could be promoted to its rightful place in a world free of war criminals.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Barbara Lee, Katie Porter Will Run Competing Senate Bids in California

    Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee reportedly told fellow Congressional Black Caucus members in a private meeting on Wednesday that she will be running to replace California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2024. Lee has not publicly announced a run, though sources informed Politico and NBC of her announcement. She later told reporters that she would officially announce her plans “when it’s appropriate,”…

    Source

  • Veterans Understand Martin Luther King Jr’s Powerful Demand for Peace



    Veterans Day celebrations have come and gone. One thing about veterans: Everyone’s for them. But what does that really encompass? How did they get here? And what of the veterans to come?

    The World Veterans Federation (WVF) is an international network comprised of 172 veterans organizations from 121 countries representing about 60 million veterans worldwide. It acts as a humanitarian, peace, and justice advocate not just for veterans but for victims of war. Out of those 121 countries with 60 million veterans, one country contains about 19 million — over 30% — of all the world’s veterans. That’s the United States.

    Why so many? The U.S. represents only 4.25% of the world’s population. That outsize representation, where we dramatically outnumber other countries in producing veterans, is repeated in our jails where we imprison more than 20% of the entire world’s prison population and repeated in our routine gun shootings where we own 42% of the world’s privately held guns.

    Veterans For Peace (a U.S. member of WVF), was formed in 1985. Odds are you’ve never heard of it. It suffers from a lack of recognition, particularly among members of Congress, precisely because it stands in opposition to US wars of aggression (Iraq in 2003 as characterized by Kofi Annan).

    It’s irrational to honor veterans and create them simultaneously. Over 99% of our living veterans have not fought in defensive wars! It matters when veterans are created in wars for an unspecified (or bogus) national interest. This is not a trivial point.

    Foreign policy is a blind spot for Americans. This became part of Martin Luther King’s message. He said if you want to understand what’s taking place in America, look past that to what America is doing overseas. The military violence we sow overseas mirrors the violence of the oppressed here at home.

    King did not merely have a dream on the Washington Mall. If that was all there was to it, he wouldn’t have become an enemy of the state. He audaciously demanded of his country social and economic justice. Without realizing the enormous compliment it was paying Karl Marx and communism, the state regarded him as a communist for demanding such things. Which is the more radical? Asking for this, or denying it.

    It’s over half a century since King’s assassination, martyred at the age of 39. We exploit his memory each year with a national holiday bearing his name, but we have not moved an inch closer to remodeling our country on the world stage to exemplify what it could be like at home.

    Unless we are truly defending our country—and not for the so-called national interest that represents the class interests of the one percent—the best way to honor veterans is not with 10% off and thank you for your service. Peace, not war, is the way to honor the sacrifices of veterans. This is the central theme of Veterans For Peace.

    For possible change, these things must be demanded, but who gets to make demands on Washington? The top one percent own 32.3% of the country’s wealth, against the bottom fifty percent owning a mere 2.6%. Half the country owns practically nothing.

    It takes the totality of the bottom ninety percent, owning 30.2%, to approach the wealth of the one percent. Of course this has no affect on the balance of power. The bottom ninety percent are so divided it’s not funny, and even if they weren’t, they don’t run anything. The well-off section between 91 and 99% doesn’t run anything either. The top 1%—although not necessarily agreeing with one another—run the country.

    As far as the general public is concerned, placing faith in the U.S. Supreme Court is bound to disappoint. For much of its history, it’s been on the wrong side of the people. Whatever else can be said about it, our recent conservative court is being faithful to its roots. For example, the Citizens United ruling enables the 1% (corporations , plutocrats, and Wall Street) to spend unlimited funds on elections. There’s a straight line from this to the founding fathers’ enshrinement of property rights (land, capital, patriarchy, slaves) in our Constitution. That’s what they wanted.

    John Jay—founding father, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and first U.S. Chief Justice—expressed the principle very clearly: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” For all the lip service about democracy, that’s the way it was designed, and that’s the way it’s been.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Chomsky: 20 Years After Iraq War Vote, US Continues to Flout International Law

    This week marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. congressional vote to authorize the deadly war on Iraq, which according to some estimates, killed between 800,000 and 1.3 million people. In the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, Noam Chomsky shares his thoughts on the causes and ramifications of this appalling crime against humanity.

    Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).

    C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, 20 years ago, the U.S. Congress authorized the invasion of Iraq despite massive opposition to such an undertaking. Several leading Democratic senators ended up supporting the war authorization, including Joe Biden. For both historical and future purposes, what were the causes and ramifications of the Iraq war?

    Noam Chomsky: There are many kinds of support, ranging from outright to tacit. The latter includes those who regard it as a mistake but no more than that — a “strategic blunder,” as in Obama’s retrospective judgment. There were Nazi generals who opposed Hitler’s major decisions as strategic blunders. We don’t regard them as opponents of Nazi aggression. The same with regard to Russian generals who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan as a mistake, as many did.

    If we can ever rise to the level of applying to ourselves the standards we rightly apply to others, then we will recognize that there has been little principled opposition to the Iraq War in high places, including the government and the political class. Much as in the case of the Vietnam War and other major crimes.

    There was, of course, strong popular opposition. Characteristic was my own experience at MIT. Students demanded that we suspend classes so that they could participate in the huge public protests before the war was officially launched — something new in the history of imperialism — later meeting in a downtown church to discuss the impending crime and what it portended.

    Much the same was true worldwide, so much so that Donald Rumsfeld came out with his famous distinction between Old and New Europe. Old Europe are the traditional democracies, old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who we Americans can disregard because they are mired in boring concepts like international law, sovereign rights, and other outdated nonsense.

    New Europe in contrast are the good guys: a few former Russian satellites who tow Washington’s line, and one western democracy, Spain, where Prime Minister Aznar went along with Washington, disregarding close to 100 percent of public opinion. He was rewarded by being invited to join Bush and Blair as they announced the invasion.

    The distinction reflects our traditional deep concern for democracy.

    It will be interesting to see if Bush and Blair are interviewed on this auspicious occasion. Bush was interviewed on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan, another act of criminal aggression that was overwhelmingly opposed by international opinion contrary to many claims, matters we have discussed before. He was interviewed by the Washington Post — in the Style section, where he was portrayed as a lovable goofy grandpa playing with his grandchildren and showing off his portraits of famous people he had met.

    There was an official reason for the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, the “single question,” as it was called from on high: Will Iraq terminate its nuclear weapons programs?

    International inspectors had questioned whether there were such programs and asked for more time to investigate, but were dismissed. The U.S. and its U.K. lackey were aiming for blood. A few months later the “single question” was answered, the wrong way. We may recall the amusing skit that Bush performed, looking under the table, “No not there,” maybe in the closet, etc. All to hilarious laughter, though not in the streets of Baghdad.

    The wrong answer required a change of course. It was suddenly discovered that the reason for the invasion was not the “single question,” but rather our fervent wish to bring the blessings of democracy to Iraq. One leading Middle East scholar broke ranks and described what took place, Augustus Richard Norton, who wrote that “As fantasies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were unmasked, the Bush administration increasingly stressed the democratic transformation of Iraq, and scholars jumped on the democratization bandwagon.” As did the loyal media and commentariat, as usual.

    They did have some support in Iraq. A Gallup poll found that some Iraqis also leaped on the bandwagon: One percent felt that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq, 5 percent thought the goal was “to assist the Iraqi people.” Most of the rest assumed that the goal was to take control of Iraq’s resources and to reorganize the Middle East in U.S. and Israeli interests — the “conspiracy theory” derided by rational Westerners, who understand that Washington and London would have been just as dedicated to the “liberation of Iraq” if its resources happened to be lettuce and pickles and the center of fossil fuel production was in the South Pacific.

    By November 2007, when the U.S. sought a Status of Forces Agreement, the Bush administration came clean and stated the obvious: It demanded privileged access for Western energy companies to Iraqi fossil fuel resources and the right to establish U.S. military bases in Iraq. The demands were endorsed by Bush in a “signing statement” the following January. The Iraqi parliament refused.

    The ramifications of the invasion were multiple. Iraq has been devastated. What had been in many ways the most advanced country in the Arab world is a miserable wreck. The invasion incited ethnic (Shia-Sunni) conflict that had not existed before, now tearing not only the country but the whole region apart. ISIS emerged from the wreckage, almost taking over the country when the army trained and armed by the U.S. fled at the sight of jihadis in pickup trucks waving rifles. They were stopped just short of Baghdad by Iranian-backed militias. And on, and on.

    But none of this is a problem for the lovable goofy grandpa or the educated classes in the U.S. who now admire him as a serious statesman, called upon to orate about world affairs.

    The reaction is much like that of Zbigniew Brzezinski, when asked about his boast to have drawn the Russians into Afghanistan and his support for the U.S. effort to prolong the war and to block UN efforts to negotiate Russian withdrawal. It was a wonderful success, Brzezinski explained to the naïve questioners. It achieved the goal of severely harming the U.S.S.R. he (dubiously) claimed, while conceding that it left a few “agitated Muslims,” not to speak of a million cadavers and a ruined country.

