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Category: Iraq

  • Voter Turnout in Iraq Hits All-Time Low as Faith in Democratic Process Falters

    Voter Turnout in Iraq Hits All-Time Low as Faith in Democratic Process Falters

    Voter turnout at the fifth parliamentary election in Iraq hit an all-time low, with many Iraqis refusing to vote as widespread faith in the democratic process and politics falters. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been a vocal opponent of foreign invasion, won the most seats. He has also been accused of kidnapping and killing his critics. “The election has more to do with making this regime and this system look good than responding to the demands of the people,” says Nabil Salih, Iraqi journalist and photographer, who also discusses protests that sped up the election and conditions in Iraq’s hospitals. His latest piece for Middle East Eye is “Iraq’s streets are littered with the memories of our dead.”

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It’s never the generals on trial for wartime atrocities. That needs to change.

    The trial of former soldier Dennis Hutchings is underway in Belfast. And once again, the accused is from the lower ranks. Not one of the powerful commanders who gave the orders is facing trial.

    The former Household Cavalry trooper faces a charge of attempted murder. His alleged victim was John Pat Cunningham. Cunningham was 27 and had learning difficulties. He was shot in the back after fleeing an army patrol in 1974. Hutchings has pleaded not guilty to the offence.

    Hutchings has won the support of many in the military community. This includes former Tory veterans minister Johnny Mercer, who has been with him in Ireland. A DUP politician even joined the pair for a photo opportunity. Carla Lockhart claimed on Twitter that Hutchings was a victim of politicised courts:

    Familiar pattern

    Hutchings served in the Household Cavalry as a non-commissioned officer. That means he was part of the workforce not the boss class of officers. In fact, barring a few exceptions, most of the soldiers accused of war crimes from Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan served in ‘the ranks’. And here there is a question about accountability.

    What the average soldier does on the ground reflects how they are trained and led. Yet the burden of legal cases always seems to fall on low-ranking personnel and never on the generals and politicians in charge. So what’s the alternative?

    The poor bloody infantry

    Derry writer and politician Eamonn McCann captured this sentiment in a head-to-head debate with ex-general and peer Richard Dannatt in 2019.

    Speaking on the Bloody Sunday massacre, McCann said:

    What we’re seeing [is] what Kipling called the “poor blood infantry”. Your rank-and-file soldiers, they have to carry the can. Somebody organised it, somebody gave the Paras to understand that it would be okay if you go in there and shoot innocent people. Where are they?

    And he went on:

    And I agree with the person who said [gestures to the audience] where are the IRA leaders? Why are the foot soldiers being dragged up all the time? Where are the bosses? The bosses are sitting pretty, and none more so than the bosses of the British Army, now made Lords and the rest of it. And none of them were ever held to account.

    Real justice

    That’s not to say low-ranking soldiers who carry out atrocities should get away scot-free. However, the fact that courts only seem to look at working class squaddies, who have little say over the broader scope of operations, is intolerable.

    The senior officers with the actual power who give the orders should also be in the dock.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Kenneth Allen

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Iron Dome: Don’t be deceived, US aid to Israel is not about saving lives

    Battles in the US Congress that erupted again this week, holding up an extra $1bn in military funding for Israel, underscored just how divorced from reality the conversation about US financial aid to Israel has become, even among many critics.

    For 48 hours last month, a small group of progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives succeeded in sabotaging a measure to pick up the bill for Israel to replenish its Iron Dome interception missiles. The Iron Dome system was developed by Israel, with generous financial backing from successive US administrations, in the wake of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Today, it ostensibly serves to protect Israel from short-range, largely improvised rockets fired intermittently out of Gaza.

    Supplies of the Iron Dome missiles, each of which cost at least $50,000, were depleted back in May, when Israel triggered widespread confrontations with Palestinians by intensifying its settlement of Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem’s Old City and violently raiding al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian militant groups fired large numbers of rockets out of Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel for the past 15 years. Iron Dome intercepted the rockets before they could land in Israel.

    The group of progressive Democrats, known popularly as the Squad, scotched an initial move by their congressional leadership to include the $1bn assistance to Israel in US budget legislation. But the money for Iron Dome was quickly reintroduced as a stand-alone bill that passed overwhelmingly, with 420 votes in favour and nine against. Two representatives, one of them the prominent Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,  voted “present” – counting effectively as an abstention.

    This week, the furore moved to the Senate when Rand Paul, a strong Republican critic of US foreign aid, refused to nod through the bill and thereby give it unanimous assent. It will now need to go through a more complicated legislative process.

    The latest funding for Iron Dome comes in addition to the $3.8bn Israel receives annually from the US in military aid, which has made Israel the biggest recipient, by far, of such largesse. Putting the new tranche of Iron Dome aid into perspective, it is twice what Washington contributes annually to Nato’s budget.

    The previous administration, under former President Donald Trump, turned US funding for Nato into a big domestic controversy, arguing that the US was shouldering too much of the burden. But there has been barely a peep about the massive military bill the US is footing for Iron Dome.

    Debate stifled

    The Squad’s main achievement in launching its brief blocking move was to force out into the open the fact that the US is paying for Israel’s stockpile of missiles. Like the House leadership, the Israel lobby had hoped the money could be transferred quietly, without attracting attention.

    What little debate did ensue related to whether Israel really needs US military assistance. A few commentators asked why Washington was kitting out one of the richer countries on the planet with missiles in the midst of a pandemic that has hit the US economy hard.

    But the lobby quickly stifled a far more important debate about whether the US should be encouraging Israel’s use of Iron Dome at all. Instead, US funding for the interception missile system was presented as being motivated solely by a desire to save lives.

    In attacking Paul’s decision to block the bill, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Congress, AIPAC, argued this week that his move would “cost innocent lives, make war more likely, and embolden Iran-backed terrorists”.

    It was precisely the claim that the Iron Dome is defensive that appeared to push Ocasio-Cortez, usually seen as one of the few US politicians openly critical of Israel, into a corner, leading to her abstention.

    Images from the House floor showed her tearful and being given a hug by another representative after the vote. She later attributed her distress in part to how Iron Dome funding had a polarising effect at home, noting that the House bill was a “reckless” move to “rip our communities apart”.

    That was an apparent reference to factional tensions within the Democratic Party between, on one side, many Jewish voters who back what they see as Israel’s right to defend itself and, on the other, many Black and Hispanic voters who think it is wrong for the US to financially support Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

    Some saw her indecision as evidence of her ambitions to run for the Senate, where positions critical of Israel would be more likely to damage her prospects of success.

    Expiring in silence

    In Israel, and in Jewish communities beyond, the conversation about US support for Iron Dome is even more detached from reality. The nine US representatives who voted against were roundly castigated for willing the deaths of Israelis by voting to deny them protection from rockets fired from Gaza. In predictable fashion, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called those who voted against “either ignorant or antisemitic”.

    But some liberals took the argument in a different, even more fanciful direction. They called the Squad “hypocrites” for voting against the $1bn funding, arguing that Iron Dome missiles not only save Israelis, but Palestinians too. One Haaretz commentator went so far as to claim that Palestinians were actually the main beneficiaries of the Iron Dome system, arguing: “The fact Israel has a defensive shield against rocket attacks makes a wide-scale military operation with thousands of – mainly Palestinian – casualties less likely.”

    Of course, there is the small question of whether Israel has indeed been “forced” into its attacks on Gaza. It is precisely its military superiority – paid for by the US – that has freed it to carry out those massive attacks, in which large numbers of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, are killed, rather than negotiate an end to its decades-long occupation.

    Just as in life, bullies resort to intimidation and violence because they feel no need to compromise. But even more to the point, Iron Dome is central to Israel’s efforts to keep Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, entirely subjugated and stripped of any power to resist.

    With Israel patrolling tiny Gaza’s land borders and coast, sealing off the enclave from the rest of the world, Palestinians have few options to protest their slow starvation – or to gain attention for their plight. Israeli snipers have fired on Palestinians staging unarmed, mass protests at the fence caging them in, killing and wounding thousands. The Israeli navy fires on or sinks Palestinian boats, including fishing boats, in Gaza’s waters if they stray more than a few kilometres from the shore.

    Iron Dome, far from being defensive, is another weapon in Israel’s armoury to keep Palestinians subdued, impoverished, corralled and silent. For those claiming to want peace in Israel-Palestine, the extra funding for Iron Dome just made that prospect even less likely. As long as Palestinians can be made to slowly expire in silence – their plight ignored by the rest of the world – Israel is free to seize and colonise yet more of what was supposed to become a future Palestinian state.

    Systems of domination

    But there is another reason why Ocasio-Cortez should have voted against the Iron Dome resupply, rather than tearfully abstaining – and that is for all our sakes, not just the sake of Palestinians.

    The US foots the bill for Iron Dome, just as it does for most of Israel’s other weapons development, for self-interested reasons: because it helps its own war industries, as Washington seeks to maintain its military dominance globally.

    With western populations less willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters for the sake of modern wars, which seem less obviously related to defence and more transparently about the control of key resources, the Pentagon has worked overtime to reframe the public debate.

    It is hard to disguise its global domination industries as anything but offensive in nature. This is where Israel has played a critical role. Not only has Israel helped to develop weapons systems like Iron Dome, but – despite being a nuclear-armed, belligerent, occupying state – it has leveraged its image as a vulnerable refuge for the long-persecuted Jewish people. It has been able to make more plausible the case that these domination systems really are defensive.

    In recent decades, Israel has developed and tested drone technology to surveil and assassinate Palestinians, which has proved invaluable in the US and UK’s long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel’s latest “swarm” technology – making drones even more lethal – may prove particularly attractive to the Pentagon.

    Israel has also been the ideal partner for the Pentagon in testing and refining the battlefield use of the new generation of F-35 fighter planes, the most expensivemilitary product in US history. Uniquely, Israel has been allowed to customise the jet, adapting its capabilities in new, unforeseen ways.

    Bowing to US hegemony

    The F-35’s ultimate role is to make sure major rival airforces, such as Russia’s and China’s, are elbowed out of the skies. And Israel has been at the forefront of developing and testing a variety of missile interception systems, such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which are intended to destroy incoming projectiles, from short-range rockets to long-range missiles.

    Last December, Israel announced it had successfully launched Iron Dome interception missiles for the first time from the sea. Reports noted that the US arms maker Raytheon and the US defence department were involved in the tests. That is because, behind the scenes, the US is not only paying for the development and testing of these systems; it is also guiding the uses to which they will be put. The Pentagon has bought two Iron Dome batteries, which, according to Israeli media, have been stationed in US military bases in the Gulf.

    The US has its own interception systems under development, and it is unclear which it will come to rely on most heavily. But what is evident is that Washington, Israel and their Gulf allies have Iran in their immediate sights. Any country that refuses to bow to US global hegemony could also be targeted.

    US interest in these missiles is not defensive. They are fundamental to its ability to neutralise the responses of rivals to either a US military attack, or more general moves by the US to dominate territory and control resources.

    Just as Palestinians have been besieged by Israel for 15 years, the US and Gulf states may hope one day to deal a knockout blow to Iran’s oil exports. Washington would be able to ignore current concerns that Tehran could retaliate by firing on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz or on hostile Middle Eastern capitals. If Iran’s missiles can be intercepted, it will be incapable of defending itself against increasing economic or military aggression from the US or its neighbours.

    Less safe world

    Following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, there has been plenty of naive talk that the US is seeking a diminished role in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Ultimately, the US is seeking global dominance at arm’s length – through a combination of long-range military power, cyber warfare, robotics and artificial intelligence – that it hopes will lift the restraints imposed by American casualties and domestic opposition.

    Israel’s playbook with regards to Palestinians is one that elites in Washington trust can be exported to other corners of the globe, and even outer space. Interception missiles lie at the heart of that strategic vision, as a way to neutralise and silence all resistance. This is why no one who cares about a less violent, exploitative and dangerous world should be indifferent to, or neutral on, congressional funding for Iron Dome.

    Missile interception systems are the face not of a more defensive, safer world, but of a far more nakedly hostile, aggressive one.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

    The post Iron Dome: Don’t be deceived, US aid to Israel is not about saving lives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Is the US Global Empire Actually in Decline?

    It is almost taken for granted, if not an article of faith, in the progressive milieu (e.g., here) that the US empire is declining. Does this hold up, or is it comfort food for the frustrated hoping for the revolution?

    First, it is essential not to confuse the ongoing decline of the living conditions of US working people with a decline in the power of the US corporate empire. The decline of one often means the strengthening of the other.

    In the aftermath of World War II, the US was the world manufacturing center, with the middle class rapidly expanding, and this era did end in the 1970s. It is also true the heyday of uncontested US world and corporate neoliberal supremacy is over, its zenith being the decade of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies. Now, looming on the horizon is China, with the US empire and its subordinate imperial allies (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Italy) unable to thwart its rise this century, even more than when China stood up in 1949.

    Yet the US imperial system still maintains decisive economic and political dominance, cultural and ideological hegemony, backed by tremendous military muscle. If US ruling class power were in decline, why have there been no socialist revolutions ­­­− the overturning of capitalist rule ­­­− in almost half a century? What would the world look like if the US lacked the muscle to be world cop?

    Imperialism continually faces crises; this is inherent to their system. The question is: which class takes advantage of these crises to advance their interests, the corporate capitalist class or the working class and its allies at home and abroad. In the recent decades, capitalist crises have resulted in setbacks for our class, and a steady worsening of our conditions of life.

    Previous proponents of US empire decline have predicted its demise with an expanding Communist bloc, then Germany and Japan with their supposedly more efficient capitalist production methods, then the European Union encompassing most of Western Europe into a supra-national entity, then the Asian Tigers, and then BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). All challenges turned out to be wishful thinking. Now the proponents of decline expect China itself will soon supplant US dominion.  We explore a number of the economic, political, and military difficulties the US empire confronts in its role as world cop.

    Imperial Decline or Adjustments in Methods of Rule?

    A common misconception among believers of US ruling class demise holds that imperial failure to succeed in some particular aim signifies imperial weakening. Examples of setbacks include Afghanistan, the failure to block North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, catastrophic mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and seeming inability to reign in the mammoth US national debt. However, throughout history, successful maintenance of imperial hegemony has never precluded absence of terrible setbacks and defeats. Most importantly, the fundamental question arising from a setback is which class learns to advance its interests more effectively, the imperial overlords or the oppressed.