    Or like Jimmy Carter, who assured us that we owe “no debt” to the Vietnamese because “the destruction was mutual.”

    It is all too easy to continue. From a position of supreme power, with a loyal intellectual community, little is beyond reach.

    The 2003 Iraq invasion was as criminal an act as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the reaction on the part of the Western community was very different than it has been in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. No sanctions were imposed against the U.S., no freezing of the assets of U.S. oligarchs, no demands that the U.S. be suspended from the UN Security Council. Your comments on this matter?

    Comment is hardly needed. The worst crime since World War II was the long U.S. war against Indochina. No censure of the U.S. could be contemplated. It was well understood at the UN that if the horrendous crimes were so much as discussed, the U.S. would simply dismantle the offending institution. The West righteously condemns Putin’s annexations and calls for punishment of this reincarnation of Hitler, but scarcely dares to utter a chirp of protest when the U.S. authorizes Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and Greater Jerusalem, and Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara. The list is long. The reasons are clear.

    When the operative rules of world order are violated, reaction is swift. A clear illustration was when the World Court condemned the Holy State [the U.S.] for international terrorism (in legalese, “unlawful use of force”) in 1986, ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations to the victim (Nicaragua). Washington reacted by escalating the crimes. The press dismissed the judgment as worthless because the court is a “hostile forum” (according to the New York Times), as proven by its judgment against the U.S. The whole matter has been effectively wiped out of history, including the fact that the U.S. is now the only state to have rejected a World Court decision — of course with total impunity.

    It’s an old story that “Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.” The maxim holds with particular force in the international domain, where the Godfather rules supreme.

    By now the contempt for international law — except as a weapon against enemies — is barely concealed. It is reframed as the demand for a “rules-based international order” (where the Godfather sets the rules) to supersede the archaic UN-based international order, which bars U.S. foreign policy.

    What would have happened if Congress had refused to go along with the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq?

    One Republican voted against the war resolution (Chafee). Democrats were split (29-21). If Congress had refused to go along, the Bush administration would have had to find other means to achieve the goals that Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and other hawks had laid out fairly clearly.

    Many such means are available: sabotage, subversion, provoking (or manufacturing) some incident that could be used as a pretext for “retaliation.” Or simply extending the brutal sanctions regime that was devastating the population. We may recall that both of the distinguished international diplomats who administered Clinton’s program (via the UN) resigned in protest, condemning it as “genocidal.” The second, Hans von Sponeck, wrote an extremely illuminating book spelling out the impact in detail, A Different Kind of War. There was no need for an official ban of what is arguably the most important book on the build-up to the criminal invasion, and on the U.S. sanctions weapon generally. Silent conformity sufficed. That might have crushed the population sufficiently as to call for “humanitarian intervention.”

    It is well to remember that there are no limits to cynicism if conformity and obedience prevail.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Iraq War Vote Anniversary Nears, Don’t Forget Who Was Responsible

    As we approach the 20th anniversary of the fateful congressional vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq, many are questioning what would have happened had Congress refused to go along. There was widespread public opposition to going to war at the time. The Catholic Church and every mainline Protestant denomination came out against the war, as did virtually every major labor union and other left-of-center organization that took a stand. The vast majority of the U.S. Middle East scholars opposed an invasion, being aware of the likely disastrous consequences. The vast majority of the world’s nations, including most of the United States’s closest allies, were also in opposition to the war.

    Unlike the near-unanimous vote (save for Rep. Barbara Lee) the previous year authorizing military force in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war resolution was far more controversial. A sizable majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion, which came to a vote on October 10, 2002. The Republicans then controlled the House, however, and it passed easily.

    This left the determination as to whether the United States would go to war up to the Democratic-controlled Senate the following day. To the astonishment of many, several leading Democratic senators crossed the aisle to support the war authorization, including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Assistant Majority Leader Harry Reid and Foreign Relations Committee Chair Joe Biden, as well as such prominent senators as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, John Edwards and Dianne Feinstein.

    All this was well-known at the time. Since then, however, a number of these Democrats, particularly those with presidential ambitions, have lied about their votes — and much of the mainstream media have allowed them to get away with it.

    The primary excuse they have subsequently put forward has been that the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution,” as it was formally known, was not actually an authorization for use of military force against Iraq. Instead, these Democrats claim they did not actually support George W. Bush’s decision to invade in March 2003 but simply wanted to provide the administration with leverage to pressure Iraq to allow a return of UN inspectors, which President Clinton had ordered removed in 1998 prior to a four-day bombing campaign, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had, quite predictably, not yet allowed to return.

    Despite wording in the congressional resolution providing Bush with an open-ended authority to invade, John Kerry claimed in 2013 that he “opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq.” While running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton insisted that she voted for the resolution simply because “we needed to put inspectors in, that was the underlying reason why I at least voted to give President Bush the authority,” and that she did not want to “wage a preemptive war.” Similarly, during his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden insisted he supported Bush’s war resolution not because he actually wanted to invade Iraq, but because “he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program,” and further claiming that, “Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.”

    In reality, at the time of the vote on the war resolution, the Iraqi government had already agreed in principle to a return of the weapons inspectors and were negotiating with the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission on the details which were formally institutionalized a few weeks later. (Indeed, it would have likely been resolved earlier had the Bush administration not repeatedly postponed the UN Security Council resolution in the hopes of inserting language that would have allowed the United States to unilaterally interpret the level of compliance.) In addition, all three of these senators voted against the substitute amendment by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, which would have also granted President Bush authority to use force, but only if Iraq defied subsequent UN demands regarding the inspections process. Instead, they voted for the Republican-sponsored resolution to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing, regardless of whether inspectors returned.

    More critically, when Bush launched the March 2003 invasion a full four months after large-scale weapons inspections had begun with no signs of any proscribed weapons or weapons facilities, Clinton, Biden and Kerry still argued that the invasion was necessary and lawful.

    Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, “I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.” He added, “Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.”

    Soon after the launch of the invasion, despite the fact that four months of unfettered inspections had revealed none of the chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear programs or sophisticated delivery systems he claimed Iraq possessed, Biden insisted that “there was sufficient evidence to go into Iraq.”

    Similarly, despite Saddam Hussein being in full compliance with the UN Security Council, Senator Clinton insisted that Hussein nevertheless needed to resign as president, leave Iraq and allow U.S. troops to occupy the country. ​“The president gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid war,” Clinton said in a statement, ​“and the world hopes that Saddam Hussein will finally hear this ultimatum, understand the severity of those words, and act accordingly.”

    When Hussein refused to resign and the Bush administration launched the invasion, all three of them voted in favor of a resolution calling for ​“unequivocal support” for Bush’s ​“firm leadership and decisive action” as ​“part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.” They insisted that Iraq was somehow still ​“in material breach of the relevant United Nations resolutions” and, despite the fact that weapons inspectors had found no evidence of any remaining weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), they insisted the invasion was necessary to ​“neutralize Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

    Even when the three future Democratic presidential nominees acknowledged that Iraq had in fact disarmed from its proscribed weapons programs prior to the invasion, they still insisted that invading the oil-rich country was the right thing to do.

    Many months after the absence of WMDs was confirmed, Clinton declared in a speech at George Washington University that her support for the authorization was still ​“the right vote” and one that ​“I stand by.” Similarly, in an interview on “Larry King Live” in April 2004, when asked about her vote despite the absence of WMDs or al-Qaeda ties she had insisted that Iraq had, she acknowledged, ​“I don’t regret giving the president authority.”

    While running for president, Kerry — when asked whether he would support the war “knowing what we know now” about the absence of “weapons of mass destruction” — replied: “Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.”

    In another interview regarding the invasion, Kerry insisted: “I’m glad we did. There’s no ambivalence.” As late as October 2004, Kerry argued that “Congress was right to give the president the authority to use force to hold Saddam Hussein accountable.”

    Similarly, not long after the Bush administration conceded that there were no “weapons of mass destruction” to be found, Biden told CNN, “I, for one, thought we should have gone in Iraq,” adding his disappointment that other Democrats weren’t as supportive. A couple of weeks later, on “Fox News Sunday,” even while acknowledging that Iraq didn’t actually have the weapons, weapons systems and weapons programs he claimed, Biden insisted, “I do think it was a just war.”

    At a hearing in July 2003, Biden categorically stated, “I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again.” Days later, in the face of growing outrage by fellow Democrats about being misled into what was already becoming a bloody counterinsurgency struggle, Biden argued, “In my view, anyone who can’t acknowledge that the world is better off without [Saddam Hussein] is out of touch. … Contrary to what some in my party might think, Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later.”

    Despite Bush’s case for the war now unarguably based on falsehoods, Biden insisted that Bush had made a good case for invading and said, “I commend the president.” More than a year later, as the death toll mounted, Biden insisted, in regard to his support for the invasion, “I still believe my vote was just.”