    The US rulers, as with other imperial nations, have proven adept at engineering more effective methods of control from crises, as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine illustrates. For instance, in the mid-20th century the imperial powers were forced to relinquish direct political governance of their colonial empires, often due to costly wars. Until after World War II, the Western nations owned outright most of Africa and much of Asia. Yet this new Third World political independence did not herald the end of imperial rule over their former colonies. The imperialists simply readjusted their domination through a neocolonial setup and continued to loot these countries, such as siphoning off over $1 trillion  every year since 2005 just through tax havens.

    Likewise, for seven decades the imperial ruling classes endured repeated defeats attempting to overturn the seemingly invincible Russian revolution. But they only needed to succeed one time, using a new strategy, to emerge victorious.

    A third example, the growing US national deficit due to the cost of the war on Vietnam forced Nixon to no longer peg the value of the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce. After World War II, the US had imposed the dollar as the international reserve currency, fixed at this exchange rate.  Today gold is $1806 an ounce, yet the dollar continues as the world reserve currency. The US rulers resolved their crisis by readjusting the manner their dollar reigned in international markets.

    A fourth example is the world historic defeat dealt the empire at the hands of the Vietnamese. Yet Vietnam today poses no challenge to US supremacy, in sharp contrast to 50 years ago.

    The US ruling class is well versed in the lessons gained from centuries of Western imperial supremacy. They have repeatedly demonstrated that the no longer effective methods of world control can be updated.  Bankruptcy in methods of rule may not signify a decline, but only the need for a reset, allowing the domination to continue.

    Part 1:  US Economic and Financial Strength

    Decline in US Share of World Production

    A central element of the waning US empire argument comes from the unparalleled economic rise of China. As a productive powerhouse, the US has been losing ground. As of 2019, before the COVID year reduced it further, the US share of world manufacturing amounted to 16.8%, while China was number one, at 28.7%.

    Similarly, the US Gross Domestic Product itself (GDP) slipped from 40% of the world economy in 1960 to 24% in 2019. GDP is the total market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country.

    When GDP is measured by the world reserve currency, the dollar, the US ranks first, at $21 trillion, with China number two at $14.7 trillion. Using the Purchasing Power Parity measure of GDP,  which measures economic output in terms of a nation’s own prices, China’s GDP surpasses the US at $24.16 trillion. By either measure, a steady US erosion over time is evident, particularly in relation to China, and a major concern for the US bosses.

    Worsening US balance of trade reflects this decline. In 1971 the US had a negative balance of trade (the value of imports greater than the value of exports) for the first time in 78 years. Since then, the value of exports has exceeded that of imports only two times, in 1973 and 1975. From 2003 on, the US has been running an annual trade deficit of $500 billion or more. To date the US rulers “pay” for this by creating dollars out of thin air.

    Ballooning US National Debt

    The ballooning US national debt is considered another indicator of US imperial demise. The US debt clock puts the national debt at $28.5 trillion, up from $5.7 trillion in 2000. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) numbers, the US debt is 118% of the GDP, near a historic high point, up from 79.2% at the end of 2019.

    The international reserves of the imperialist nations do not even cover 2% of their foreign debt. In contrast, China tops the list with the largest international reserves, which covers 153% of its foreign debt.

    However, today US debt as a percent of GDP is lower than in World War II, at the height of US economic supremacy. Germany’s debt to GDP ratio is 72%. Japan’s is 264%, making its debt over two and a half times the size of the country’s GDP. China’s is 66%.

    Yet a key concern with the ballooning national debt − inflation caused by creating money backed with no corresponding increase in production − hasn’t been a problem in any of these countries, not even Japan. The immediate issue with debt is not its size in trillions of dollars, but the degree annual economic growth exceeds the annual interest payment on the debt.

    In the US, this payout costs almost $400 billion a year, 1.9% of GDP. Federal Reserve Board president Powell stated: “Given the low level of interest rates, there’s no issue about the United States being able to service its debt at this time or in the foreseeable future.” Former IMF chief economist and president of the American Economic Association, Olivier Blanchard likewise declared: “Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost” given that “the current US situation in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is more the historical norm than the exception.” According to these ruling class economists, the huge size of the US national debt presents no economic difficulty for their bosses.

    Technological Patents

    Patents are an indicator of a country’s technological progress because they reflect the creation and dissemination of knowledge in productive activities. Today China is on the technological cutting edge in wind power, solar power, online payments, digital currencies, artificial intelligence (such as facial recognition), quantum computing, satellites and space exploration, 5G and 6G, drones, and ultra-high voltage power transmission. In 2019, China ended the US reign as the leading filer of international patents, a position previously held by the US every year since the UN World Intellectual Property Organization’s Patent Cooperation Treaty System began in 1978.

    The failure of the US rulers to thwart China’s scientific and technological advances threatens the preeminence the US holds on technological innovation. Rents from the US corner on intellectual property is a major contributor to the US economy. The drastic measures the US has taken against Huawei exemplify the anxiety of the empire’s rulers.

    US technological superiority is now being challenged. Yet, as John Ross points out, “Even using PPP measures, the US possesses overall technological superiority compared to China…. the level of productivity of the US economy is more than three times that of China.”1

    The US Still Controls the Global Financial Network

    While the world share of US manufacturing and exports has shrunk, the US overlords still reign over the world financial order. A pillar of their world primacy lies in the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency,” an innocuous term referring to US sway over the global financial and trade structure, including international banking networks, such as the World Bank and the IMF.

    Following the 1971 end of the dollar’s $35 an ounce peg to gold, Nixon engineered deals with the Middle East oil exporting regimes, guaranteeing them military support on condition they sell their oil exclusively in dollars. This gave a compelling new reason for foreign governments and banks to hold dollars. The US could now flood international markets with dollars regardless of the amount of gold it held. Today, most of the world’s currencies remain pegged directly or indirectly to the dollar.

    To facilitate growing international trade, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) was created in 1973. SWIFT is a payment and transaction network used by international banks to monitor and process purchases and payments by individuals, companies, banks, and governments. Dominated by the US, it grants the country even greater mastery over world trade and financial markets. Here, China poses no challenge to US supremacy.

    After the euro became established, the percent of world reserves held in US dollars diminished from the 71% share it held in 2001. Since 2003, the dollar has kept the principal share, fluctuating in the 60-65% range. Today, the percent of world nations’ currency reserves held in US dollars amounts to $7 trillion, 59.5% of international currency reserves.

    In 2021 the dollar’s share of total foreign currency reserves is actually greater than in the 1980s and 1990s.

    Because only a few reserve currencies are accepted in international trade, countries are not free to trade their goods in their own money. Rather, over 90% of nations’ imports and exports requires use of the dollar, the euro, or the currencies of other imperial states. The Chinese RMB, in contrast, constitutes merely 2.4% of international reserves, ranking China on the level of Canada. The US continues as the superpower in world currency reserves, while China is a marginal player.

    The US Dollar as the World Reserve Currency

    The US maintains preeminence because banks, governments and working peoples around the world regards US dollar as the safest, most reliable, and accepted currency to hold their savings.

    A capitalist economic crisis, even when caused by the US itself, as in 2008, actually increases demand for the dollar, since the dollar is still viewed as the safe haven. People expect the dollar to be the currency most likely to retain its value in periods of uncertainty. Ironically, an economic crisis precipitated by the US results in money flooding into dollar assets, keeping world demand for dollars high. The 2008-09 crisis enabled the ruling class to advance their domination over working people, fleecing us of hundreds of billions of dollars.

    SWIFT data show that China’s RMB plays a minor role in world trade transactions.  While China has become the world exporter, its currency was used in merely 1.9% of  international payments, versus 38% for the US dollar, with 77% of transactions in the dollar or euro. This means almost all China’s own imports and exports are not traded in Chinese currency, but in that of the US and its subordinates.

    Being the leading force in SWIFT gives the US a powerful weapon. The US rulers can target countries it seeks to overthrow (such as Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Iran) with sanctions declared illegal by the United Nations. SWIFT enables the US rulers to prevent those countries’ access to their overseas bank accounts, blocks their access to international trade as well as loans from the World Bank, the IMF and most international banks. The US uses its authority in the World Trade Organization to prevent countries like Venezuela from demanding the WTO punish the US for disrupting Venezuela’s legitimate trade by means of these sanctions.

    Arguments that China and Russia are abandoning the dollar point out that, while in 2015 approximately 90% of trade between the two countries was conducted in dollars, by spring 2020 the figure had dropped to 46%, with 24% of the trade in their own currencies. This shows some increasing independence, yet almost twice as much China-Russia trade still takes place in the dollar rather than in their own money. Further, their moves from the dollar have been in reaction to US imposed sanctions and tariffs, forcing them off the dollar, not from their own choice to cast aside the dollar as the international currency.

    If China and Russia had the means to create a new world economic order they could withdraw their over $1.1 trillion and $123 billion invested in US Treasury bonds and use the funds to start their own international financial structure.

    That China pegs the RMB to the dollar, rather than the dollar pegged to the RMB, also indicates the economic power relations between China and the US. China has expressed unease about the US potential to cut China off from the SWIFT network. Zhou Li, a spokesperson for China’s Communist Party, urged his party’s leaders to prepare for decoupling from the dollar, because the US dollar “has us by the throat… By taking advantage of the dollar’s global monopoly position in the financial sector, the US will pose an increasingly severe threat to China’s further development.”

    While China has displaced the US as the primary productive workhouse of the world, it remains far from displacing the US as the world financial center. The size of China’s economy has not translated into a matching economic power.

    Part 2: Military and Ideological Forms of Domination

    The US regards as its Manifest Destiny to rule the world. The US bosses equate their national security interests with global security interests; no place or issue is insignificant. The US sees its role as defending the world capitalist order even if narrow US interests are not immediately and practically involved.

    The Question of a US Military Decline

    The second central element of the waning US empire argument is based on the US armed forces failures in the Middle East wars. However, they overlook that the US rulers suffered more stinging defeats in Korea 70 years ago and Vietnam 50 years ago, when the US was considered at the height of its supremacy. While over 7000 US soldiers and 8000 “contractors,” a code word for mercenaries, have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is much smaller than the 41,300 troops killed in Korea, or the 58,000 in Vietnam. Although in wars against Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, the US ruling class could not achieve its aims, these peoples’ anti-imperial struggles were derailed, a US key objective. To the extent the peoples of these countries “won,” they inherited a country in ruins.

    Likewise, the rising British empire suffered defeats at the hands of the US in 1783 and 1814, but this had little impact on 19th century British global ascendancy.

    Save Iraq in 1991, the US has not won a war since World War II. Yet even in its heyday, the US military did not take on and defeat another major power without considerable outside aid. Spain was mostly defeated in Cuba and the Philippines before the US attacked. The US entered World War I after the other fighting forces were reaching exhaustion. In World War II, the Soviet Red Army broke the back of the German Wehrmacht, not the US. Only against Japan did the US military play a key role in crushing an imperial rival, though even here, the bulk of Japanese troops were tied down fighting the Chinese.

    While today, the US military is reluctant about engaging in a full-scale land war, this has been mostly the case for the whole 20th century before any alleged imperial deterioration. Previously, the US rulers proved adept at not entering a war until it could emerge on top once the wars ended.

    The “Vietnam syndrome,” code word for the US people’s opposition to fighting wars to defend the corporate world order, continues to haunt and impede the US rulers when they consider new military aggressions. This “syndrome,” which Bush Sr boasted had been overcome, has only deepened as result of the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. Yet the corporate class took advantage of these wars to loot trillions from public funds, with working people to pay the bill.

    The US is spending over a trillion dollars to “upgrade” a nuclear capacity which could wipe out life on the planet.  Even if US military capacity were diminishing in some areas, this is immaterial so long as the US still can, with a push of the button, annihilate all it considers opponents, even if this means a likely mutually assured destruction. The US also possesses similarly dangerous arsenals of biological and chemical weapons. It is not rational to think the US rulers spend mind-boggling sums of money on this weaponry but will not use them again when considered necessary to preserve their supremacy.

    The US empire’s military dominion remains firmly in place around the world. Peoples’ struggles to close US military bases have met with little success. US ruling class de facto military occupations overseas continue through its over 800 bases in over 160 countries. These constitute 95% of the world’s total foreign military bases.

    To date, if there has been any lessening of US military destructive capacity, no new armed forces or uprisings have dared to take advantage of this. If some national force considered it possible to break out of the US world jailhouse, we would be seeing that.

    Hybrid Warfare: US Regime-Change Tools Besides Military Intervention

    Military victory is not necessary for the US rulers to keep “insubordinate” countries in line. It suffices for the US to leave in ruins their attempts to build political and economic systems that prioritize national sovereignty over US dictates.

    When incapable of overturning a potential “threat of a good example” through military invasion, the US may engineer palace coups. Since 2000, it has succeeded in engineering coups in Honduras, Bolivia, Georgia, and Haiti, to name a few.

    Alternatives to fomenting a military coup include the US conducting lawfare to overturn governments, as seen in Paraguay and Brazil. The US ruling class also skillfully co-opts “color revolutions,” as seen in the Arab Spring and in the implosion of the Soviet bloc. Worldwide, the US regularly violates the sovereignty of nations through its regime-change agencies such as the CIA, USAID, and NED.

    Besides invasions, coups, lawfare, election interference, and color revolutions, the US relies on its command over the global financial system and the subservience of other imperialist nations. This enables the US overlords to impose crippling sanctions and blockades on countries that assert their national sovereignty. The blockades on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and Syria constitute a boot on their neck, which have only become more severe the more these peoples valiantly defend their independence.

    Condemnation of these blockades by working people and nations worldwide has yet to have material effect in constraining this imperial cruelty against whole peoples. Rather than a decline of the US empire’s ability to thwart another country’s right to determine their own future, there have been changes in method, from overtly militaristic to more covert hybrid warfare. Both are brutal and effective means of regime change.

    US-First World Ideological Hegemony

    The corporate leaders of the West wield world dominion over the international media, including news services, social media, and advertising. Their Coke and Disney characters, for instance, have penetrated even the remotest corners of the world. Today most of the world’s viewers of the news are fed a version of the news through media stage-managed by the US and its subordinate allies. In addition, there are almost 4 billion social media users in the world, with six social media companies having more than one billion users. China owns just one of these. Only the US and its subordinates have world reach in their control of news and social media, while China does not.

    Ramon Labanino, one of the Cuban 5, illustrated how the US rulers use their media to foment the July 12 regime change operation in Cuba:

    We are in the presence of an international media dictatorship, the big media are in the hands of imperialism and now the social networks and the alternative media also use them in a masterful way. They have the capacity, through data engineering, bots, to replicate a tweet millions of times, which is what they have done against Cuba. A ruthless attack on social networks and in the media to show a Cuba that is not real. On the other hand, we have an invasion in our networks to disarticulate our computer systems so that even we cannot respond to the lies. The interesting thing is the double purpose, not only that they attack us, but then we cannot defend ourselves because the media belong to them… Within the CIA, for example, they have a special operations group that is in charge of cyber attacks of this type and there is a group called the Political Action Group that organizes, structures and directs this type of attack.

    Worldwide use of media disinformation and news spin plays a central role in preserving US primacy and acceptance of its propaganda. As Covert Action Magazine reported:

    United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Take the case of Syria. The people and groups one would normally count on to oppose wars have been the ones largely defending it. They have also often been the ones to label war opponents as “Assad apologists” or “genocide deniers”—causing them to be blacklisted.

    The ruling class media’s effective massaging of what is called “news” has penetrated and disoriented many anti-war forces. This illustrates the appalling collapse of a world anti-war opposition that almost 20 years ago had been called “the new superpower,” not some decline of the US as world cop. Corporate media operations play a role comparable to military might in perpetuating US global control.

    Part 3: The Threat US Rulers Perceive in China

    Secretary of State Blinken spelled it out:

    China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system, all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.

    China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin responded to Washington’s view that the international system operates primarily to advance US corporate interests:

    The ‘rules-based order’ claimed by the US…refers to rules set by the US alone, then it cannot be called international rules, but rather ‘hegemonic rules,’ which will only be rejected by the whole world.

    Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently said:

    The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal…They are promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries.

    The Challenge China Presents to US Rulers Differs from that of the Soviet Union

    China’s development poses a threat to imperialist hegemony different from the former Soviet bloc. China competes in the world markets run by the Western nations, slowly supplanting their control. China’s economic performance, 70 years after its revolution, has been unprecedented in world history, even compared to the First World countries. In contrast, the Soviet economy after 70 years was faltering.

    China does not provide the economic and military protection for nations striving to build a new society the way the Soviet Union had. The importance of the Communist bloc as a force constraining the US was immense and is underappreciated. The Communist bloc generally allied itself with anti-imperialist forces, encouraging Third World national liberation struggles as well as the Non-Aligned Movement. The Communist bloc’s exemplary social programs also prompted the rise of social-democratic welfare state regimes (e.g., Sweden) in the capitalist West to circumvent possible socialist revolution.

    Now, with no Soviet Union and its allies to extend international solidarity assistance to oppressed peoples and nations, countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea are much more on their own to defend themselves against US military maneuvers and blockades.

    As John Ross points out, China is capable of slowly supplanting US-First World power over a long period of time, but in no position to replace these imperial states as world hegemon, nor does it desire to do so. US products are being driven out by China’s cheaper high-quality products and China’s more equitable “win-win” business arrangements with other countries, offering the opportunity for Third World countries to develop. However, China cannot displace the US in the world financial system, where the US and its allies retain overwhelming control.

    The US has proven incapable of impeding China from becoming an independent world force. No matter the tariffs and sanctions placed on China, they have had little impact. Yet, the US has caused China to digress from its socialist planned economy, through US corporations and consumerist values penetrating the Chinese system.

    Part 4:  The World if the US were in Decline

    Revolutions on the International Stage

    A weakened US imperialism would encourage peoples and nations to “seize the time” and score significant gains against this overlord’s hold on their countries. Yet since shortly after 1975, with the victories in Vietnam and Laos, a drought in socialist revolutions has persisted for almost half a century. If the US empire were in decline, we would find it handicapped in countering victorious socialist revolutions. However, the opposite has been the case, with the US rulers consolidating their hegemony over the world.

    This contrasts with the 40-year period between 1917 and 1959, when socialist revolutions occurred in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, eleven countries across eastern Europe, and Cuba. These took place in the era of US rise, not decline. During this period, the US empire had to confront even greater challenges to its dictates than presented by today’s China and Russia in the form of the world Communist bloc, associated parties in capitalist countries, and the national liberation movements.

    During the period of alleged US imperial demise, it has been socialist revolution that experienced catastrophic defeats. In the last 30 years, the struggle for socialist revolution has gone sharply in reverse, with the US and its subordinates not only blocking successful revolutions but overturning socialism in most of the former Communist sphere. The last three decades has witnessed greater consolidation of imperial supremacy over the world, not a deterioration.

    The socialist revolutions that continue − North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba − have all had to backtrack and reintroduce private enterprise and capitalist relations of production.  North Korea has allowed the growth of private markets; Cuba relies heavily on the Western tourist market. They have this forced upon them to survive more effectively in the present world neoliberal climate.

    A victorious socialist revolution, even a much more limited anti-neoliberal revolution2 , requires a nation to stand up to the imperial vengeance that enforces neo-colonial subjugation. Small countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, have established political and some economic independence, but they have been unable to significantly advance against crushing blockades and US-backed coups in order to create developed economies. Historically, the only countries that have effectively broken with dependency and developed independently based on their own resources have been the Soviet Union and China.

    Raul Castro made clear this world primacy of the US neoliberal empire:

    In many cases, governments [including the subsidiary imperial ones] do not even have the capacity to enforce their sovereign prerogatives over the actions of national entities based in their own territories, as these are often docilely subordinated to Washington, as if we were living in a world subjugated by the unipolar power of the United States. This is a phenomenon that is expressed with particular impact in the financial sector, with national banks of several countries giving a US administration’s stipulations priority over the political decisions of their own governments.

    A test of the US overlords’ decline can be measured in the struggle against US economic warfare in the form of sanctions. To date, the US can arm twist most countries besides China and Russia into abiding by its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and Iran. The US rulers still possess the power and self-assurance to ignore United Nations resolutions against economic warfare, including the UN General Assembly’s annual condemnation of the US blockade on Cuba. The peoples and nations of the world cannot make the US rulers pay a price for this warfare.

    Domestic Struggles by the Working Class and its Allies that Shake the System

    If the US empire were weakened, our working class could be winning strikes and union organizing drives against a capitalist class on the defensive. But the working class remains either quiescent, its struggles derailed, or most strikes settled by limiting the degree of boss takebacks. The 1997 UPS and 2016 Verizon strike were two that heralded important gains for workers. So far, however, the weakening class at home is not the corporate bosses, but the working class and its allies.

    The workers movement has not even succeeded in gaining a national $15 minimum wage. The US rulers can spend over $900 billion a year on its war machine even during a pandemic that has killed almost 700,000, amid deteriorating standard of living  − no national health care, no quality free education, no raising of the minimum wage − without angry mass protests. This money could be spent on actual national security at home: housing for the homeless, eliminating poverty, countering global warming, jobs programs, and effectively handling the pandemic as China has (with only two deaths since May 2020). Instead, just in the Pentagon budget, nearly a trillion dollars a year of our money is a welfare handout to corporations to maintain their rule over the world. This overwhelming imperial reign over our workers’ movement signifies a degeneration in our working class organizations, not in the corporate overlords.

    A weakened empire would provide opportunities for working class victories, re-allocating national wealth in their favor. Instead, we live in a new Gilded Age, with growing impoverishment of our class as the corporate heads keep grabbing greater shares of our national wealth. Americans for Tax Fairness points out:

    America’s 719 billionaires held over four times more wealth ($4.56 trillion) than all the roughly 165 million Americans in society’s bottom half ($1.01 trillion), according to Federal Reserve Board data. In 1990, the situation was reversed — billionaires were worth $240 billion and the bottom 50% had $380 billion in collective wealth.

    US billionaire wealth increased 19-fold over the last 31 years, with the combined wealth of 713 billionaires surging by $1.8 trillion during the pandemic, one-third of their wealth gains since 1990.

    This scandalous appropriation of working people’s wealth by less than one thousand bosses at the top without causing mass indignation and working class fightback, encapsules the present power relations between the two contending classes.

    With a weakened empire, we would expect a rise of a militant mass current in the trade unions and the working class committed to the struggle to reverse this trend. Instead, trade unions support corporate governance and their political candidates for office, not even making noise about a labor party.

    With a weakened empire, we would expect the US working people to be turning away from the two corporate parties and building our own labor party as an alternative. In 2016 the US electorate backed two “outsiders,” Bernie Sanders and Trump, in the primaries against the traditional Democratic and Republican candidates, but this movement was co-opted with little difficulty. That the two corporate-owned parties still wield the power to co-opt, if not extinguish, our working class movements, as with the mass anti-Iraq war movement, the Occupy movement, the Madison trade union protests, the pro-Bernie groundswells in 2016 and 2020, shows the empire’s continued vitality, not deterioration.

    In 2020 most all liberals and lefts capitulated to the Democrats’ anti-Trumpism, under the guise of “fighting fascism.” The “resistance” became the “assistance.” The promising Black Lives Matter movement of summer 2020 became largely absorbed into the Biden campaign a few months later. If the corporate empire were declining, progressive forces and leftist groups would not have bowed to neoliberal politicians and the national security state by climbing on the elect-Biden bandwagon. The 2020 election brought out the highest percent of voters in over a century to vote for one or the other of two neoliberal politicians. This stunning victory for the US ruling class resulted from a stunning surrender by progressive forces. To speak of declining corporate US supremacy in this context is nonsense.

    Likely Indicators of a Demise of US Supremacy

    For all our political lives we have been reading reports of the impending decline of US global supremacy. If just a fraction of these reports were accurate, then surely the presidential executive orders that Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, and Cuba are “unusual and extraordinary threats to the national security of the United States” would have some basis in reality.

    If US corporate dominion were declining, we might see:

    • The long called for democratization of the United Nations and other international bodies with one nation, one vote
    • Social democratic welfare governments would again be supplanting neoliberal regimes
    • Replacement of World Bank, WTO, and IMF with international financial institutions independent of US control
    • Curtailing NATO and other imperialist military alliances
    • End of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency
    • Dismantling of US overseas military bases
    • Emergence of regional blocs independent of the US, replacing the current vassal organizations (e.g., European Union, OAS, Arab League, Organization of African Unity)
    • Nuclear disarmament rather than nuclear escalation
    • Working peoples of the world enforcing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
    • A decline of the allure of US controlled world media culture (e.g., Disney, Hollywood)

    Part 5: Conclusion:  US Decline looks like a Mirage

    Proponents of US decline point to two key indicators: its diminished role in global production and ineffectiveness of the US ruler’s military as world cop. Yet, the US rulers, with the aid of those in the European Union and Japan, maintain world financial control and continue to keep both our country and the world under lock and key.

    The US overlords represent the spokesperson and enforcer of the First World imperial system of looting, while compelling subservience from the other imperial nations. None dare pose as potential imperial rivals to the US, nor challenge it in any substantial manner.

    It is misleading to compare China’s rise to the US alone, since the US represents a bloc of imperial states. To supplant US economic preeminence, China would have to supplant the economic power of this entire bloc. These countries still generate most world production with little prospect this will change. A China-Russia alliance scarcely equals this US controlled First World club.

    To date, each capitalist crisis has only reinforced the US rulers’ dominion as the world financial hub. Just the first half of this year, world investors have poured $900 billion into the safe haven US assets, more than they put into funds in the rest of the world combined. So long as the US capitalists can export their economic downturns to other countries and onto the backs of its own working people, so long as the world turns to the US dollar as the safe haven, decline of US ruling class preeminence is not on the table.

    The last period of imperial weakening occurred from the time of US defeat in Vietnam up to the reimposition of imperial diktat under Reagan and his sidekick, Margaret Thatcher. During this time, working peoples’ victories were achieved across the international stage: Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Grenada; Cuban military solidarity in Angola, Vietnam’s equivalent in Cambodia; revolution in Portugal and in its African colonies, in Zimbabwe, and seeming imminent victories in El Salvador and Guatemala. At home, a rising class struggle current arose in the working class, as in the Sadlowski Steelworkers Fight Back movement and the militant 110-day coal miners strike, which forced President Carter to back down. This worldwide upsurge against corporate rule ended about 40 years ago, as yet unmatched by new ones.

    Proclamations of a waning US empire portray a wishful thinking bordering on empty bravado. Moreover, a crumbling empire will not lead to its final exit without a massive working peoples’ movement at home to overthrow it. Glen Ford observed that capitalism has lost its legitimacy, especially among the young: “But that doesn’t by itself bring down a system. It is simply a sign that people are not happy. Mass unhappiness may bring down an administration. But it doesn’t necessarily change a system one bit.”

    Capitalism is wracked by crisis – inherent to the system, Marx explained. Yet, as the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath showed, as the Great Depression showed, as Europe in chaos after World War II showed, capitalist crises are no harbinger of its collapse. The question is not how severe the crisis, but which class, capitalist or working class, takes advantage of it to advance their own interests.

    A ruling class crisis allows us to seize the opportunity if our forces are willing to fight, are organized, and are well-led. As Lenin emphasized, “The proletariat has no other weapon in the fight for power except organization.” In regards to organization, we are unprepared. Contributing to our lack of effective anti-imperialist organization is our profound disbelief that a serious challenge at home to US ruling class control is even possible.

    Whatever the indications of US deterioration as world superpower, recall that the Roman empire’s decay began around 177 AD. But it did not collapse in the West until 300 years later, in 476, and the eastern half did not collapse for 1000 years after that. Informing a Roman slave or plebe in 200 AD that the boot on their necks was faltering would fall on deaf ears. We are now in a similar situation. The empire will never collapse by itself, even with the engulfing climate catastrophe. Wishful thinking presents a dysfunctional substitute for actual organizing, for preparing people to seize the time when the opening arises.

    1. John Ross, “China and South-South Cooperation in the present global situation,” in China’s Great Road, p. 203.
    2. There is a continuous class struggle between popular forces demanding increased government resources and programs to serve their needs, against corporate power seeking to privatize in corporate hands all such government spending and authority. This unchecked corporate centralization of wealth and power is euphemistically called “neoliberalism.”  An anti-neoliberal revolution places popular forces in political control while economic power remains in the hands of the capitalist class.
    The post Is the US Global Empire Actually in Decline? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 20 years after his war began George Bush gets a timely reminder of his crimes

    George W. Bush probably thought he was in for an easy night when he was invited to speak at a live event in Beverly Hills. But the former US president – best known for invading and destroying Iraq – wasn’t reckoning on an audience member named Mike Prysner.

    Bush sounded relaxed until Prysner, who served with the US Army in Iraq, interrupted to demand an apology for the million Iraqis killed in the war.

     

    Prysner also accused Bush of lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and made false claims about Iraqi involvement in 9/11 in order to support his calls for war.

    As Prysner confronted Bush, two audience members tried vainly to wrestle the former corporal out of the room. However, they were quickly joined by security guards, who dragged Prysner the rest of the way out of the auditorium.