    The violent legacy of the Iraq invasion will be with us for many decades to come. As a result, it is important to recognize the responsibility not just of the architects of the war within the Bush administration, but also of the congressional lawmakers from both parties who made it possible. The invasion was not simply a “mistake,” but an effective rejection of the United Nations Charter and the post-World War II international legal system. There were many months leading up to the passage of the war resolution during which scholars, peace activists, former UN inspectors, strategic analysts, and many others informed these senators that such an invasion would be illegal, unnecessary and have disastrous consequences. They knew.

    Despite being among the right-wing minority of congressional Democrats who supported Bush’s war, all three of these senators were nominated by their party as their presidential candidate. Kerry and Clinton both lost very close elections in part because of their support for the war. These two later became secretaries of state, ironically under Barack Obama, an outspoken opponent of the war. Joe Biden became president, only to decide he supports the UN Charter’s prohibition against aggressive war after all — as long as the aggressor is an adversarial nation like Russia.

    That the more progressive of the two major U.S. parties would be so forgiving of candidates who supported an illegal, unnecessary and predictably disastrous war and then also lied about it is a sad reflection of the state of U.S. politics. The vast majority of Americans now recognize the invasion of Iraq was wrong. Yet we can be surprisingly forgiving of those who supported such a calamity, or even forget that they did so.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “The Wind Knows Your Name”: Dahr Jamail on William Rivers Pitt

    The title of William Rivers Pitt’s unpublished book about the pandemic is: Please Take This, Because I Love You and I Might Die. A COVID Diary. He sent me the manuscript not too long ago so I could read it, and give him input on where it might make the most sense to have it published.

    With the pandemic, as he was consistently able to do, Will saw what was coming, knew the consequences could well be catastrophic, and behaved accordingly. Each of those things is a true gift. The ability (and willingness) to see what was coming before most people, knowing in his heart what the consequences could mean, and then taking appropriate actions to prepare. In the case of COVID-19, Will was being especially careful in order to protect his aging mother who has lung issues, his young daughter Lola, and perhaps with subconscious foreshadowing of his own death, he was making preparations for what was to come.

    Will’s unpublished book is dedicated to Lola.

    Iraq

    I met Will during the early years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The propaganda leading up to the invasion, which of course ignored a dozen years of U.S.-imposed sanctions that strangled the country and killed at least half a million children, had deeply impacted us both. Will had already written a book (War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know) that completely disassembled the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, upon which the entire justification for the illegal invasion and occupation was predicated. He had done what he could. Yet he was not going to stop taking the Bush administration to task. In fact, Will was just getting warmed up.

    We met in Boston a couple of years into the occupation. Will was already one of my heroes, one of the few voices of reason, sanity and truth in the media in the U.S. I was reading his valiant, noble, fiery words toward that end for years, and he had been reading my articles from Iraq about the widespread death and destruction then unfolding — death and destruction he had done all he could to prevent, a deep and lasting friendship was born on the spot, one that would also yield a coauthored book published by this website, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation, Why it is Happening, and Who is Responsible.

    While I kept making my trips in and out of Iraq over the next years, Will continued writing his salvos of truth about what the Bush and then Obama administrations were doing in Iraq, covering the domestic political situation, and writing about it as fiercely and steadfastly as though his life depended on it. The many times I became dispirited while on the front lines of the brutal occupation, I would read Will’s latest column about whatever the Bush administration was doing to justify their ongoing atrocities in Iraq, and my fire to continue my work would be fed yet again.

    Truly one of the most important public intellectuals, writers and commentators of our time, in losing Will, we’ve lost a voice that is irreplaceable, and I’ve lost one of my heroes.

    Roads

    Late this August, Will and I were exchanging emails about his unpublished book. I wrote him this:

    I’m only part way through your book. Two months ago I lost my long-time climbing partner of 25 years in a rock fall accident…we were roped up…his body was literally hanging off me…so I’ve been in a deep grieving process this summer, otherwise I’d have already torn through your book.

    Thanks for being out there carrying the torch brother.
    Love,
    Dahr

    To which Will replied:

    WHAT THE FUCK

    Oh Jesus Dahr, I am so sorry.

    I believe the inchoate universe puts its stamp on some people now and again, and it is woe to that person. The stamp means you are to suffer: To suffer from outside forces, and to suffer from an internal need to put that suffering into some context, to explain it, or to make some use of it if nothing else. It is a wailing of the soul, that stamp. The Buddhists call them Bodhisattvas, those who cross the precipice of enlightenment but come back for others, to guide them rather than pass over themselves. It is an altogether agonizing fate, for it brings wisdom, and wisdom is the most terrible thing of all.

    Fuck my book. Stay on the mountain. The wind knows your name.

    While I thought he’d gone too far with the Bodhisattva bit, I wrote him back and thanked him, from my heart, for his gracious words of comfort. These words of his, like everything he wrote, came from his heart, his soul, his own experience. Will was, by his own definition, a Bodhisattva, here to guide all of us with his wisdom, and his seeing.

    “We stand today upon the fulcrum of history, a crossroads at midnight with a blood moon rising,” Will wrote in February 2019. “Down one road lies fire, flood, famine, failure and the final triumph of greed. What awaits down the other road is unknown, terra incognita, a mystery to be solved one gentle step at a time…. The road we have been on is littered with bones and sorrow. The road we must take is strange, and new, and dangerous, and difficult. There are no promises, other than it will be — by dint of our collective will — better than the way that is failing before our eyes. This crossroads is freedom distilled, and the time to choose is now.”

    Will is now on the road each of us inevitably shall take. He showed us how to live a noble life. He made a living speaking truth to power. He did these things for all of us, and he did them because they were his to do. He did them because he could.

    Most importantly, he did them because he knew with all his heart they were the right things to do.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Know Your Enemy: After the Theocons, with Damon Linker

    A conversation about the George W. Bush administration, the conservative religious publication First Things, and how today’s right became so deranged.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Secret memo reveals 2002 meeting between Bush and Blair in lead up to Iraq War

    A secret memo published by Stop the War UK details an April 2002 meeting between Tony Blair and George W Bush concerning military intervention to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, reports Kerry Smith.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Britain: Protests planned to oppose Blair’s knighthood

    Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will receive a knighthood on June 13, but more than 1.2 million petitioners say he should be sent to The Hague as a war criminal, not honoured at Windsor Castle.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Bush Accidentally Condemns “Brutal Invasion of Iraq” When Talking About Ukraine

    While speaking to an audience at his presidential library on Wednesday, former President George W. Bush accidentally condemned his 2003 invasion of Iraq while attempting to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Bush’s speech took place at his library in Dallas, Texas, and was part of an event focused on the importance of promoting free and fair elections throughout the world. Bush was trying to say that a lack of transparency and democracy in Russia, resulting in Putin’s continued rule in Moscow, led to the invasion of Ukraine that was launched earlier this year.

    But instead of saying “Russia,” Bush inserted the name of the country he ordered U.S. military forces to invade nearly two decades ago.

    “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine,” Bush said.

    The former president acknowledged his mistake seconds later, and tried to play it off with a joke. “Iraq too, anyway,” he said, eliciting some laughter from the crowd.

    Many pointed out that it was callous for Bush to joke about the invasion of Iraq, as the war resulted in thousands of American soldiers dying or being injured in significant ways, and more than a million Iraqi citizens being killed. Millions more have been permanently displaced because of the invasion.

    “I’m not laughing, and I am guessing nor are the families of the thousands of American troops and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in that war,” said MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan on Wednesday night.

    “The laughing and joking at the end of this reveals everything you will ever need to know about George W. Bush,” said Dan Caldwell, vice president of foreign policy for Stand Together, a philanthropic organization focused on “bridging partisan divides.”

    “I gave eye witness testimony at [the Kuala Lumpur] War Crimes Tribunal in 2012 on US torture in #Bagram and #Gitmo alongside survivors #abughraib #Iraq,” tweeted Moazzam Begg, who was formerly imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. “Bush and his acolytes were found guilty in absentia of war crimes and crimes against humanity. No joke.”

    Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the basis that the country was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and was seeking to develop nuclear weapons capabilities — unfounded allegations that were relentlessly pushed by his administration and corporate media to justify going to war. When no such weapons were found after the invasion began, Bush joked about his lie to the public during a speech at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner, showing images of himself looking around the White House for WMDs.

    There are many similarities between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt noted in a column in April. Like Putin, “Bush and his allies within government and the media crafted a complete alternate reality to justify their intentions,” he wrote.

    “Vladimir Putin, the strongman leader who calls the Russian oligarch billionaire class his base, has also constructed an alternative reality to buttress his desire for an expanded empire,” Pitt pointed out, comparing Bush’s false narratives to justify an invasion of Iraq to the unfounded allegations the Russian president has made against Ukraine’s political leaders.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Madeleine Albright’s Funeral Buried Her Legacy Of War-Making And Extraordinary Deceit

    It’s fitting that Joe Biden and Bill and Hillary Clinton should eulogize Madeleine Albright at the mammoth Episcopalian institution calling itself the “National Cathedral”. After all, just last year, Albright eulogized fellow war maker, “trailblazer” and fellow Episcopalian Colin Powell there for his “honesty, dignity, loyalty and an unshakable commitment to his calling and word.”

    Albright, Biden and the Clintons covered for each other’s criminal war making – and ultimately, they all enabled and covered for Republican criminality as well. All showed they were capable of murderous deceits.

    It sparked some measure of attention during the 2020 election, but it’s largely been forgotten that the current sitting president, who with great hypocrisy calls Vladimir Putin a war criminal, Joe Biden, won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record – and he hasn’t for years.

    The post Madeleine Albright’s Funeral Buried Her Legacy Of War-Making And Extraordinary Deceit appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Lasting Cruelties

    Reign of Terror situates the War on Terror as part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Don’t forget Iraq and Afghanistan

    It’s said the only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. Shezana Hafiz from CAGE tells us why it’s critical to keep unpicking the West’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    By Pablo Navarrete

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Russians Say, Don’t Hate Us For What Our Leaders Have Done

    As a U.S. diplomat who resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 in opposition to Bush’s war on Iraq, I hoped at the time that all Americans would not be vilified by the world for the actions of the Bush administration.

    As hard as it might be for some, I plead that we not vilify Russians for the actions of their political leaders. I hope that we can be as generous to peace-seeking Russians as the world was to anti-war Americans.

    The post Russians Say, Don’t Hate Us For What Our Leaders Have Done appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Antiwar Movement That Wasn’t Enough

    So here we are, 20 years after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and months since they hotfooted it out. That two-decade-long boots-on-the-ground (and planes in the air) episode has now officially been declared over and done with, if not exactly paid for. But was that an inflection point, as this country turned its military attention to China and Russia? Not so fast. I’m impatient with the conventional wisdom about our twenty-first-century wars and the reaction to them at home. Still, I do think it’s important to try to figure out what has (or hasn’t) been learned from them and what may have changed because of them.

    The post The Antiwar Movement That Wasn’t Enough appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Knighthood won’t rehabilitate blood-soaked Blair

    Former British prime minister Tony Blair should be on trial at The Hague rather than parading the medieval trappings of wealth and power, wroites Lindsey German.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Asymmetric War and Its Journalists

    If we ask the right questions, we might well conclude that political struggle rather than war is the better strategy for both sides in virtually all asymmetric conflicts.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • One million sign petition to rescind Tony Blair’s knighthood

    One million people have signed a petition to have former prime minister Tony Blair’s knighthood “rescinded”.

    The Queen appointed Blair a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. This is the oldest and most senior British Order of Chivalry.

    ‘Irreparable damage’

    The Change.org petition which aims to strip the former prime minister of his appointment reached one million signatures on Friday 7 January.

    A statement accompanying the petition said:

    Tony Blair caused irreparable damage to both the constitution of the United Kingdom and to the very fabric of the nation’s society.

    He was personally responsible for causing the death of countless innocent civilian lives and servicemen in various conflicts. For this alone he should be held accountable for war crimes.

    Tony Blair is the least deserving person of any public honour…

    We petition the Prime Minister to petition Her Majesty to have this honour removed.

    Chilcot Iraq inquiry
    Demonstrators in 2010 protest in London as Tony Blair was due to give evidence at the Iraq war inquiry (PA)

    Made Britain better with an illegal war

    The knighthood has provoked debate about the honours system. Labour leader Keir Starmer said Boris Johnson has not “earned the right” of a knighthood after leaving office.

    But Starmer insisted his predecessor at the top of the Labour Party had earned his knighthood. Starmer argued that Blair had “made Britain a better country”.

    Blair’s former defence secretary Geoff Hoon wrote in his recent memoir that Downing Street ordered his office to burn a secret memo saying the 2003 Iraq invasion could be illegal, according to the Daily Mail.

    Appointments to the Garter are in the Queen’s gift and made without prime ministerial advice. They’re usually announced on St George’s Day, 23 April. But the Queen can do so at any time, and chose this one to coincide with the New Year Honours.

    You can sign the petition here.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Happy New Year! A Reflection on 20 Years at Truthout

    William Rivers Pitt now and 20 years ago

    The New Year’s holiday is a time for memories, for an accounting of the span you’ve just passed, for an assessment of where you are now, and for looking down the road and making wild-ass guesses about where you’ll be a year from now.

    This New Year’s Eve is particularly poignant for me, as January 2022 marks 20 years I’ve been writing and working for Truthout. Trying to wrap my mind around it is a challenge, to say the least… 20 years! When I started this, I was a 30-year-old writer and teacher with almost no gray hair, a manageable waistline and a strangely sunny disposition given the circumstances. September 11 had just happened, the Afghanistan War was barely underway, and the serial horrors of the Iraq War were yet to come.

    Now? Let’s just say that sunny disposition has a few dings and scuffs in it. I’ve been riffling through memories as this anniversary has approached, and each has left me more gobsmacked than the last.

    There was the upstate New York hotel I overnighted in to give a book lecture at some college up there in late spring of 2003, after the Iraq invasion was well underway. Donald Rumsfeld and his pack of wreckers had been working overtime to convince the American people that Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and that an attack was imminent. I happened past the hotel manager’s office, and what do you know? A whole pile of plastic sheeting and duct tape was piled up on the floor awaiting installation, in case Saddam Hussein decided to gas New Paltz.

    There were all the times George W. Bush lied and got away with it, thanks in no small part to a co-opted, timid, post-9/11 “news” media. There was the time Dick Cheney refused to give his official papers to the National Archives because, he argued, the vice president’s office was not part of the executive branch. There was also the time he shot a guy in the face, and the guy wound up apologizing to him. The time when Barack Obama blew off Abu Ghraib and the horror of CIA black sites with a blithe, “We tortured some folks.” The time when Donald Trump was actually president for four years. The time when President Biden (!) had his domestic agenda sabotaged by fellow Democrats.

    The time… God save us all, the time…

    In the very first article I wrote for Truthout 20 years ago, I concluded with the following paragraph: “It is one thing to coddle and court a corrupt energy company for political and financial gain. It is quite another to coddle and court a murderous terrorist-supporting regime, hindering anti-terrorism investigations in the process, for the purpose of exploiting valuable natural resources. The former cost a number of people their retirement funds. The latter has cost thousands of people their lives. One is criminal. The other is abominable. George W. Bush is deeply implicated in both. There will be hell to pay.”

    That’s the thing, though: There wasn’t, hasn’t been, and probably never will be any hell paid whatsoever. If you told me 20 years ago that things would be worse today, I’d have found it hard to believe. Yet here we stand, mired in a lethal global pandemic with no end in sight. Mothership capitalism, always bad, is worse. Because of this, the climate is demonstrably worse and now poses an existential threat. The practice of politics is also worse, and the money in politics is worse by an order of magnitude. Gun violence is worse. The Republican Party’s hard right turn toward overt fascism is worse. The Democrats’ ossified leadership and its talent for dropping bombs on its own boats is worse, though the newly muscular Congressional Progressive Caucus may have words about that ere long.

    I got into this to try and make things better. I stuck with Truthout because we are a union shop devoted to that same cause, and because we are beholden to none but our reader-donors and to ourselves. No hedge fund scumbag is going to wake up tomorrow and decide to sell Truthout for parts.

    You cannot imagine what that means for a writer of politics in such an untethered time: I am able, because of the freedom provided by our generous readership, to be entirely myself in every word. After 20 years, I can say with joy in my heart that I never, not once, sold out my principles or beliefs in print to mollify a pissy stockholder or a nervous advertiser. None of us here have. Not once, not ever.

    Enough for now. If I could make any wish, it would be to get another 20 years to do this, if only for the chance to sit here two decades hence and talk about all the good shit that went down after we cured COVID, kept Trump out of office, vanquished fascism, found a way to turn CO2 and methane into marijuana fertilizer, and shot all that sea-bound plastic into space.

    Likely as not, though, I’ll be back here in 20 years talking about the day we lost Boston and New York to the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe not. That’s the thing about tomorrow: It’s only a rumor. The rest is up to us.

    Happy New Year, all. Thanks from my heart for the 20, and God help us, here’s to 20 more. Stout hearts.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Air Wars Killed Thousands of Civilians, Including Children, NY Times Reports

    A relative weeping over the casket of a child killed by U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan

    Thousands of previously hidden Pentagon documents show that the U.S. air wars in the Middle East have been marked by “deeply flawed intelligence” and have killed thousands of civilians, many of them children, according to a shocking new report in The New York Times Saturday afternoon.

    The 5-year Times investigation received more than 1,300 reports examining airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from September 2014 to January 2018, more than 5,400 pages in all. None of these records show any findings of wrongdoing on the actions of the U.S. military.