    List of the dead

    Speaking outside, Prysner said he had tried to read out a list of friends of his who died because of the war and Iraqis who had been killed during the occupation.

    I tried to read the names but event runners immediately grabbed the list and tore it up. But I was able to shut it down for a little while. Right when Bush was getting into his first little cheesy story about his life and all that, trying to be funny…

    Round Two?

    A day later at a different event, Bush faced another barrage of criticism. Mint Press News, reported that researcher Jeb Sprague had also challenged the ex-president on Iraq. A Twitter video shows Bush smiling and laughing in response:

    Sprague later tweeted the full text of his intervention:

    Sprague’s thread continued:

    Your war destroyed my cousin’s life. Your war created a nightmare for my family. He’s a shell of his former self. Tens of thousands of Americans and a million Iraqis have died. You used white phosphorus a chemical weapon in Fallujah. Arrest this man. Arrest this war criminal.

    No rest for the wicked

    Sprague and Prysner’s efforts were commended on Twitter. And one user pointed out that Britain’s own war criminals should be called out as well:

    A view which other Twitter users seemed to share:

    None of the architects of the Iraq war have ever been brought to justice for their involvement in the disaster. And people like Mike Prysner are doing a public service by making sure the wicked don’t rest easy.

    Featured images via YouTube – The Empire Files & Wikimedia Commons/Chris Greenberg

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Who Represents Afghanistan: Genuine Activists vs “Native Informants” 

    Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away?

    In the US and other Western media, answers were readily available: they were mostly ‘translators’, Afghans who ‘collaborated’ with the US and other NATO countries; ‘activists’ who were escaping from the brutality awaiting them once the Americans and their allies left the country, and so on.

    Actually, the answer is far more complex than that offered by Western officials and media, which ultimately – although inaccurately – conveyed the impression that NATO armies were in Afghanistan to safeguard human rights, to educate women and to bring civilization to a seemingly barbaric culture.

    Though political dissent is a basic human right, there is a clear and definitive line between the legitimate right to challenge one’s government/regime and willingly collaborating with another – especially when that collaboration can have dire consequences on one’s own people.

    In the United States and Europe, there are thousands of political dissidents from many parts of the world – from South America, the Middle East, East Asia, and others – who are, sadly, used as cheerleaders for political and military interventions, either directly by certain governments, or indirectly, through lobby and pressure groups, academic circles and mainstream media.

    These individuals, often promoted as ‘experts’, appear and disappear whenever they are useful and when their usefulness expires. Some might even be sincere and well-intentioned when they speak out against, for example, human rights violations committed by certain regimes in their own home countries, but the outcome of their testimonies is almost always translated to self-serving policies.

    Thousands of Afghans – political dissidents, NATO collaborators, students, athletes and workers seeking opportunities – have already arrived in various western capitals. Expectedly, many are being used by the media and various pressure groups to retrospectively justify the war on Afghanistan, as if it was a moral war. Desperate to live up to the expectations, Afghan ‘activists’ are already popping up on western political platforms, speaking about the Taliban’s dismal record of human rights and, especially, women’s rights.

    But what is the point of appealing to the western moral consciousness after 20 years of a NATO-led deadly invasion that has cost Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

    In Afghanistan, an alternative narrative is evolving.

    On September 11, hundreds of Afghan women protested in Kabul University, not against the Taliban, but against other Afghan women who purport to speak from western capitals about all Afghan women.

    “We are against those women who are protesting on the streets, claiming they are representative of women,” one of the speakers said, Agency France Press reported.

    While AFP made a point of repeating that the women protesters have “pledged” their commitment to “all Taliban’s hardline policies on gender segregation”, emphasizing how they were all covered “head to toe,” the event was significant. Among many issues, it raises the question: who represents Afghan women, those who left or those who stayed?

    A large banner held by the protesters in Kabul read: “Women who left Afghanistan cannot represent us.”

    The truth is no one represents Afghan women except those who are democratically-elected by Afghan society to represent all sectors of that society, women included. Until real democracy is practiced in Afghanistan, the struggle will continue for real freedom, human rights, equality and, obviously, representation.

    This fight can only take place within an organic, grassroots Afghan context – whether in Afghanistan or outside of the country – but certainly not through Fox News, the BBC or US Senate hearings.

    The late Palestinian-American scholar, Professor Edward Said, had repeatedly warned of the pseudo reality painted by the ‘native informants’ – supposed political dissidents recruited by western governments to provide a convenient depiction of the reality in the Middle East and elsewhere, as a moral justification for war. The consequences, as the 2003 Iraq war and invasion have demonstrated, can be horrific.

    Said challenged a particular ‘native informant’, the late Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese academic, whose ideas about the Iraqi enthusiasm for the US war, though proved disastrously wrong, were used by George W. Bush and others as proof that the impending war was destined to be a ‘cakewalk’.

    Ajami’s ideas were long discredited, but the political machinations that still prefer ‘native informants’ to genuine human rights defenders and good scholarship remain in place. Many of the Afghan escapees are sure to be strategically placed through the same channels, which continue to promote interventions and sanctions as sound policies.

    The war in Afghanistan has ended, hopefully for good, but the conflict on who represents the people of that war-torn country remains unresolved. It behooves the Taliban to deliver on its promises regarding equal representation and political plurality, otherwise there are many others abroad who will be ready to claim the role of legitimate representation.

    In the Middle East, in particular, we have already witnessed this phenomenon of the west-based ‘legitimate’ democratic representations. Ultimately, these ‘governments-in-exile’ wrought nothing but further political deception, division, corruption, and continued war.

    War-torn Afghanistan – exhausted, wounded and badly needing a respite – deserves better.

    The post Who Represents Afghanistan: Genuine Activists vs “Native Informants”  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 9/11 and Afghanistan Post-Mortems: Lessons in Safe Logic

    In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the corporate mainstream and alternative media have been replete with articles analyzing the consequences of 9/11 that resulted in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its alleged withdrawal after two decades of war.

    These critiques have ranged from mild to harsh, and have covered issues from the loss of civil liberties due to The Patriot Act and government spying through all the wars “on terror” in so many countries with their disastrous consequences and killing fields.  Many of these articles have emphasized how, as a result of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the U.S. has lost its footing and brought on the demise of the American empire and its standing in the world.  Some writers celebrate this and others bemoan it.  Most seem to consider it inevitable.

    This flood of articles has been authored by writers from across the political spectrum from the left through the center to the right.  All were outraged in their own ways, as such dramatic events typically manage to elicit much spilled ink informed by the writers’ various ideological positions in a media world where the categories of left and right have become meaningless.

    These articles have included cries about phony tears for the wrong victims (those who died in the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and on the planes), how good intelligence could have prevented 9/11, how so many died in vain, how it all led to torture, how whistle blowers were not heeded, how the military was right, how the collapse of the towers led to the collapse of the American empire, how bin Laden won, how evil U.S. war making came home in the form of 9/11 evil, how the longest war was in vain, how the Pentagon received vast sums of money over decades, how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a betrayal of the 9/11 victims, etc.

    Many of the points made were valid; others were not.  This flood of opinionated outrage was very emotional and no doubt stirred deep feelings in readers.  It fed on the widespread feeling in the country that something dreadful has occurred, but what it is isn’t exactly clear. The sense of mass confusion and continual disaster permeating the air and infecting people’s daily lives.  The sense of unreality existing everywhere.

    These articles have almost run their course and a new series of post mortems can be anticipated as fear and trembling attaches to new matters, particularly the ongoing Covid-19 fear porn minus the dire consequences of government policies.  Fear is the name of the game and untruth snakes through the media hidden in the grass of truth.  Many of the articles I referred to above – and you can check for yourself as I have purposely left out names and links – contain truths, but truths that disguise deeper untruths upon which the truths are allegedly based.  I will leave the logic lesson to you.

    Since many of these articles have been penned by liberal writers, some of whom one might naively expect to grasp essentials, and since those further to the right are considered defenders of Pax Americana, I will quote the outspoken anti-war singer/songwriter Phil Ochs, who prefaced his trenchant 1965 song, Love Me I’m a Liberal, with these words about logic:

    In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion.    One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the  right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.

    So here’s the rub about the logic.  Almost without exception (there are a handful of truthful writers aside from those I am here referring to, such as Kit Knightly, Michel Chossudovsky, Pepe Escobar, et al.), from the left to the right and everywhere in between, the authors of all these articles about the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and Afghanistan have based their points on a false premise.

    A false premise.  This is the way minds are shaped in the era of mass propaganda and servile journalism.  Assume (or make believe) something is true despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and build from there. Slip in this premise or background assumption as if it were truer than true. This is what has happened throughout the media in the last two weeks.  It is not new but worth pointing out.

    The false premise is this: That 9/11 was a terror attack carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as blow-back for American wars against Muslims, and this terror attack on the U.S. led to the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

    The evidence is overwhelming that this premise is false.  In fact, the evidence makes clear that 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag attack, carried out by sinister forces within the government of the United States with a little help from certain foreign junior partners to justify its subsequent war crimes across the globe.  I will not explore here the ample evidence concerning 9/11, for it is readily available to readers who have the will to look.  Even the use of the shorthand – 9/11 for the events of September 11, 2001 – that I have used here for brevity’s sake, is a crucial part of the linguistic propaganda used to frighten and conjure up thoughts of an ongoing national emergency, as I have written elsewhere.

    One is not supposed to say that the mass murders of September 11, 2001 were a false flag attack, for it touches a realty that is so disturbing in its consequences that all the hand wringing post-mortems must deny: That nearly three thousand innocent people in the U.S. had first to be murdered as a pretext for killing millions around the world.  It is a lesson in radical evil that is very difficult to swallow, and so must be hidden in a vast tapestry of lies and safe logic.  American innocence can survive the disclosures of U.S. atrocities overseas because the deaths of foreigners have never meant much to Americans, but to bring it all back home is anathema.

    It is another example of the unspeakable, as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said long ago and James W. Douglass referenced in his monumental book, JFK and the Unspeakable, to explain why John Kennedy died at the hands of the CIA and why that fact had to be suppressed.  The mass murders of September 11, 2001 recapitulate that systemic evil that defies speech.

    It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes    them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.  It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…

    From true writers and journalists we should expect something better – that they don’t repeat official declarations, utter hollow platitudes, and build analyses on false premises – but these are not the best of times, to rephrase Ochs, and safe logic keeps one’s legitimacy intact and protects one’s brand.

    It’s always personal when it comes to the unspeakable.

    The post 9/11 and Afghanistan Post-Mortems: Lessons in Safe Logic first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The War on Terror has made populations more vulnerable to the climate crisis

    The International Witness Campaign is remembering the last 20 years of the “failed War on Terror”. This decades-long war has seen its fair share of illegality and incompetence by those who’ve waged it. As with all wars, it’s hawks also paid no regard to the huge environmental costs involved.

    Now, after these decades of war, the Middle East is facing another security threat: the climate crisis. Indeed, authorities around the world are increasingly recognising the environmental emergency as the greatest security threat we face.

    As In These Times recently contemplated, imagine if those who waged the War on Terror had spent the last 20 years fighting the climate crisis instead. The populations targeted in the failed war, and the global community as a whole, would undoubtedly be better equipped to deal with the crisis if they had.

    Indeed, there might not be a crisis to speak of if the vast amounts of money spent on the war had been directed to tackling the climate crisis from the start of the millennium onwards.

    Perfect storm

    A number of countries in the Middle East have faced intense temperatures this summer. In July, for example, Iraq saw temperatures of over 51C. In 2016, the country faced heat of more than 53C. As Foreign Policy recently reported, global warming in the region is double the global average. So 2C of global warming by 2050 would mean a 4C increase in the Middle East.

    It’s not just intense heat affecting the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region either. The climate crisis is impacting rainfall and water availability. This means that some areas are experiencing increased drought, while others are flooding.

    As the International Committee of the Red Cross has pointed out, the War on Terror and previous conflicts have played a role in this environmental situation. It’s regional water and habitat advisor Igor Malgrati said:

    In southern Iraq, you have an environment that has been damaged by years of conflict, poor environmental management and weak governance. When you add climate change into the mix, you have the perfect storm.

    The Costs of War Project has also asserted that the enduring military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have resulted in “the degradation of the natural resources in these countries and a radical destruction of forest cover”. It said “the animal and bird populations have also been adversely affected”.

    Security threat

    The Max Plank Institute has warned that the climate crisis could make some areas of the MENA region uninhabitable in the coming years. A study by researchers from Princeton University earlier this year made similar claims about countries in the tropics. The study’s authors asserted that the world’s temperature increase needs to stay below 1.5C for the tropics to avoid the risk of exceeding a particular heat threshold, known as wet bulb temperature (TW). Because the human body is unable to regulate its own temperature past the TW threshold of 35C, it’s considered, as the Guardian put it, the “limits of human livability”.

    As the UN secretary-general António Guterres said in August, greenhouse gas emissions are “choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk”. Meanwhile, the biodiversity crisis, whereby species are disappearing at a rate not seen in history, is devastating the ecosystems on which people depend on for food, water, and much more. These two interconnecting crises are converging too, with horrifying consequences.

    Righting wrongs

    Of course, climate change is not news. The oil and gas industry have known about it for decades. Governments involved in waging the War on Terror have long been aware of it too. As In These Times‘ Sarah Lazare wrote, in light of this understanding:

    We should have been putting every resource toward stopping climate disaster, rather than pouring public goods into the war effort

    Instead, the US ploughed $21tn into “foreign and domestic militarization” over the last 20 years. The UK government, meanwhile, recently revealed that it spent £22.2bn of taxpayers’ money on the 20-year-long invasion and occupation of Afghanistan alone.

    In short, rather than investing in averting climate disaster, US and UK politicians chose to wage a climate-destroying war that made targeted populations even more vulnerable to the environmental crises.

    The actions of rich nations in general, largely the elite among them, have brought the world to this environmental juncture. And the warmongering decisions these elites have made are a part of the litany of failures that got us here.

    Officials from these countries need to address these injustices, and provide reparations for them, as they gather at climate and biodiversity conferences over the coming months.

    Featured image via Channel 4 News / YouTube

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • George W. Bush Spent This 9/11 Moralizing. What About His Own Big Lie?

    George W. Bush

    The 20th anniversary of September 11 is behind us now, but the George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour continues unchecked, and the cognitive dissonance surrounding it remains thicker than the frosting on my daughter’s last birthday cake. “He seems decent compared to the other guy,” I overheard someone say. It was almost too much to bear.