    The Times reporting confirms many of the previous reports by whistleblowers Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and others. On July 27, 2021, whistleblower Hale was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison for exposing the true civilian toll of the U.S. drone program. “I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life,” Hale said at his sentencing.

    From the Times report:

    The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

    The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

    The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”

    Dr. Assal Rad, Senior Research Fellow at the National Iranian American Council reacted via Twitter:

    “Daniel Hale, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning have all been jailed for trying to reveal the same thing. We’ve known US airstrikes have been killing civilians all this time, but the war crimes go on bc we jail the whistleblowers instead of the war criminals.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • No justice for Julian Assange, but plenty of cruelty

    Cruelty has caught fire in Australian politics; cowardice has become the currency affecting exchange with Washington and London, argues Stuart Rees.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Let’s Turn Rising Generations Into War Resisters Rather Than Veterans

    Anti-war activists march from the White House to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on January 4, 2020.

    As a veteran who turned into an antiwar activist after deploying twice to Afghanistan, I’ve been railing against the toxicity of Veterans Day and calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan every year for the last decade.

    This year, following the official end to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, there is a new kind of pressure because I fear most people in the U.S. will soon stop talking about Afghanistan — the country I think about nearly every day — entirely.

    I know it’s tempting. The war is technically over. We saw it “end” nearly three months ago. But in reality, the war spills on in insidious ways that are harder to see and harder to resist: official and unofficial special forces operations, drone strikes and surveillance, and the training and maintenance of proxy forces.

    It makes sense that, with the United States’ official withdrawal from Afghanistan, many people in the U.S. don’t want to think about it anymore. I get it — I also hate thinking about it. Most good people are disgusted by what the U.S. has done there for the last 20 years — to say nothing of the U.S. meddling in Afghan affairs throughout the ‘80s and beyond that helped give rise to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

    I loathe waking up in the middle of the night with thoughts of the violence that the U.S. wreaked in Afghanistan swirling like rotor wash in my mind. However, I have resigned myself to the fact that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is part of me. It’s part of all of us. To forget what our politicians, military leaders, big corporations, soldiers and all of our tax dollars did in that far off land for 20 years feels morally wrong. To forget will only allow it to happen again. We can’t just move on.

    My regular thoughts of Afghanistan are bookended by the planes hitting the Twin Towers in 2001; and then the images of young Afghans civilians clinging to, and then falling off, the landing gear of one of the last military transport planes to flee Bagram Air Base in Kabul in disgrace on August 16, 2021.

    In between those 20 shameful years, 775,000 U.S. service members would be deployed to the country. Over 2,400 of them would be killed. More than 20,000 would come home injured. A trillion dollars would be spent. Around 66,000 Afghan soldiers would be killed, and untold numbers of civilians would lose their lives.

    An estimated 3.6 million Afghans have fled their homes because of the U.S. occupation. That’s the rough equivalent of the entire populations of Montana and Arkansas being forced to flee their homes (often after a loved one was killed) to try and find new ones in a space the size of Texas — only with far fewer resources than Americans would have access to, which is a low bar. We can’t just move on.

    Mainstream outlets have already dropped most of their coverage of Afghanistan since the shameful exit in August. This is no surprise given that those outlets rarely covered the war when it was officially a war. They certainly won’t be steadily covering future air and drone strikes, or unofficial secret military operations carried out by U.S. special forces, if the past is prologue.

    And they hardly cover the acts of war that are being carried out all around the world by the U.S. military at this very moment. Afghanistan is still part of the U.S.-led forever wars. U.S. taxpayer-funded death and destruction will be perpetuated by American soldiers and drone operators in Afghanistan for years to come. We can’t just move on.

    So how do we keep reminding ourselves and the war makers that the U.S. military wasted countless lives and enormous amounts of money in Afghanistan? How do we stay disgusted by the violence of war?

    The best way is to make sure that young people know the story of Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to know that the U.S. is not interested in spreading freedom and democracy around the globe. This is the line that is fed to students across the country who are being targeted by any one of the 10,000 recruiters that currently stalk high school hallways across the U.S.

    One might also look to the 23 million Afghans threatened with starvation after a 20-year U.S. occupation — and now the suffocating U.S.-backed sanctions — to learn more about the “freedom” and “greatness” the U.S. brings.

    Then there are the 2.2 million refugees fleeing Afghanistan. I’m sure they can tell long stories about the condition the U.S. left Afghanistan in. There is nothing noble about fighting the U.S.’s wars. It is an immoral act. The evidence is in. It’s been in.

    Make sure your kids, your neighbors’ kids, and beyond develop critical thinking to counteract the propaganda spewed by recruiters. Make sure they don’t glamourize war in video games and movies. Find antiwar veterans to speak in their schools. There are organizations such as Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War that would love to help you with this. Volunteer to speak about the horrors of U.S. imperialism in high schools yourself. Protest when U.S. war history is heroicized in school or at sporting events. Fight for free education and health care so there’s less incentive to sign up for the military, particularly in marginalized communities, where Black and Brown youth are disproportionately targeted for recruitment. Make sure your kids are actively anti-racist, because a country can’t fight a war without racism.

    The U.S. government knew we let our guard down after 9/11 and hell followed. We can’t ever let our guard down again. No amount of moralizing or drum–beating can ever inspire people like me to fight a war for U.S. war-makers again.

    The trillion dollars spent in Afghanistan could have put us well on our way toward building sustainable, green infrastructure in the U.S.

    A trillion dollars could have provided a home to every homeless person in the U.S.

    A trillion dollars not spent on war could have saved millions of lives over the last 20 years.

    There are so many things we can do with our resources and our lives when war isn’t an option. Knowing this, after watching what happened in Afghanistan over the past 20 years makes it impossible to move on.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Release Julian Assange

    Supporters of Julian Assange in Sydney rallied outside the British Consulate. Michael Hatrick reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Biden and Other Democrats Helped Colin Powell Spread George W. Bush’s Iraq Lies

    Secretary of State Colin Powell speaks to the media outside the Security Council Chambers at United Nations headquarters on February 14, 2003, in New York City.

    While the death of former Secretary of State and retired Gen. Colin Powell has elicited praise-filled eulogies in the mainstream media and officials in Washington, many Americans still carry bitter feelings over Powell’s support for the illegal, unnecessary and predictably disastrous war in Iraq. In particular, critics cite his February 2003 speech before the United Nations Security Council in which he put forward a litany of demonstrably false statements in making the case that Iraq had compiled a dangerous arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction” and was actively supporting the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

    In light of the negative reaction from the arms control community and other knowledgeable sources, as well as many of the United States’ European allies and others, Powell’s speech would not have had anything close to the war-justifying impact it did were it not for efforts by prominent Democrats — including then-Sen. Joe Biden — to defend him.

    Virtually all of the accusations that Powell put forward in his nationally televised speech were based upon the word of anonymous sources. His interpretation of the fuzzy photos he displayed were similarly unconvincing. Despite years of spy satellites and aerial surveillance combing that largely-desert country, no evidence of ongoing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons activity had been spotted, nor were any of the proscribed missiles and other weapons systems. In addition, United Nations inspectors, who had been given unfettered access to suspect sites throughout Iraq since late the previous year, had visited suspect sites and had found nothing. So while his speech was eloquent, Powell fell far short of proving that Iraq had anything that could seriously threaten the security of its neighbors, much less the United States.

    Powell’s remarks were widely dismissed in the international community. The Security Council rejected his calls to authorize an invasion of that oil-rich country. Hans Blix, executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC), categorically rejected many of Powell’s claims. For example, the respected Swedish diplomat insisted that there was absolutely no evidence to back Powell’s claims of mobile biological weapons laboratories, of Iraq trying to foil inspectors by moving equipment before his teams arrived, or that his organization has been infiltrated by Iraqi spies, later noting how UNMOVIC had not “found evidence of the continuation or resumption of proscribed items.”

    The weakest part of Powell’s presentation was his effort to link the decidedly secular Iraqi regime with the fundamentalist al-Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden had referred to Saddam Hussein as “an apostate, an infidel, and a traitor to Islam.” Reports cited by Powell attempting to link Hussein to affiliated groups like Ansar al-Islam came almost exclusively from anti-Hussein Iraqis in exile hoping that establishing such a link could encourage U.S. military action to oust the dictator. Indeed, Ansar al-Islam’s stated goal was to overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Baghdad and replace it with an Islamic state.

    The efforts to tie al-Qaeda figure Abu Musab Al Zarqawi to the Iraqi regime were also based largely on unattributed sources. Ansar al-Islam fighters and their al-Qaeda supporters had been seen only in autonomous Kurdish areas beyond Iraqi government control. (Indeed, Powell’s claim that there had been “decades” of contact between Hussein and al-Qaeda was particularly odd, given that the terrorist network was less than 10 years old at that point.) Furthermore, none of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi, none of al-Qaeda’s leaders have been Iraqi and none of the money trail has ever been traced to Iraq.

    Subsequent reports indicate that Powell himself didn’t even believe what he was saying, but saw himself obliged as a “good soldier” to obey the commands of his commander-in-chief.

    Despite the lack of compelling evidence and the ridicule the claims made in the speech received from knowledgeable observers, leading Democrats rushed in to defend Powell in the face of his transparently false claims.

    For example, Sen. Joe Biden who, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as the Democrats de facto foreign policy spokesperson, insisted that Powell’s testimony was “very powerful and I think irrefutable,” telling Powell, “I am proud to be associated with you.” The Washington Post highlighted Biden’s statement in an editorial praising Powell’s speech, which it titled as a nod to Biden’s statement, “Irrefutable.”

    Even though Iraq had already disarmed itself from its proscribed weapons and weapons systems and had eliminated its weapons programs years earlier, Nancy Pelosi was inspired by Powell’s speech to reiterate the lie that Iraq had not done so, saying, “The case for disarming Saddam Hussein is strong and well known, and Secretary Powell reiterated that case today.”

    Susan Rice, who held senior positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations (and is currently serving in the Biden administration), insisted that Powell “has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that,” a particularly ironic statement given the strong doubts among arms control community, including those within the U.S. government, such as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and within the CIA itself, which questioned claims about Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and delivery systems.

    Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton — both future Democratic presidential nominees and secretaries of state, along with then-Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt — insisted that Powell’s testimony was “compelling,” as did Sen. Maria Cantwell, who also stated that Powell had made a strong case that the isolated and disarmed country suffering under the toughest sanctions in world history was somehow a “serious threat to global stability.”

    Rep. Ed Markey, now a U.S. senator, insisted that Powell had made a case “as well as it can be made.” Sen. Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, claimed that Powell had made a “compelling, convincing, and chilling case.” Sen. John Edwards, the subsequent Democratic vice-presidential nominee, claimed that, “Powell made a powerful case before the United Nations,” and that Saddam Hussein constituted a “grave threat.”

    Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Powell’s testimony convinced her that “I don’t know that there’s any other solution” than war. Similarly, Kerry used Powell’s speech to push the United Nations to grant the United States the authority to invade Iraq, saying, “With such strong evidence in front of them, it is now incumbent on the U.N. to respect its own mandates.” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid also insisted that Powell had made a convincing case for war, though he later admitted that he was “sucked in by General Powell,” and regretted believing him over more credible sources.

    It is unclear as to why so many leading Democrats would have rushed to defend what virtually all knowledgeable observers saw as a transparently weak case for war. One possible reason is that they figured that if the United States invaded Iraq only to find there were no biological or chemical weapons, no nuclear program, no offensive weapons systems and no ties to al-Qaeda, they could simply blame the Bush administration or “faulty intelligence” and not suffer the political consequences. Indeed, the Democrats who praised Powell’s speech were almost all easily reelected to Congress, even after they acknowledged that Powell’s statements were untrue, while Kerry, Clinton and Biden all later received the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

    To this day, leading Democrats continue to side with Republicans on the Israeli and Moroccan occupations, increased military spending, support for dictatorial regimes, and attacks on the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, as well as other controversial foreign policy positions rationalized through demonstrably false statements. As long as Democrats can defend Republican lies without suffering any consequences from their constituents, they have little incentive to do otherwise.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Colin Powell, Who Helped George W. Bush Lie Nation Into Iraq War, Dies

    Colin Powell looks at a flag-draped coffin

    Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State who helped President George W. Bush under whom he served to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the United Nations and the American people, has died at the age of 84.

    According to the New York Times, “He died of complications from Covid-19, his family said in a statement. He was fully vaccinated and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his family said.”

    In 2003, Powell, a retired four-star U.S. Army General who also served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs before becoming the nation’s top diplomat under Bush, made the now infamous presentation to the U.N. Security Council in which he claimed that the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein was hiding a secret chemical weapons program from the international community and supporting international terrorists following the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

    Powell later claimed that the testimony he gave in 2003 was a “great intelligence failure,” but critics — including his chief of staff at the time, Lawrence Wilkerson — said the speech was significant both for its dishonesty and that Powell’s “gravitas” was a crucial “part of the two-year-long effort by the Bush administration to get Americans on the war wagon.”

    “That effort,” Wilkerson wrote in 2018, “led to a war of choice with Iraq — one that resulted in catastrophic losses for the region and the United States-led coalition, and that destabilized the entire Middle East.”

    In a 2018 column detailing what the former Secretary of State knew and was saying privately at the same time he was selling the Iraq invasion to the U.S. public, The Intercept’s John Schwarz wrote that “Powell’s loyalty to Bush extended to being willing to deceive the world: the United Nations, Americans, and the coalition troops about to be sent to kill and die in Iraq. He’s never been held accountable for his actions, and it’s extremely unlikely he ever will be.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Iraq War Veteran Confronts George W. Bush

    Nearly 20 years ago, in July 2002, I sat behind then-President George W. Bush as he gave a speech to my Army unit, the 10th Mountain Division. Less than a year later I was in Iraq, on Bush’s orders, as part of the US invasion.

    Tonight as Bush spoke at a so-called “Distinguished Speaker Series” event in Beverly Hills–with the cheapest tickets starting at over $500–I again watched from the crowd, before confronting the event. Primarily, I demanded he apologize for the 1 million or more dead, who are only dead because of his lies and his crimes.

    When George W. Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, he did so with full knowledge that Iraq possessed none of the Weapons of Mass Destruction he told the country he knew existed.

    The post Iraq War Veteran Confronts George W. Bush appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • White House’s release of declassified 9/11 documents may implicate Saudi royal family

    US president Joe Biden recently announced that he will sign an executive order to facilitate the release of classified documents about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The move is the result of a long-running campaign by victims’ families to determine whether the government of Saudi Arabia played a hand in the atrocities.

    Throughout the 20 years since the attacks, it appears that successive US administrations and the US intelligence community alike have gone out of their way to suppress evidence that might implicate one of Washington’s staunchest allies. This refusal to release the documents speaks volumes about the US’s fawning treatment of one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies. It also raises big questions about the US’s flagrant double standards in the Middle East during its so-called ‘War on Terror’.

    Documents finally redacted after three presidents in a row refuse

    On 3 September, Biden ordered the US Justice Department to release documents produced as part of a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) probe into the 9/11 attacks. Groups representing families of 9/11 victims have lobbied hard for years for their release. In response, Biden committed to declassifying the documents during his 2020 presidential campaign.

    As the anniversary of the attacks approached, these groups released a statement urging Biden not to attend memorial events unless his administration declassified the documents. The administrations of former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all refused to do so.

    Saudi involvement?

    Many victims’ families have been particularly motivated by a suspicion that the government of Saudi Arabia might have been involved in planning the attacks. On 3 September, Reuters reported:

    Family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks asked a U.S. government watchdog on Thursday to investigate their suspicions that the FBI lied about or destroyed evidence linking Saudi Arabia to the hijackers.

    These suspicions have been heightened by the fact that Saudi Arabia is, after Israel, the US’s second staunchest ally in the Middle East. Throughout the presidencies of Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, Washington all entered into profitable arms deals with the country’s royal family. Successive US administrations, therefore, have had an incentive to suppress information that could reveal Saudi involvement in 9/11. Politico reported in April 2017 that the 9/11 Commission’s “own members protested drastic, last-minute edits that seemed to absolve the Saudi government of any responsibility”.

    Bogus justification for meddling in the Middle East

    But the reality is that Washington’s deceitfulness runs even deeper. Because the 9/11 attacks were used as a ruse to provide bogus justification for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to topple the Taliban and the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein respectively. Yet there is evidently significantly less reason to believe that either of these actors had any connection to 9/11 when compared with Saudi Arabia.

    In spite of this rather obvious reality, there were no calls in the aftermath of 9/11 to take any kind of action whatsoever against Saudi Arabia, let alone to invade it and replace its government. Yet despite much thinner evidence linking them to the attacks, the Bush administration instead launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. What could explain this stunning paradox?

    Revealing double standards

    The answer lies in examining the criteria on which the US bases its treatment of other countries. As The Canary has extensively argued, US administrations of both parties do not base their treatment of other countries on their publicly-stated criteria of human rights and democracy. (Indeed, if the true motivation behind Washington’s foreign policy was to spread democracy, as George W. Bush claimed, then Saudi Arabia would probably top the list of countries to invade given its status as one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies.) Rather, Washington bases its stance towards other nations according to how obedient they are to US geo-strategic and economic interests.

    When it comes to Saudi Arabia, the evidence speaks for itself. In the final year of World War II, the US entered into a deal with the Saudi royal family to ensure continued privileged access to the country’s ample oil reserves. Ever since, the Saudi royals have been rewarded for this with the most fawning treatment imaginable. As then-US president Donald Trump put it in a November 2018 statement:

    The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.