    I suppose it would have been impossible to pass the day without Bush making an appearance, but it would have been nice if he had kept it simple: “That was awful, I’m sorry for “fixing the facts around the policy” and lying the country into two failed calamity wars that started a bunch of other wars and torturing people and spying on everyone and looting the Treasury and dropping a giant turd on your future, so I’m going to go paint in Kennebunkport for the remainder of my years and never be seen again until they put me in the ground. Bye, y’all.”

    Would that it were so. Instead, the foulest failson of fearsome privilege went and made himself a bit of news on Saturday by alluding that Donald Trump’s domestic terrorism brigades are not such a good thing for the country. He named no names, but even that infamously obtuse man can pop a cap in a fish when it’s in a very small barrel.

    Speaking from the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, memorial for the passengers of Flight 93, Bush alluded to “growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within.” That got everyone’s attention in a hurry.

    “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush continued. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

    Quick note: When the U.S. withdrew from Bush’s war in Afghanistan, some of Donald Trump’s favorite Proud Boys were vocally thrilled, considering the Taliban’s actions a worthy roadmap for their own plans. “Little cultural overlap, George?” More than you and your Republican pals may want to think.

    To be fair, this wasn’t the first time Bush gave Trump and his minions a soft serving of the back of his hand. After the 1/6 insurrection, Bush said, “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic,” adding that he was “appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election.” Again, no names, but the inference was unmistakable … though I winced hard at the time to hear Bush, of all people, use the (notably racist) term “banana republic” after gaining the presidency by way of the bag job they call the 2000 election.

    Had Bush stopped there, this column probably would not exist … but, of course, he didn’t stop there. “A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” he said in Shanksville. “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”

    Full stop, what?

    You know what year was worse than 2001? 2002. That was the year the swelling started to go down after 9/11 and Bush’s people, along with their allies in Congress and the news media (most of the news media, not just Fox), went full-tilt into fearmongering and brazen racism. Bush said many nice things about Muslims and peace and getting along, while his administration arrested Muslims by the score and slapped together anti-Muslim no-fly lists that included 4-year-old children.

    2002 was the year of “Watch what you say” from the press secretary, well-timed terror “alerts” that seemed to come along a few minutes after any negative story about the administration hit the wires, and WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA whenever anyone dared question the lethal course we were taking. 2002 was the first full year of the war in Afghanistan, and unbeknownst to most of us, was also the year when the groundwork for the Iraq War WMD lies was being prepared. The torture of Muslims around the world began in full not long after.

    “At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith,” said Bush in Shanksville. “That is the nation I know. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.”

    According to the FBI, hate crimes against Muslims had increased 1,617 percent by the end of 2001. Mosques were vandalized and burned, and those seeking to worship at them were brutalized. George W. Bush was not personally directing violence against these communities, but in his quest to maximize his power after 9/11, he wound the country up so tight with a cocktail of fear and patriotic balderdash that racist violence was an obvious outcome, and it was. There is little chance Trump’s rampant anti-Muslim bigotry would have bloomed as well as it did without the Bush era preparing the ground first.

    That is the nation I know, Mr. Bush, and you had a heavy hand in creating it … which brings me back around to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. The country, and in particular the news media, spent the weekend gazing deeply into its navel wondering, “What does it all mean? How did we come to this dismal place after 20 years?”

    A primary answer, of course, should have been “the Bush administration,” which presided over 9/11 and got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. That triple play served to put us down in this deep hole, but few people in positions of responsibility seem willing to say it. The TV news people want no part of it, though their role is almost equally bleak.

    Many are rightly worried about the ongoing effects of Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election being stolen. What about Bush’s “Big Lie” regarding WMD in Iraq? Cognitive dissonance is what. That deliberate decision to mislead the country into a two-decade war has cost us countless lives and trillions of dollars. It touches every aspect of our existence now, and not for the good, but the corporate media and politicians largely refused to acknowledge it even on September 11, 2020, a day when a reckoning with what we’ve done and what we’ve become seemed just and proper.

    That didn’t happen, and George W. Bush was allowed out in public again without even the most minor public displays of accountability. Instead, we spent the weekend lamenting our sorry national estate while one of the principal authors of that collapse was treated like a returning hero.

    That is cognitive dissonance to the bone. It is our lasting collective inheritance from a former president who knew exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it for all those years ago. All you really need to remember is the smirk. The rest is aftermath, and the ashes in our hair.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 20 Years After 9/11, Republicans Are the Greatest Threat to the United States

    The early morning skyline is viewed on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan in New York, on September 11, 2021.

    Snapshot of the moment: On the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, days after the president announced vaccination mandates intended to stop the 9/11-every-two-days death toll caused by the COVID pandemic, a Washington, D.C., rally planned for next Saturday celebrating people who invaded the Capitol Building and tried to overturn a free and fair election may become the flashpoint for further political violence because an astounding number of Republicans have been brought to believe Democrats are running a cannibal pedophile ring with Hollywood “elites” as part of a larger plot to take over the world.

    Twenty years ago this morning, as I stood before a bank of televisions and watched the Twin Towers swaying in their death throes, I had a vision of what was to come. It was ridiculously incomplete, to be sure — Nostradamus himself couldn’t have pulled “President Trump” out of his hat — but those events in combination with the people in power at that moment assured me we were headed for some very dark places.

    Twenty years later, and all I can say is, “I had no idea it would be like this.” By “this,” I mean members of the very same Republican Party that pounced on 9/11 to wrap itself in the flag while attacking the Taliban and then Iraq has transmogrified into a pack of neo-Confederate would-be warriors, some of whom see the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan as a model for future endeavors. The GOP was bad enough back then — remember John Ashcroft shrouding the stone breasts of a statue so as not to be tempted, or something? — but this new breed is thoroughly around the bend.

    You can’t blame it all on an economy that left them behind. A whole lot of these Republicans drive cars that cost more than your average three-bedroom house — see: the gun-toting McMansion couple who got famous on the right-wing circuit for menacing peaceful protesters with an AR-15. What most of these people share in common is a frenzied terror that being white in America might be becoming less of a power ticket than it used to be, and hating Muslims 20 years ago has metastasized into hating everyone and everything that might threaten their centuries-old supremacy. Even you. Especially you.

    If that includes disrupting and destroying elections, so be it. David Frum, the George W. Bush speechwriter who helped that Republican president sell fear to a traumatized nation, made an observation once. “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically,” he predicted, “they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

    It turns out Frum was only half right. They are rejecting democracy wholesale (see: Trump’s “Big Lie”), but in their tumbledown rush to please a failed real estate mogul, they are also abandoning the flaccid “strictures” of basic conservatism. Look no further than Texas and Florida, where right-wing governors are dropping the hammer on local governments and small business over COVID mask mandates.

    I’m so old, I remember when local government and small business were the reasons conservatives claimed they existed in the first place. Now, they exist to please Trump, and have gone so far out into the ether that people like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, John Boehner and God-help-us even George W. Bush are considered to be too squishy-lefty to be tolerated in proper Republican circles.

    All that, and they have foot-soldiers now, shock troops dressed in their finest tac gear and armed to the last tooth. These brigands are insinuating themselves into the ranks of anti-mask and anti-vax fanaticism, to the point that any school board meeting on these topics is likely to descend into a parking lot brawl, with fathers screaming at school board members, “We will find you.”

    * * * * *

    Flipping through the TV channels on Thursday night, I came across the first game of the NFL season. Someone was performing the national anthem, and I caught “…gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” The thought came of itself, immediate and unbidden — “Not in Afghanistan, not anymore” — and I fell down the stairwell of 20 years, again.

    That’s been happening quite a bit lately, as this grim anniversary has lurked on the far side of news reports — try to contain your shock — about how our disastrous, useless, calamity war in that country came to a disastrous end. I mashed the buttons on the remote until some show about growing carrots came on, and I watched for a while in search of elusive calm; the very last thing I wanted to see was the God damned war machine flyover that has become a stinking staple of sporting events ever since the whole country went sideways into war, fear and failure.

    Please clap, right? Twenty years, 20 miles of bad road, millions dead, damaged or displaced, trillions of dollars deftly handed to the fortunate few who sell the bullets and the bombs, criminal profiteers and their political enablers walking unencumbered in the daylight, hauling down small fortunes in speakers fees, and more again in fees for commentator gigs with the murderously complicit corporate “news” media….

    All of it aftermath, the consequences of getting everything wrong since that day, and it has all only just begun, because a segment of the population spent 20 years bathing in far-right Republican Kool-aid — the best stuff for fundraising, don’tcha know — and came out of the tub orange with rage, oblivious to the absurdities and the brazen picking of their pockets. Every time I see a vehicle with a Trump sticker next to an American flag sticker next to a Confederate flag sticker, a tiny part of my prefrontal lobe turns into pus and leaks out of my ear.

    When did it start? Trump? The Tea Party? Newt Gingrich? Ronald Reagan? Richard Nixon? Barry Goldwater? Ayn Rand? Henry Ford? Appomattox? Wounded Knee? Jamestown? Cristóbal Colón? From what bleak corner came the original sin that set us pinwheeling into this vortex of racism, greed, ignorance and violence?

    Answer: “Yes.”

    Upon this anniversary, I offer a dollop of purest truth to that cohort: Osama bin Laden and his friends got more than everything they came for 20 years ago, and you are the proof.

    To the rest, I humbly proffer a bit of wisdom from Helen Keller: “Rights are things which we get when we are strong enough to make our claim to them good.”

    To properly consecrate this day, endeavor to be stronger than those who seek to shred your rights out of a misguided fear that they are losing theirs. Quite an enormous amount depends on it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Messianic Failure: Pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock

    Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration.  Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective.  Mature reflections may be permitted.  But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record.

    The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoes.  For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of its aims were achieved.

    The central feature to the war, which deserves its place of failure alongside such disastrously misguided concepts as the war on drugs, was its school boy incoherence.  It remained, and to an extent remains, a war against tactics, a misguided search reminiscent of the hunt for Lewis Carroll’s nonsense beast, the Jabberwock.  As with any such wars, it demands mendacity, flimsy evidence if, in fact, it needs any evidence at all.

    This perception was critical in placing the US, and its allies, upon a military footing that demanded false connections (a fictitious link of cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda), false capabilities (Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) and an exaggeration of the threat to US security (all of the above).

    With such evaluations of terroristic potential, a secular, domestic murderer such as Saddam could be transformed into a global threat armed with weapons of mass destruction, neither proposition being true as the attacks on 9/11 were executed.  In this hot house fantasy, the Iraqi leader was merely another pilot willing to steer a plane into an American target.

    This narrative was sold, and consumed, by a vast number of press houses and media outlets, who proved indispensable in promoting the GWOT-Jabberwock crusade.  Calculated amnesia and hand washing has taken place since then, pinning blame on the standard crew of neoconservatives, various Republicans and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.  “It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus,” Matt Taibbi points out, “which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia.”

    War sceptics such as Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura were removed from MSNBC while war cheerleaders thickened the airwaves with ghoulish delight.  The New York Times ran sympathetic columns and reviews for the war case, praising such absurd works as Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. “The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States,” wrote the grave Pollack, “is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.”

    The New Yorker also joined in the pro-war festivities.  David Remnick made his case in “Making a Case” by praising Pollack and dismissing containment as “a hollow pursuit” that would be “the most dangerous option of all.”  Jeffrey Goldberg, now at The Atlantic, was even more unequivocal in a staggeringly inexpert contribution headlined, “The Great Terror.” On his own hunt for the Jabberwock, Goldberg interviewed alleged terrorist detainees in a prison operated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Saddam Kurdish group in Iraq’s northern Kurdish area.  Having been permitted to interview the prisoners by the Union’s intelligence service (no conflict of interest there), Goldberg was informed that Saddam Hussein’s own spooks had “joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam [a local jihadist group]”; that the Iraqi leader “hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992”; that members of Al Qaeda escaping Afghanistan had “been secretly brought into the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam” and that Iraq’s intelligence service had “smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.”  And so rests the case for the prosecution.

    In March 2003, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting examined 393 on-camera sources who featured in nightly news stories on Iraq across a range of programs – ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  Of those 267 were from the United States; of the US official sources, only Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, registered his doubts.  Even then, he could hardly be said to be a firebrand contrarian, telling NBC Nightly News that he worried about exit plans, the extent of US troop losses and “how long we’re going to be stationed there”.

    Many of these outlets would be the same who obsessed about President Donald Trump’s attacks upon them as peddlers of “fake news” during his time in office.  Trump, drip-fed on conspiracy theories and fictions, knew who he was talking to.

    The security propagandists have not done much better.  With pious conviction, the vast security apparatus put in place to monitor threats, the warrantless surveillance regime exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the persistent interventions in the Middle East, have all been seen as beneficial.  “Terrorism of many sots continues domestically and internationally,” claims Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, “but the data is unmistakable that in most cases – and especially in the United States – it is both manageable and not nearly of the scale feared in 2001.”

    A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner advance a rather different proposition. “Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”

    The issue of what is marginal is a point of contention.  Former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security, a monster created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, are guarded in their assessments.  Bush’s Secretary Michael Chertoff admits to being “hesitant” in saying “we are safer, or less”.  He prefers focusing on scale.  “We haven’t had an attack of that scale since 9/11, and we’ve also been very good about keeping dangerous people out of the country.”  Alas, domestic threats had emerged, notably on the Right, while jihadi sympathisers lurk.

    Janet Napolitano, who occupied the office under the Obama administration, waffles in her reading.  “Are there some things that we’re safer on now than we were on 9/11?  Absolutely.  Are there new risks that have evolved or multiplied or grown since 9/11?  Absolutely.   To put it shortly, on some things, we’re definitely safer.”  Napolitano is up with a jargon that says nothing at all: “risks are not static”; the environment is “constantly changing”. “DHS needs to continue to be agile and to adapt.”

    The smorgasbord of modern terrorism, a good deal of it nourished by cataclysmic US-led interventions, is richer than ever.  “We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11,” Elizabeth Neumann, DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel last month.  “That’s very sobering, as a counterterrorism person.”  Preparing the grounds for the imminent exit from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden reasoned that keeping US troops in the country as a permanent counter-terrorist force was no longer a tenable proposition.  Terrorism as a threat had “become more dispersed, metastasising around the globe”.  The folly of pursuing the GWOT jabberwock shows no sign of abating.

    The post Messianic Failure: Pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • After 20 years of war, we’re getting an Afghanistan inquiry. But it’s not the one we need.