    Opening up the region to Western oil companies in Afghanistan…

    When it comes to Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, the Taliban and the government of Saddam Hussein had fallen afoul of the US foreign policy establishment due to their growing unwillingness to serve US interests. This was particularly so in terms of providing favorable access to their countries’ oil reserves. And that resulted in a desperate scramble by the Bush administration to somehow tie them to 9/11.

    In the case of Afghanistan, Washington attempted to strike a deal with the Taliban in the late-1990s to allow the US-based petroleum giant Unocal to build an oil pipeline through the country to the Caspian Sea. When it became clear that the Taliban was unlikely to accommodate this process, Unocal withdrew from negotiations and the plans were shelved. When 9/11 came along, it gave the Bush administration its perfect ruse to topple the Taliban in order to install a more friendly government that would allow the building of the pipeline. (Though there were considerable delays, probably owing to the chaos caused by the US invasion, construction of the pipeline finally began in February 2018. The New York Times reported at the time: “The United States has supported pipelines to bypass Russia and alleviate former Soviet states’ economic dependence on it.”)

    Since this motivation would have surely provoked widespread scorn, Washington weaponized 9/11 by issuing allegations that the Taliban were ‘harboring terrorists’ and had links to al-Qaeda to whip up public and congressional support for invasion. On both counts, these allegations were dubious. A 2011 report by the Center on International Cooperation describes the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban as “complicated and often tense”, adding that they “knew little about each other”. Nonetheless, the ploy seemingly paid off: only one congress member voted against the invasion while public opinion polls at the time put support for it at around 80%.

    …and Iraq

    A similar, and even more duplicitous, dynamic played out with respect to Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been a close US ally, and even received US military funding in the 1980s. But throughout the 1990s, the relationship began to sour over his invasion of Kuwait. In the early 2000s, Hussein’s status as a US enemy was cemented when he fully nationalised Iraq’s oil industry and closed off access to Western petroleum companies. Unfortunately for the Bush administration, however, his connection to 9/11 was simply nonexistent – even Bush himself said after the invasion “I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein”.

    So his administration concocted a narrative, which the media dutifully repeated, that would nonetheless play on public fears that had been ignited by the attacks. It fabricated bogus claims that Hussein’s government had been developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to provide a ruse for invading the country. (To demonstrate the absurdity of denouncing Iraq for purportedly having ‘weapons of mass’ destruction, consider that the only nuclear armed state in the entire region is the US’s number one ally, Israel.) As was the case with Afghanistan, the true purpose of the invasion was to create a more favorable environment for US oil companies. Even members of the US’s own military have admitted this reality. Former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq gen. John Abizaid said in 2007: “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that”.

    Some of the Bush administration’s leading figures, meanwhile, had extensive ties to the very corporations that ultimately benefited from the invasion, such as the former CEO of oil giant Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who served as Bush’s vice president. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were highly profitable for such US private contractors, which received billions in contracts for both wars. Halliburton itself ultimately became the largest single US government contractor in Iraq and by 2013 had received over $39bn in contracts.

    The final piece of evidence could be coming soon

    Clearly, the US foreign policy and intelligence establishment have a vested interest in suppressing evidence of potential Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. After all, this would make even further nonsense of the entire edifice of bogus justification that the Bush administration built in order to manufacture consent for invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Though his administration is hardly a decisive break from the bipartisan consensus for endless war, Biden’s decision to declassify the documents should nonetheless be welcomed. It might end up providing the final piece of evidence needed to determine whether one of the US’s own allies in the Middle East played a hand in the worst domestic terrorist atrocity in US history.

    Featured image via Flickr – Stacy Herbert and Wikimedia Commons – Michael Foran

    By Peter Bolton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Challenges for the left: Reflections on the formation of the Socialist Alliance

    On the 20-year anniversary of the formation of the Socialist Alliance, Peter Boyle reflects on its early days and the left’s ongoing challenge to link up with broader forces in a struggle for system change.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Biden Tried to Absolve Himself for Afghanistan Aftermath — But He Voted for War

    President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Afghanistan from the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 8, 2021.

    Former president George W. Bush recently took a break from painting portraits of the wounded soldiers he fed into the maw of dual wars 20 years ago to complain about the end of one of those wars. In a rare interview, given to German news agency Deutsche Welle (DW), Bush had himself a nice little sad about the fact that the Biden administration was finally shutting down U.S. military involvement in the two-decade bottomless pit that was, and will ever be, his Afghanistan conflict.

    Calling the withdrawal a “mistake,” Bush said, “I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad and sad.” Of course, the results of U.S. intervention (and its aftermath) in Afghanistan are indeed bad and sad. After 20 years of war, thousands of dead, wounded and traumatized U.S. servicemembers and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed, severely injured or displaced, absolutely nothing of substance was accomplished beyond lining the pockets of the warmaking industry. Despite U.S. propaganda to the contrary, the women and girls who suffered unspeakable abuse at the hands of the Taliban before the war are threatened with the same fate now, because U.S. intervention was never actually about human rights — and imperial war and militarism aren’t solutions to human rights abuses in any event.

    After the interview, DW reached out to Kabul-based journalist Ali Latifi for his thoughts on Bush’s comments. “I think it’s very interesting that he’s suddenly, you know, concerned about women and children,” said Latifi. “His war made a lot of widows and made a lot of children orphans.”

    A number of comparisons have been made to the U.S.’s scrambling retreat from Vietnam 46 years ago. While sailors are not pushing perfectly good helicopters off the flight decks of Navy ships to make room for fleeing U.S. personnel, the onrushing chaos in Afghanistan cannot be denied. A major effort is underway to evacuate Afghan translators and others who aided the U.S. war effort. There is no good way to end an unwinnable war. “A hundred percent we lost the war,” special operations forces Marine Raider Jason Lilley told Reuters. It was time to go.

    But are we going? Mr. Bush can rest easy on that score, because while virtually all U.S. military forces have been withdrawn, the private military contractors (read: mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan in force. In fact, those companies are hiring at an enormously escalated rate, as they rush more private soldiers into the country to fill the gaps left by the U.S. military.

    “Contractors are a force both the U.S. and Afghan governments have become reliant on, and contracts in the country are big business for the U.S.,” reported New York Magazine back in May, when the withdrawal was in its early stages. “Since 2002, the Pentagon has spent $107.9 billion on contracted services in Afghanistan, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis. The Department of Defense currently employs more than 16,000 contractors in Afghanistan, of whom 6,147 are U.S. citizens — more than double the remaining U.S. troops.”

    If the war is over, and ultimately lost, why do these contractors remain? For that, you’ll have to ask the mining industry, not that the leaders of that industry tend to do much talking. They’re too busy, see. Afghanistan holds upwards of 1,400 mineral fields containing lucrative materials like barite, chromite, coal, copper, gold, iron ore and lead. The country has huge reserves of natural gas, as well as petroleum. The gemstone mines turn out emeralds, rubies, red garnet and lapis lazuli.

    Mining interests from all over the world had their eye on Afghanistan’s natural riches long before the war began, and that interest has never waned. Back in 2018, Donald Trump claimed the U.S. was “getting very close” to achieving a safer strategic situation there so those resources could be exploited. “In a partial survey conducted by the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, the country’s mineral wealth is estimated at $3 trillion,” reported CNBC at the time, “more than enough to compensate for the war’s cost.”

    There was always more to that war than September 11 and terrorism, and those resources likely offer part of the reason why the U.S. spent thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and more than 7,300 long days trying to make that country safe for plunder.

    Any student of history could have told them: Empires don’t tend to fare well in Afghanistan. U.S. assistance during the Soviet war there only strengthened that reality.

    Hearing George W. Bush pule about our withdrawal from Afghanistan is galling, as he and his administration — in combination with almost all the Democrats and Republicans in Congress at the time — own majority stock in blame for this debacle. Both Presidents Obama and Trump stayed in that war for a combined 12 years. Nothing got better, because neither wanted to be the White House left standing without a chair when the music stopped. They did not want defeat and retreat on their records, and so it finally fell to President Biden to say enough, thanks in part to many years of pressure from grassroots antiwar movements.

    Yet Biden is not without culpability in all this. In a CBS interview in February of 2020, the topic of withdrawal from Afghanistan was raised by host Margaret Brennan, who asked if Biden would bear responsibility if the U.S. withdrew and the nation collapsed into chaos. “Do I bear responsibility?” Biden replied. “Zero responsibility.”

    A nasty echo of Trump in those words, and far from the truth besides. In September of 2001, then-Senator Biden voted with 97 other senators to give Bush the authority to wage war in Afghanistan. That vote also approved what has become known as the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), one of the most broad, violent and insidious pieces of legislation ever to pass through Congress. That AUMF is why the U.S. was legally able to remain in Afghanistan for 20 years, and served as a blueprint for the 2002 AUMF, which gave us the Iraq War. Biden voted for that, as well.

    If you voted for it, Mr. President, you’re responsible for it, too. It’s a big ol’ crap sandwich, and everyone gets to take a bite.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Should Dismantle US Bases in Iraq and Bring the Troops Home

    Soldiers board a CH-47 Chinook helicopter as they depart from al-Qaim base, Iraq, on March 9, 2020.