    The UK Defence Committee has proposed an inquiry into the recent, messy end of the 20 year war in Afghanistan. The scrutiny body has laid out a series of questions it wants answered. But it’s far from the inquiry we need into the decades-long disaster.

    Committee chair Tobias Elwood MP said:

    The sheer speed of the Taliban takeover following our withdrawal from Afghanistan sent shockwaves across the world. After twenty years of war, the images of Taliban fighters celebrating victory on the streets of Kabul are sobering. It has been a dark and troubling time for the West and supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide.

    Pot, kettle?

    Certainly the resurgent Taliban is no friend of human rights and democracy. But this isn’t the whole story. The scope of the inquiry will not extend to the legacy of human rights abuses carried out in Afghanistan by the West and its allies.

    There is no mention in the proposal of the bombings, the night raids, the drone attacks or the Western-trained death squads – nor the huge profits made by arms firms during the war.

    The questions proposed are very narrow in scope, often focusing on recent events only. It also covers whether the disaster will affect future UK wars and occupations. One question reads:

    What effect will the withdrawal have on future operations, and what will be the impact on the willingness of local personnel to work with, and support, the UK in future operations?

    A key priority, then, seems to be the next war. Wherever that will be…

    A real inquiry?

    PM Boris Johnson has already rejected the idea of a proper inquiry, as The Canary reported recently. Yet other voices are demanding that the war is properly scrutinised.

    Among them is former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He challenged Johnson on the matter in the Commons on 7 September.

    Others have warned that there will be no accountability. Former military officer Frank Ledwidge is among them. And he said this was the case despite the Afghan war being more damaging than the Iraq War in “every respect”. He added:

    Over the past 20 years, 457 members of the armed forces have been killed in Afghanistan – and thousands more ruined for life. We don’t count the suicides. We killed thousands of non-combatants in Helmand, and many more insurgents.

    Truth and justice

    There can be no meaningful peace without justice. This is as true in Afghanistan as anywhere else. And that will never be achieved by another narrow inquiry which amounts to the UK warmongering class marking its own homework once again.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Stag Sgt Vince Mancilla

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Fallujah: My Lost Hometown

    An illustration in shades of blue and yellow shows drones turning into birds over a small town.

    This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.

    It was the first day of summer vacation in France, and I was unusually melancholic for an 8-year-old. I lived in a little town outside Paris and all my friends had left to visit their families in the provinces. The morning was blue, unusually cold and felt decidedly lonesome. I decided to approach my sullen father with a question about Iraq, the country he had fled in the ’70s as a dissident: “Baba, do we even have a family?”

    Sensing my dismay, my father smiled, took out a piece of paper and began writing down names. He didn’t stop until he’d filled the page with nearly a hundred names of family members: Auday, Mazen, Riad, Nahla, Soad, Hasna. … I practiced saying them. One name in particular stood out to me: Fallujah. My father had circled the word and written right next to it, “our hometown.” 

    I carried the page with me, reading and rereading it until I had memorized as many names as I could. My father told me that every one of these people knew my name and had seen photographs of me. We hadn’t spoken to them because Iraq was at war with Iran and telephone calls were rare. 

    I was struck by the paradox of my situation: born in Paris when really, I belonged to Fallujah. 

    One summer day in 1988, we finally received that long-awaited phone call: The war was over! A year later, my mother, my sister and I found ourselves on an Iraqi Airways plane bound for Baghdad, then Fallujah. 

    Of course, it’s hard to say the name Fallujah today in Europe or the United States without instantly conjuring up images of war, destruction and battle-hardened anti-American jihadis. What does the world know of Fallujah besides its destruction by U.S. forces in 2004 and its 2014 conquest by the Islamic State group? From my experience, almost nothing. But that empty space is where my history and my family’s history reside. 

    Fallujah is the city where my parents were born, a clean, green city bordered by the Euphrates – or Al-Furat – River, after which I was named. It wasn’t as exciting as Baghdad, a much larger and wealthier city, but its greatest charm was the world of family it opened up. During my first visit, it was exhilarating to meet aunts and uncles and cousins in the flesh, people whose lives I’d only been able to imagine until then. After years of feeling isolated in France, as one of the only Iraqi families we knew, I was overwhelmed to discover that I belonged to a warm and loving community of more people than I could count. 

    Feurat Alani and his sister sit atop a car parked on the banks of a river. Three uncles stand around them.
    Feurat Alani (second from right) and his sister on the banks of the Euphrates River in Fallujah with his uncles in 1989. Credit: Courtesy of Feurat Alani

    1989 was a year of peace, sadly an anomaly in Iraq’s recent history. In the years that followed, the lightness and joy of my first visit began to fade. When I returned in 1992, an unstoppable United Nations Security Council-imposed embargo had just begun to set in, and by 1995, the weight of the sanctions hung heavy over Iraq. Fallujah began to fold in on itself. Everyone was hungry. More and more of my cousins were dropping out of school to work in the local markets. When I left Iraq at the end of that visit, I didn’t know if or when I would return. I wanted to just be a teenager and focus on my life in France.

    The turning point came on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember the shock and grief watching the news on that fateful Tuesday. I remember phone calls of disbelief and tears from my cousins in Iraq. But as Bush administration officials wasted no time in building their case for invading Iraq, a slow horror set in about what this emerging narrative – however fraudulent – could mean for my hometown. It was this narrative, coming out of 9/11 and daily conversations with my father, that pushed me back to Iraq and into journalism. 

    My father had fled Iraq after being imprisoned by Saddam Hussein for spreading Communist ideas and building an opposition to his authoritarian rule. During the lead-up to the war, we talked about his activism in Iraq and his fears and hopes for the future every day. I knew I had to go back myself and tell stories about what Iraqis were going through. 

    And so for a decade, I made Baghdad my base and reported across the country for a range of French and international outlets on everything from the fallout of the U.S. invasion to the rise of the Islamic State group. But my most powerful stories – and life lessons – came from Fallujah and my family.  

    The horror of reporting on bodies buried in the local football stadium after the deadly battles of Fallujah in April and November 2004 was surpassed only by recognizing some of the names on the makeshift tombstones. Three of my cousins died during the fighting and are buried there. 

    Headstones fill a sandy lot. A brick wall stands at one end.
    The Martyrs’ Cemetery was previously a football stadium in Fallujah. Credit: Yvon Le Gall

    A fourth cousin had joined the insurgency but was caught and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. When he was released a year later, he decided to enroll in the newly created Iraqi police force. He was killed a week later by al-Qaida in Iraq, which called him a traitor for joining any part of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government. 

    As I was trying to make sense of the senseless violence and the sectarian nightmare that was unfolding in Iraq, I learned that my uncles, all of whom had been in the Iraqi military, had joined different sections of the anti-American insurgency: Salafi, Sufi, nationalist, independent. I was initially surprised by the diversity of ideology in a city that had always seemed homogenous on its face, essentially an army town, which in Saddam’s time also meant a Sunni town. But mostly, I was uncomfortable with how the fighting had changed my uncles. One of them, a decorated veteran of the war with Iran, reminded me that resistance to an occupying force was legitimate under international law. But I also saw the rage that swept across his face each time an American military convoy passed through the rubble of our hometown. It terrified me.

    This is when my father planned his first visit to post-invasion Iraq. A few days after he arrived, he ran into an old friend he hadn’t seen in 30 years at a cafe they both used to love in Baghdad. Minutes after the encounter, two young men walked in and shot his friend, killing him on the spot. We later learned that the friend had been suspected of working with the Americans. My father left Iraq soon after and, after three decades of holding out hope of returning and playing a role in his country, applied for French citizenship.

    By 2007, I could no longer ignore the stories I’d been hearing about an uptick in the number of birth defects among babies born in Fallujah. My friend Abu Yunis, a former football player who became my fixer and guide in the city, told me about babies dying soon after birth and deformed children growing up in hiding. His descriptions were so fantastical that I had struggled to believe him. But after he started sending me photographs, I started investigating the phenomenon for French television. I interviewed Iraqi families, medical researchers, doctors, scientists, weapons experts, as well as Marines who had fought in Fallujah. Doctors reported a sharp uptick in birth defects after the invasion. No one knew exactly what had caused it, but one theory was that toxic contamination caused by the war might be responsible. One doctor in Fallujah told me she was so overwhelmed by seeing 1 in 5 babies being born with deformities that her only advice to people in the city was to stop having children. 

    Even after most American troops left the country, policies the United States put in place – like the disbanding of the army, the de-Baathification of government institutions, and the imposition of a sectarian political system – continue to haunt Iraq. There’s no other way of putting it: The war has left Iraqis a legacy of death. Each year, the Fallujah I knew and loved slips further away. But this history, as bloody and painful as it is, matters and should not be forgotten. There’s no official count of how many Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began. There’s no memorial for all the Iraqis who’ve died terrible, violent deaths. Or for those who’ve died of hunger or disease as a result of the war. 

    As a French Iraqi, I’m used to translating Iraq for a French audience, right from when I returned from my first visit in 1989 and tried explaining what life in Iraq was like to my school friends. But I also think of my role as an archivist, a keeper of memories, both joyful and hard – my own and my family’s and of the people in Fallujah and across Iraq. It’s why I became a journalist, to insist on recording the history of our present moment, however imperfect and incomplete it is. It’s the only way I can piece together the full picture of what happened to Fallujah, my lost hometown. 

    This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

    Feurat Alani can be reached at feurat@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Feurat.

    Fallujah: My Lost Hometown is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Forever Wars

    Since 9/11, the power of the U.S. military has been felt around the world in the name of rooting out terrorism. But at what cost? From Fallujah in Iraq to tiny villages in Afghanistan and Yemen, Reveal reporter Anjali Kamat talks to three journalists about how America’s so-called war on terror has shaped an entire generation. 

    Anand Gopal is a foreign journalist who traveled across the Afghan countryside, meeting with Taliban commanders and trying to understand how people understood the war. He says when U.S. President George W. Bush divided the world into those who are “with us” and those who are “with the terrorists,” it was an oversimplification and had tragic consequences for Afghanistan. Within months of the invasion, the Taliban wanted to surrender, but 9/11 was fresh and the U.S. said no. Instead, the military allied with anti-Taliban warlords and incentivized them to hunt down “terrorists.” Gopal says thousands of innocent people were arrested, tortured and killed – which only galvanized the Taliban and drew more recruits to their ranks. 

    To many Americans, Fallujah is remembered as the site of two brutal battles where many Americans died during the invasion of Iraq. But to journalist Feurat Alani, it’s also his parents’ hometown. While American TVs filled with images of the city as a jihadist stronghold, Alani knew it was a bustling city full of regular people whose lives would be forever changed by the invasion. Alani recounts precious memories of Fallujah, like swimming in the Euphrates River with his cousins and seeing football matches with his uncles. But after the invasion, his family fell apart and the city was reduced to rubble. The football stadium turned into a cemetery, and joyful moments there became somber walks through gravestones.   

    Finally, journalist and filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad talks about what America’s post-9/11 wars have done to Yemen, where drone strikes became part of everyday life for civilians. Al Ahmad recounts what it felt like to ride in a pickup truck, wondering if she would be targeted as the sound of a drone buzzed overhead. She saw on the ground how the tactics of the war on terror in Yemen led to resentment and hostility among people whose lives were upended. While the 9/11 attacks happened 20 years ago, Al Ahmad says that for people in other places, bombings, airstrikes and drone attacks have never stopped. “They’re still living the nightmare that people in New York lived for the day,” she says.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Twenty Years Of Phony Tears About 9/11

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The mass media are churning out articles and news segments commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, many of them featuring adoring retrospectives of their celebrity president’s actions as a US senator that day. Biden’s ceremonial PR tour to New York City, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon can be expected to receive a great deal of coverage as outrage swells over the president’s controversial new nationwide vaccine mandate.

    And it’s all just so very, very stupid. This nation which has spent twenty years weeping about its victimization with Bambi-eyed innocence reacted to 9/11 with wars which killed millions and displaced tens of millions and ushered in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism which has funneled trillions of dollars to some of the worst people in the world.

    Compared to the horrors the United States unleashed upon the world under the justification of 9/11, 9/11 itself was a family trip to Disneyland. The death and destruction visited upon Iraq alone dwarfs the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 by orders of magnitude; hell, this was true of the death and destruction the US had been inflicting on Iraq even before 9/11.

    In a saner, more emotionally intelligent world, it is those deaths that Americans would be focused on this September the 11th.

    There’s a great thread being shared around on Twitter right now by someone who found a book full of political cartoons published in the wake of 9/11, and it’s a perfect reminder of just how insane people were being driven by mass media manipulation during that time. The brazen Islamophobia, the flag-waving jingoism, the mawkish histrionics and the government bootlicking contained in those vapid comics are like an emotional time portal back to the lizard brain mentality of that point in history. I especially recommend it to those who are too young to remember how people came to support the monstrous foreign policy decisions made in the aftermath of 9/11.

    It’s also an excellent lesson into why it is always best to avoid being swept up in the emotionality of a major event that’s getting a lot of narrative push, no matter how loudly the mass media are shrieking about it and no matter how many of the people around you get swept up in it.

    There was no real reason Americans needed to respond to 9/11 with slobbering patriotism and the banging of war drums. It would have made sense for everyone to feel shocked, afraid, angry and sad, but that’s all that would have happened had their minds not been manipulated by the mass media and the Bush administration into believing that the sane response to a terrorist attack is to start launching full-scale regime change invasions of sovereign nations.

    Americans could just as easily have felt sad for a bit, and had that be the end of it. Imagine. Imagine what a better world we’d be living in if the public had not consented to wars and had instead just felt their feelings for however long it took to feel them, and had that be that.

    Without being told so by solemn-looking pundits and politicians, it never would have occurred to ordinary people that the sane response to an attack by Al Qaeda was to invade and occupy Afghanistan, much less Iraq. People would’ve expected to see the individuals responsible for the attacks captured and brought to justice, just as they’d seen happen with every other terrorist attack in their country, but on their own it would never have occurred to them to think of it as an “act of war” for which wars were an appropriate response.

    But wars were planned. The US had already been strategizing to oust the Taliban before 9/11. Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for the Iraq invasion within hours of the planes striking. Further wars were planned within days. The official 9/11 narrative itself was riddled with gaping plot holes. And mass media pundits were fired if they didn’t support the Iraq invasion.

    So people were psychologically conditioned by mass-scale propaganda to believe that 9/11 was some unforgivable atrocity so egregious that it could only be paid for by rivers of blood. And that conditioning remains today, as we will see from brainwashed empire pundits weeping their crocodile tears on the 20th anniversary of an event which, compared to the consequences of their government’s retaliation, wasn’t actually a very big deal.

    It would have been infinitely better for everyone if America had done nothing, absolutely nothing, in response to 9/11, or better yet if it had left the Middle East altogether to make sure there are no extremist groups wanting them dead due to their actions there. But, again, wars were planned. And the public was psychologically brutalized into accepting them.

    This is what we should all remember on 9/11. Not those 2,977 deaths on US soil. As sad as they were, they’ve been grieved more than enough by the general public. Now it’s time to begin addressing the giant stain upon our collective soul that is the vastly greater evils those deaths were exploited to justify.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty

    It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces.  After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed.

    With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion.  Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that.  In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.

    The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction”.

    When those elusive WMDs proved stubbornly elusive, PW shifted his emphasis from security rationales to one of liberation.  Along the way he blamed the “consensus judgment of the intelligence community” for not getting it right in the first place, an assessment verging on the mendacious.

    While Saddam Hussein was a high grade butcher and villain to many of his people, it is hard to credit him with the Bond villain, pulp view Wolfowitz gives him.  Evidence chasers such as Ben Bonk at the Central Intelligence Agency were frustrated in being thrown at the fruitless effort to link Saddam to al-Qaeda.  Intelligence operatives were effectively being leaned upon to confect the record and find justifications.

    In 2013, Wolfowitz was still insisting on uncertainty as a principle.  “We still don’t know how all of this is going to end.”  He accepted that the decapitation of the Iraqi leadership without an immediate substitute might have been unwise.  The “idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them” was erroneous.

    That did not matter.  The threat was there and present, growing like a stimulated bacillus.  Depraved and disoriented, he takes the argument that invading Iraq at the time was appropriate because it would have had to happen in any case. Saddam was street store vendor, sponsor and patron of terrorism (he never defines the dimension of this, nor adduces evidence) and needed to be dealt with.  The sword would eventually have to be unsheathed.  “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”

    In 2003, the aptly named Jeffrey Record reflected his surname’s worth by taking a hatchet to the Wolfowitz view in a scathing assessment for the Strategic Studies Institute.  In declaring a global war on terrorism (GWOT), the Bush administration had identified a range of states, weapons of danger, terrorists and terrorism while conflating “them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.”  Not sloppy, is Record.

    He goes on to note, relevantly, the conflation premise: that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were seen, amateurishly, “as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.”  This “strategic error of the first order” ignored “critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to US deterrence and military action” led to “an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq.  The result: “a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism” and the diversion of “attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda.”

    The 9/11 Commission Report, despite noting “friendly contacts” between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi officials at various points, similarly found “no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative personal relationship.”  Nor was there “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

    Critics suggest incompetence and bungling in the invasion of Iraq.  They exclude venality and calculation.  Wolfowitz, as if anticipating a prosecution in some faraway court, has been busy covering his tracks and pointing the finger at other decision makers further up the greased pole.  The top suspect: current retiree amateur painter President George W. Bush.  “I don’t think I ever met the president alone.  I didn’t meet him very often.  [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it.  And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?”  What a merry band they make.

    Wolfowitz, for the defence, always has to play some useful (or useless) idiot card, proffered from the surrounds of the tired lecture circuit or the American Enterprise Institute.  He is ideologically inclined, evidentially challenged, and keen to accept material that confirms his prejudice rather than contradicts it.  When found wanting about his decisions on accepting, for instance, the bargain basement material of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, he returned to common cultural themes.  “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us.”

    Perhaps, after two decades, it is time to sort the books, order the records and call forth those architects of war who, dismally deluded and acting with criminal intent and incompetence, plunged a good part of the globe into conflict, leaving a legacy that continues to pollute with tenacious determination.  Along the way, we can mourn the dead of 9/11 and all the dead that followed.

    The post Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

    Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.

    We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.

    That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.

    Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy.

    Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”

    “You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”

    Even the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.

    By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place.

    In Libya and Syria, only ten years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11th by recruiting and arming Al Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

    The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican Senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

    But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.

    Trump and Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the September 11th attack. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.

    Barbara Lee, the only Member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’s war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half:  $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000, one would think that Rep. Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

    Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for healthcare, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

    These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people; and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged.

    Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.

    But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.

    The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, ”when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

    Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.

    The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

    By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

    A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.

    America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.

    But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard.

    — We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. CODEPINK is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future” — please join us!

    — We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

    — We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others — never to the United States.

    — And we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.

    Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

    The post How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Unlearnt Lessons Of 9/11, Twenty Years Out

    Twenty years after 9/11, America is less safe, a deeply troubled country, ravaged by COVID, racism, inequality, extreme weather from global warming and political strife. Its political leaders have embraced an Orwellian approach to the truth in which war is peace and large segments of our society are polarized by widely divergent concepts of reality.

    On the afternoon of 9/11, with the American media joining with the leaders of the two major parties in banging the drum for war, I wrote one of the first statements calling for America to seek peace instead, to not turn our cries of grief into a call for war. Eventually, many joined with early voices such as those of the Green Party and the War Resisters League in warning that peace and freedom both at home and abroad would be undermined if the United States went to war instead of participating in international criminal prosecution of this crime against humanity.

    The post The Unlearnt Lessons Of 9/11, Twenty Years Out appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The UK claims some wars were moral missions. But it doesn’t count how many it kills.

    UK governments often claim their wars and occupations have a moral element. And the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libyan wars were no different.

    But a recent Freedom of Information request by the research charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) calls that claim into question. The charity has discovered that the UK military doesn’t even keep a count of the civilians it kills.

    In a new blog, AOAV’s Murray Jones reported that the MOD had said the information was “not held”.

    Only data on the deaths of non-UK civilians employed by the military was offered. Reportedly, 38 died between 2015 and 2021.

    Contested figures

    Actual figures of civilian deaths from UK military action are hard to pin down. As AOAV points out, some official estimates seem very odd.

    In the air war against ISIS, according to MOD figures, only a single civilian died.

    The MOD has been repeatedly challenged over its claim that its bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria (Op SHADER) has killed and injured an estimated 4,315 enemies, but only resulted in one civilian casualty between September 2014 and January 2021.

    AOAV also argues that due to the bombing in cities, a figure of zero civilian casualties seems optimistic.

    It’s highly likely that civilian deaths have been under-reported, as 1,000 targets were hit by the RAF during its bombing campaign in the cities of Raqqa and Mosul.

    Self denial

    AOAV previously revealed that the Royal Air Force does not always keep count of the amount of bombs it uses in areas filled with civilians.

    In August, AOAV revealed that the RAF does not keep a specific record of how many bombs they have dropped on populated areas, raising questions over how they are measuring civilian harm.

    The organisation suggested under-reporting may be due to the UK’s very high threshold of evidence for civilian deaths. While the US relies on a “balance of probabilities approach”, the UK requires “hard fact” totally innocent deaths.

    In their new article, AOAV cited Chris Cole, director of Drone Wars UK, who described the MOD approach as:

    A kind of internal structural self-denial, where it has become seemingly impossible for the MoD even to accept that civilian casualties have occurred.

    We may never know the true cost in innocent civilian lives. But it seems that the UK’s claims to be a humanitarian force in the world are, at best, massively optimistic.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Corporal Steve Follows.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Afghanistan:  a military and an “aid” failure

    While recent events have destroyed the credibility of militarists who pushed for the invasion and 20-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, the moral bankruptcy of their supporters in the aid industry has also been stunningly revealed.

    A quick Taliban victory over the foreign trained “Afghan army” at least (momentarily) embarrassed Canadian militarists. But what about their camp followers in the NGO universe?

    Over the past two decades Ottawa has plowed over $3.6 billion in “aid” into Afghanistan. During this period the central Asian country has been the top recipient of official assistance, receiving about twice the next biggest destination, another victim of Canadian foreign policy, Haiti.

    While Afghanistan is undoubtedly deserving of aid, 10 countries have a lower GDP per capita and 20 countries have a lower life expectancy. So why the focus on Afghanistan? Because it was the place where policymakers thought aid was most likely to have positive results? Of course not. The aid was delivered to support the Canadian, US, and NATO military occupation.

    Canadian personnel repeatedly linked development work in Afghanistan to the counterinsurgency effort. “It’s a useful counterinsurgency tool,” is how Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Doucette, commander of Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, described the Canadian International Development Agency’s work in Afghanistan. Development assistance, for instance, was sometimes given to communities in exchange for information on combatants. After a roadside bomb hit his convoy in September 2009, Canadian General Jonathan Vance spent 50 minutes berating village elders for not preventing the attack. “If we keep blowing up on the roads,” he told them, “I’m going to stop doing development.”

    The CF worked closely with NGOs in Afghanistan. A 2007 parliamentary report explained that some NGOs “work intimately with military support already in the field.” Another government report noted that the “Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) platoon made up of Army Reserve soldiers organizes meetings with local decision-makers and international NGOs to determine whether they need help with security.”

    The aid was also a public relations exercise. At politically sensitive moments in the war Canadian officials sought to showcase newly built schools or dams to divert attention from more unsavory sides of military conflict. Alarmed about a growing casualty list and other negative news, in fall 2006, the Prime Minister’s Office directed the military to “push” reconstruction stories on journalists embedded with the military. Through an access to information request the Globe and Mail obtained an email from Major Norbert Cyr saying, “the major concern [at Privy Council Office] is whether we are pushing development issues with embeds.” In an interview with Jane’s Defence Weekly’s Canadian correspondent, a journalist described what this meant on the ground. “We’ve been invited on countless village medical outreach visits, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and similar events.” The hope was that reporters embedded at the Canadian base in Kandahar would file more stories about development projects and fewer negative subjects.

    At a broader level aid was used to reinforce the foreign occupation. The aim was to support the Afghan forces allied with the US-led occupation. Canada’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan led to a drop in aid, and now that US forces have withdrawn, Canadian aid will likely dry up.

    Historically, military intervention elicits aid. Call it the ‘intervention-equals-aid’ principle or ‘wherever Canadian or US troops kill, Ottawa provides aid’ principle.

    Ottawa delivered $7.25 million to South Korea during the early 1950s Korean War. Tens of millions of dollars in Canadian aid supported US policy in South Vietnam in the 1960s and during the 1990-91 Iraq war Canada provided $75 million in assistance to people in countries affected by the Gulf crisis. Amidst the NATO bombing in 1999-2000 the former Yugoslavia was the top recipient of Canadian assistance. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq Canada announced a $300 million aid package to that country.

    As mentioned above, Haiti has been the second largest recipient of Canadian aid over the past two decades. While an elected, pro-poor government was in place between 2001 and 2004 Canadian aid to Haiti was reduced to a trickle. But after the US, French and Canadian invasion ousted thousands of elected officials in 2004, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti. Throughout the 15-year UN occupation, Canadian aid continued to flow.

    In the years after invasions by foreign troops, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti were the top recipients of Canadian “aid”. The thread that connected those three countries was the presence of Canadian or US troops.

    Should it even be called aid when it comes along with foreign soldiers? A better description would be the “break it and you pay for it” principle.

    Where is the discussion of all this in the NGO world? Canada’s international assistance policy gets a free ride — of course, we’re a force for good — in the mainstream media. But does anyone really believe it’s good for “aid” to be tied to military occupation?

    Will those who uncritically promote increased Canadian “aid” discuss its ties to the disaster in Afghanistan? Are any of the NGOs that followed foreign troops to Afghanistan speaking out about their error?

    • Yves Engler’s Stand on Guard For Whom?  A People’s History of the Canadian Military is now available.

    The post Afghanistan:  a military and an “aid” failure first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival

    Mythology of humans’ natural impulse for empathy

    Warfare has been a plague haunting the human species ever since our evolution to become Homo Sapiens, finally, around 300,000 years ago in Africa. Etymologically, homo means human and sapiens means wise or knowledgeable. One can see that in this 18th century anthropocentric characterization of our species, the notion of wisdom was highly overrated. What made our common Homo sapiens ancestors any wiser than the Neanderthals that they would eventually invade and annihilate? History is narrated by victors, therefore we were told that Homo sapiens were highly superior to the so-called brutal Neanderthals. It could be true in territorial ambitions, and some technological aspects, but it remains questionable in other area of social activity.

    Ultimately, a taste for adventure and conquest is what drove Homo sapiens to expand their territories on Earth. It would be utterly naive to think that this progressive form of colonization was accomplished through peaceful means. No, unfortunately for our species, a propensity for aggression, for domination through warfare was always present in Homo sapiens DNA.

    Wars of necessity or of choice: all wars are for profit

    Warfare in the 20th century was rather simple compared to today’s predicaments. Either during World War I or World War II, nations had traditional alliances which were usually respected and recognized by treaties. Usually formal declarations of wars were issued before a military action — with the exception of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl-Harbor. The two wars were sold by leaders to their respective populations as wars of necessity. In both cases, they were still wars fought by conscripts, as professional soldiers, a euphemism for mercenaries, are usually not eager to become cannon fodder.

    While the United States cautiously, one could say cowardly, stood on the sideline during World War I until 1917, the conflict unquestionably triggered the Russian revolution, as poor Russians conscripts refused to fight the tsar’s war. As Marxist ideas were quickly spreading elsewhere in Europe, many French soldiers refused to fight their German brothers for the sake of capitalism. Many conscripts then knew that the so-called war of necessity was a scheme of war for profit. At the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to pay an enormous amount to France, in gold, as war compensation. In the Middle East, in an even more substantial perennial spoils of war story, the two dominant empires of the time, the United Kingdom and France had grabbed for themselves the bulk of the Ottoman empire through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.

    If you analyze the war of necessity versus war of choice, and correlation of war for profit during World War II, in the case of the United States, first you wonder what took the US so long to enter the war alongside their allies France and England? The answer is often murky, as many major US corporations such as Ford Motor and General Motors, as well as policymakers such as Joe Kennedy (father of JFK), had either vested economic interests in Nazi Germany or were upfront in their support for Adolf Hitler.

    Photo Credit:  from the archive of Recuerdos de Pandora

    Further, once the United States was attacked by Japan and finally committed to the European part of the conflict against Germany, a large part of Detroit’s manufacturing sector was converted to military purposes. In the United States, it is arguably more this massive war effort than FDR’s New Deal which turned the US economy into a juggernaut, in a dramatic recovery from the Great Depression, which the Wall Street crash of 1929 had started. Warfare writes human history using blood and tears for ink, but the merchants of death of the military-industrial complex and their financial market affiliates always profit handsomely.