    At Bagram Air Base, Afghan scrap merchants are already picking through the graveyard of U.S. military equipment that was until recently the headquarters of America’s 20-year occupation of their country. Afghan officials say the last U.S. forces slipped away from Bagram in the dead of night, without notice or coordination.

    Taliban fighters are rapidly expanding their control over hundreds of districts, usually through negotiations between local elders, but also by force when troops loyal to the Kabul government refuse to give up their outposts and weapons.

    A few weeks ago, the Taliban controlled a quarter of the country. Now, it’s a third. They are taking control of border posts and large swaths of territory in the north of the country. These include areas that were once strongholds of the Northern Alliance, a militia that prevented the Taliban from unifying the country under their rule in the late 1990s.

    People of good will all over the world hope for a peaceful future for the people of Afghanistan, but the only legitimate role the U.S. can play there now is to pay reparations, in whatever form, for the damage it has done and the pain and death it has caused. Speculation in the U.S. political class and corporate media about how the U.S. can keep bombing and killing Afghans from “over the horizon” should cease. The U.S. and its corrupt puppet government lost this war. Now it’s up to the Afghans to forge their future.

    So what about America’s other endless crime scene, Iraq? The U.S. corporate media only mentions Iraq when our leaders suddenly decide that the 150,000-plus bombs and missiles they have dropped on Iraq and Syria since 2001 were not enough, and dropping a few more on Iranian allies there will appease some hawks in Washington without starting a full-scale war with Iran.

    But for 40 million Iraqis, as for 40 million Afghans, America’s battlefield is their country, not just an occasional news story. They are living their entire lives under the enduring impacts of the neocons’ war of mass destruction.

    Young Iraqis took to the streets in 2019 to protest 16 years of corrupt government by the former exiles to whom the United States handed over their country and its oil revenues. The 2019 protests were directed at the Iraqi government’s corruption and failure to provide jobs and basic services to its people, but also at the underlying, self-serving foreign influences of the U.S. and Iran over every Iraqi government since the 2003 invasion.

    A new government was formed in May 2020, headed by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, previously the head of Iraq’s Intelligence Service and, before that, a journalist and editor for the U.S.-based Al-Monitor Arab news website. Despite his Western background, al-Kadhimi has initiated investigations into the embezzlement of $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues by officials of previous governments, who were mostly former Western-based exiles like himself. And he’s walking a fine line to try to save his country, after all it has been through, from becoming the front line in a new U.S. war on Iran.

    Recent U.S. airstrikes have targeted Iraqi security forces called Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which were formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State (IS), the twisted religious force spawned by the U.S. decision, only 10 years after 9/11, to unleash and arm al-Qaida in a Western proxy war against Syria.

    The PMFs now comprise about 130,000 troops in 40 or more different units. Most were recruited by pro-Iranian Iraqi political parties and groups, but they are an integral part of Iraq’s armed forces and are credited with playing a critical role in the war against IS.

    Western media represent the PMFs as militias that Iran can turn on and off as a weapon against the United States, but these units have their own interests and decision-making structures. When Iran has tried to calm tensions with the United States, it has not always been able to control the PMFs. General Haider al-Afghani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer in charge of coordinating with the PMF, recently requested a transfer out of Iraq, complaining that the PMFs are paying no attention to him.

    Ever since the U.S. assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani and PMF commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in January 2020, the PMFs have been determined to force the last remaining U.S. occupation forces out of Iraq. After the assassination, the Iraqi National Assembly passed a resolution calling for U.S. forces to leave Iraq. Following U.S. airstrikes against PMF units in February, Iraq and the United States agreed in early April that U.S. combat troops would leave soon.

    But no date has been set, no detailed agreement has been signed and many Iraqis do not believe U.S. forces will leave, nor do they trust the Kadhimi government to ensure their departure. As time has gone by without a formal agreement, some PMF forces have resisted calls for calm from their own government and Iran, and stepped up their attacks against U.S. forces.

    At the same time, the Vienna talks over the JCPOA nuclear agreement have raised fears among PMF commanders that Iran may sacrifice them as a bargaining chip in order to negotiate a nuclear agreement with the United States.

    In the interest of survival, PMF commanders have become more independent of Iran, and have cultivated a closer relationship with Prime Minister Kadhimi. This was evidenced in Kadhimi’s attendance at a huge military parade in June 2021 to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the PMF’s founding.

    The very next day, the U.S. bombed PMF forces in Iraq and Syria, drawing public condemnation from Kadhimi and his cabinet as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. After conducting retaliatory strikes, the PMF declared a new ceasefire on June 29, apparently to give Kadhimi more time to finalize a withdrawal agreement. But six days later, some of them resumed rocket and drone attacks on U.S. targets.

    Whereas Donald Trump only ordered retaliatory strikes when rocket attacks in Iraq killed Americans, a senior U.S. official has revealed that President Biden has lowered the bar, threatening to respond with airstrikes even when Iraqi militia attacks don’t cause U.S. casualties.

    But U.S. airstrikes have only led to rising tensions and further escalations by Iraqi militia forces. If U.S. forces respond with more or heavier airstrikes, the PMF and Iran’s allies throughout the region are likely to respond with more widespread attacks on U.S. bases. The further this escalates and the longer it takes to negotiate a genuine withdrawal agreement, the more pressure Kadhimi will get from the PMF, and other sectors of Iraqi society, to show U.S. forces the door.

    The official rationale for the U.S. presence, as well as that of NATO training forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, is that the Islamic State is still active. A suicide bomber killed 32 people in Baghdad in January, and IS still has a strong appeal to oppressed young people across the region and the Muslim world. The failure, corruption and repression of successive post-2003 governments in Iraq have provided fertile soil.

    But the U.S. clearly has another reason for keeping forces in Iraq — as a forward base in its simmering war on Iran. That is exactly what Kadhimi is trying to avoid by replacing U.S. forces with the Danish-led NATO training mission in Iraqi Kurdistan. This mission is being expanded from 500 to at least 4,000 troops, made up of Danish, British and Turkish personnel.

    If Biden had quickly rejoined the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran on taking office, tensions would be lower by now, and the U.S. troops still in Iraq might well be home already. Instead, Biden obliviously swallowed the poison pill of Trump’s Iran policy by using “maximum pressure” as a form of “leverage,” escalating an endless game of chicken the United States cannot win — a tactic that Barack Obama began to wind down six years ago by signing the JCPOA.

    The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the JCPOA are interconnected, in that both are essential parts of a policy to improve U.S.-Iranian relations and end America’s antagonistic and destabilizing interventionist role in the Middle East. The third element for a more stable and peaceful region is the diplomatic engagement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, in which Kadhimi’s Iraq is playing a critical role as the principal mediator.

    The fate of the Iran nuclear deal is still uncertain. The sixth round of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna ended on June 20, and no date has yet been set for a seventh round. Biden’s commitment to rejoining the agreement seems shakier than ever, and President-elect Ebrahim Raisi of Iran has declared he will not let the Americans keep drawing out the negotiations.

    In an interview on June 25, Secretary of State Tony Blinken upped the ante by threatening to pull out of the talks altogether. He said that if Iran continues to spin more sophisticated centrifuges at higher and higher levels, it will become very difficult for the U.S. to return to the original deal. Asked whether or when the United States might walk away from negotiations, he said, “I can’t put a date on it, [but] it’s getting closer.”

    What should really be “getting closer” is the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Iraq. While Afghanistan is portrayed as the “longest war” the United States has fought, the U.S. military has been bombing Iraq for 26 of the last 30 years. The fact that the U.S. military is still conducting “defensive airstrikes” 18 years after the 2003 invasion and nearly 10 years since the official end of the war proves just how ineffective and disastrous this U.S. military intervention has been.

    Biden certainly seems to have learned the lesson in Afghanistan that the U.S. can neither bomb its way to peace nor install U.S. puppet governments at will. When pilloried by the press about the Taliban gaining control as U.S. troops withdraw, the president answered:

    For those who have argued that we should stay just six more months or just one more year, I ask them to consider the lessons of recent history. … Nearly 20 years of experience has shown us, and the current security situation only confirms, that “just one more year” of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely. It’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.

    The same lessons of history apply to Iraq. The U.S. has already inflicted so much death and misery on the Iraqi people, destroyed so many of its beautiful cities and unleashed so much sectarian violence and Islamist fanaticism. As with the shuttering of the massive Bagram base in Afghanistan, Biden should dismantle the remaining imperial bases in Iraq and bring the troops home.

    The Iraqi people have the same right to decide their own future as the people of Afghanistan, and all the countries of the Middle East have the right and the responsibility to live in peace, without the threat of American bombs and missiles always hanging over their heads, and their children’s.

    Let’s hope Biden has learned another history lesson: that the United States should stop invading and attacking other countries.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.