    If slavery or slave labor is the ideal structure for capitalism, any war, under any pretext, is the perfect business venture, as it provides a fast consumption of goods (weapons and ammunition), cheap labor force using the leverage of patriotism — defend the motherland or fatherland — and infinite money to rebuild once capitalism’s wars for profit have turned everything to ruins and ashes. After World War II, the US Marshall Plan was painted as some great altruistic venture, but, in fact, it justified a long-term occupation of Germany and incredibly lucrative contracts, some of them aimed at controlling West Germany’s economy and government.

    Photo Credit:  Gilbert Mercier

    Rise of conceptual wars: war on terror and war on Covid

    If the wars of the 20th century were conventional as they either opposed sovereign nations or were in the context of imperial-colonial setback, like the French war in Indochina, Algeria’s independence war against France, some were specifically defined by the Cold War era, like the Korea war. From World War II at the Yalta conference, two new empires had emerged as dominant: the United States and the USSR. The world had then the predictability of this duality. The collapse of the Soviet Union altered this balance, but it took a bit more than a decade to make a quantum leap.

    Almost exactly 20 years ago, an event, the September 11, 2001 attack, radically changed the dynamic, as it marked the start of the conceptual war on terror. Terror is an effect, an emotion. How can one possibly wage war against an emotion? However absurd conceptually, this turning point in history allowed more or less all governments worldwide to embark into surveillance, obsession for security and a crackdown on personal liberties. Using the shock and fear in the population, which followed the collapse of the New York City Twin Towers in the US, a form of police state was almost immediately born using new administrative branches of government like the Department of Homeland Security. We still live in the post 9/11 world, as that coercive apparatus keep dragging on.

    Photo Credit: US Army archive

    Just like in standard, more conventional warfare, capitalism doesn’t create crises like 9/11, but seems always to find ways to benefit from it. In the war-on-terror era, a narrative also popular with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, the beneficiaries were and still are the global military-industrial complex, private security apparatus more like small private armies, and layers of police forces. How can one go wrong in terms of maximum profit?

    In complete haste, and with a massive international support, using the trauma to influence worldwide public opinion, an attack on Afghanistan was launched by NATO’s invincible armada. Were the Taliban governing the country at the time responsible for 9/11? Not so. Their fault was to host the man who was arguably the architect of the attack: enemy-number-one Osama bin-Laden, of course. The fact that most of the pilots who flew the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were Saudi Arabian nationals was not even dismissed, it wasn’t even publicly considered by governments or the corporate controlled mainstream media.

    As matter of fact, many families of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack victims are still trying to get a sense of closure on a potential involvement of Saudi Arabia, at the highest level, in the tragedy to this day without much success, as a form of foreign policy Omerta seems to prevail in the US with the Saudis royal family. This was certainly not a war of necessity, it barely qualified as a war of choice, as it was a pure fit of anger against an individual and his relatively small organization, not even against a state.

    Photo Credit: US Army archive

    Twenty years later, back to square one, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan affairs, but NATO, the military coalition of the impulsive and ill informed, are still not candidly making mea culpa, and admitting their gross ineptitude and almost criminal negligence. Colossal failure was always written all over Afghanistan’s bullets ridden walls, mosques and even modest fruit stands! Quagmires were also perfectly predictable in the war on terror sequels in Iraq; Libya (using French/Anglo/UAE proxies); Syria (using proxy good Jihadists), then ISIS (once many of the good Sunni Jihadists somehow decided to turn bad). Described like this the 20-year war on terror’s horrendous fiascos sound like the theater of the absurd! Absurd for the successive policy makers and incompetent or corrupt planners, but tragic for the almost one million dead and their surviving families, the 38 million refugees or internally displaced, and countries like Libya, turned into wrecked failed states. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex, including the private contractors, has become more powerful than ever.

    The tragically failed policies of the past 20 years have to be quantified. According to Brown University Watson Institute, and this is a conservative estimate, the human cost of post 9/11 wars is around 800,000 in direct deaths; 38 million people worldwide is the number of war refugees and displaced persons collateral victims of the war on terror; and finally, the US war on terror spending from 2001 to 2020 was $6.4 trillion. All this money extracted from the US taxpayers, and enthusiastically approved in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, was injected into the private corporations of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, of course, to a lesser extent, and ultimately as a billionaire-making cash bonanza into Wall Street and all global financial markets. How it works is rather simple: below are two prime examples, among countless other similar schemes, to profit from the war machine.

    Photo Credit: from the Christopher Dombres archive

    One quick example of war for mega-profit comes to mind. Before he accepted to be George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney was the CEO of the giant construction, oil and mineral extraction firm Halliburton. Right before he started to campaign, he, of course, resigned from his CEO function and sold his huge Halliburton stock portfolio to avoid conflict of interests. Fast forward to 2003, and guess which firm is getting the lion share of private contracts for the Iraq war? Halliburton, of course. Coincidence? Hard to believe. Such example of vast sums of money being recycled from the taxpayers’ pocket book to the coffers of private companies war profiteers are countless.

    The other example is the major weapon systems manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin manufactures fighter jets like F-15, F-16, F-35, and F-21; helicopters like Blackhawks and Cyclone, as well as Drones. On January 19, 2000 the share value for Lockheed Martin was $12.10. By January 17, 2020 Lockheed Martin stock traded at $408.77 a share. The bottom line: who in the US Congress would dare to say no to funding the military-industrial complex via the US Defense Department budget? Basically nobody. It would be deemed unpatriotic and bad for the job market, considering that the military-industrial complex employs a lot of people.

    Terror is out, global pandemic is in

    One cannot help making an analogy between the war on terror and the new global war for profit, which is the war on Covid. As the war on terror is being exposed as a complete fiasco and receding in history’s rear view mirror, global capitalism needed something else. It magically materialized as a global biological warfare against a virus.What a golden opportunity! Since March 2020 — a bit later in the crisis actually — the beneficiaries of the war on Covid have been, not only pharmaceutical companies, but also digital giants that benefit from remote-location work due to measures like lockdowns, online commerce; and, finally, the global financial markets.

    France’s President Macron was, to my knowledge, the very first world leader to use the bellicose semantic of war on Covid. He did it in March 2020. We have seen previously that the war on terror has been immensely profitable for the nexus of global corporate imperialism, but the recent war on Covid could be even more profitable, as its protagonists/profiteers appear to be benevolent, even altruistic. The current push worldwide, and Macron was once again ahead of the game, is either to make vaccination mandatory, or blackmail the population with coercive measures like the Pass Sanitaire in France, to obey and comply.

    This is the calculus and assumption that all governments and biotech affiliates are likely making. Let’s say that they manage to make vaccination mandatory. Worldwide, you would have a captive market of around 7.8 billion people. Even if 800 million people globally resist vaccination, we are talking about an extraordinarily profitable market. At around $15 per dose for the best-adopted vaccines on the market, which are from Pfizer and Moderna, multiplied by two, or even better by three, as is now recommended by pharmaceutical companies and some governments, because of the Delta variant, we are talking about some serious cash flow. With booster jabs likely recommended down the line every nine months or so, we are talking about a biotech Eldorado!

    Photo Credit:  Jeremy Hunsinger

    As an example of the heavenly jolt of joy vaccines have already injected into the arms of the Masters of the Universe of global finance, Moderna stock on January 2, 2020 traded at $19.57 a share. On August 11, 2021, Moderna stock traded on Wall Street at $440.00 a share. It is rather obvious, besides various stimulus package schemes applied in all countries to boost economies and prevent a massive Covid economic recession, global financial markets, with the big hedge funds pulling the strings, have become addicted to vaccines. It is no wonder that all major Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already made vaccination mandatory for their employees. It is no wonder either, why stock markets, like the CAC40 in France, have reached record high despite a severe contraction of the real economy.

    I previously mentioned the real cost of the 20-year war on terror as being $6.4 trillion for the United States alone. It is not yet possible to quantify the real cost of the so-called global war on Covid. One can suspect it will be very high as well, and its human cost higher in term of diminished personal liberties. The negative side effects of the war on Covid are mainly sociological and psychological, as it has already increased human isolation and fragmented communities. This 18-month old pseudo war on a virus has also withdrawn global resources and focus from the only war of necessity, the one critical for our species survival: namely the war on climate collapse.

    War on climate collapse is a war against capitalism

    The war on Covid could even last longer than the war on terror. Cynically, the reason for this is that the war on Covid has worked wonders for the benefit of corporations and the super-rich. It has also allowed for governments that are supposed to be neoliberal economically and progressive socially to become paradoxically authoritarian. A prime example, in this instance, is again Emmanuel Macron’s government in France. As long as wars, invented or not, either conventional or conceptual, can be used to extract a profit, they will remain the modus operandi for the billionaire class and their political surrogates. It might sound Utopian, but let’s just imagine for a moment what humanity could do collectively to address the climate crisis existential threat, if we were going to implement a global policy of massive cuts in military spending and security apparatus.

    Trillion of dollars could be allocated to the true emergency that will determine our survival or extinction. What could be more critical than this for our children and grandchildren? Climate collapse is on its way. During this entire summer, large areas of Earth were on fire, and others were flooded. Killer storms will keep coming relentlessly at us. Before 2050 many coastlines will be submerged, causing more than 1 billion people worldwide to become the climate collapse refugees. This is not a projection or speculation, it is documented by the scientific community.

    Unfortunately, the reason why our Banana Republic styles of governments are not willing to fight this war of necessity, the war on climate change, is because it can only be really fought by getting rid of the capitalist system altogether. Radical approaches are needed, such as scrapping capitalism’s holy precept of permanent economic growth and its correlation of population growth. The remedies to try to mitigate the unfolding climate collapse would be many tough pills to swallow, because it’s about drastic systemic changes. Such as a zero-growth, sometime called negative-growth, economic model, which even Green parties at large do not embrace. The notion of Green New Deal is ludicrous. Green politicians either do not get it or are complete hypocrites if they are not also staunch anti-capitalists.

    Another issue almost never addressed by Green politicians anywhere is the one of overpopulation. The rapid growth of the human population is a fundamental factor for capitalism as it provides two critical elements: plenty of cheap labor as well as a continuously growing consumption base. Case in point, in 1850 or at the start of the industrial revolution, the global world population stood at around 1 billion people; currently, or 171 years later and not much time in term of human history, it stands at around 7.8 billion. Some demographic projections forecast that it will reach between 10 to 13 billion by 2100. Needless to say, from a purely physical standpoint, this is entirely unsustainable as the surface of Earth’s landmass has gone unchanged. The problem with overpopulation, as an issue, is that almost everyone in every culture rightly views his or her ability to procreate as a fundamental right. My News Junkie Post partner, Dady Chery, and I, we know that even to bring up overpopulation as an issue is extremely unpopular. However, it has to be done.

    Without a massive reduction in carbon emissions, we are on track to pass the fatal mark of a 2-degree Celsius global warming, not by 2050 but by 2035. In other words, a wrench has to be jammed into the gear of the infernal machine created by humans since the mid-19th century’s industrial revolution. Carbon emitting fossil fuels, of any kind, have to stay in the ground. Combustion vehicles should be banned promptly, and massive subsidies should be given to produce extremely affordable and fully electrical cars immediately.

    Photo Credit: US Army archive

    Many in the West point the finger at the big carbon emitters, which are China, India and Brazil. But they are not the only culprits for the nearly criminal inaction of our governing instances. The populations of countries that rely heavily on extraction must put a severe pressure on their politicians or vote them out of office. One thinks, of course, of the Gulf’s usual suspects like Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but other major players are almost as nefarious as far as having an economy built on energy or mineral extraction. A short list of the main countries heavily involved in the fossil fuel extraction business, either for domestic consumption or exports, would be: Russia, The United States, Canada, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran.

    Would the various radical changes – including capping human population growth- which seem to be objectively needed be painful? Certainly. But the alternative option, which is basically to keep the course of this giant high-speed bullet train without a pilot that is global capitalism, amounts to a medium-term collective suicide.

    The post Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gilbert Mercier.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Dogs and babies: how the savagery of the Afghanistan war is being re-written in pictures

    Soldiers helping kids and a former British marine trying to get rescue animals out of Kabul. These have become some of the dominant images of the western evacuation from Afghanistan. They’ve started to conceal brutal truths – decades in the making – some of which I witnessed there as a soldier and journalist. That cannot be allowed to happen.

    The images are heart-warming and sickly sweet. This is precisely the point of them: to humanise and soften a pointless, 20-year war that wreaked untold havoc on one of the poorest nations on earth.

    As an Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a journalist in the country, I think it’s worth reviewing what that record is before this sickly sweet PR comes to dominate. To do that we can take a look at just a few aspects of the war.

    Death toll

    Brown University’s Costs of War project, as reported by the US magazine Task and Purpose, registers an astonishing death toll in Afghanistan up to October 2018. Especially for a war which was meant to ‘liberate’ people.

    This toll includes 2,401 US military deaths, 3,937 contractor deaths, 58,596 Afghan military and police deaths, 1,141 allied military dead, and (a conservative estimate) 38,480 civilians killed. The number of wounded across all sides – both mentally and physically – is difficult to pin down.

    These figures don’t include the scores of Afghans killed and wounded at Kabul airport yesterday on 26 August. Nor the reported 13 US troops who died in the attack claimed by the local branch of ISIS.

    Drones

    Drones became a signature weapon of the War on Terror and were widely used in Afghanistan. Due to the secretive nature of their use, figures are hard to pin down. But The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) maintains a database to map and count deaths and strikes fairly accurately.

    TBIJ projects that between 2015 and today over 13,000 strikes have been carried out in Afghanistan. These resulted in between 4,126 and 10,076 deaths over that period. Drones, however, have been in use for much longer. I can recall as a young soldier posted to Kandahar Airfield in 2006, missile-laden Predator drones taking off and landing were a daily sight.

    Reports on the reality of the drone war, and its innocent victims, are widely available.

    Bombs

    The air war was another big part of the Afghan war – distinct from the drone war. As foreign troops drew down in recent years, bombing intensified in support of Afghan military operations. For instance, as reporter Azmat Khan told Democracy Now:

    the United States was bombing heavily parts of that country where there were fights against the Taliban raging. So, just to give some context, in 2019, the United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. So, I think it was something close to — more than 6,200 bombs that year, as they were trying to negotiate.

    The use of air power, she pointed out, boosted recruitment for the Taliban:

    You know, many of its more recent recruits were people who did lose loved ones and really wanted revenge for those casualties.

    House raids

    Night raids on Afghan homes were another key feature of the war. These involved special forces descending on Afghan’s houses at night, supposedly in search of terrorists. These became highly controversial. In fact, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s own cousin was killed in a raid.

    Later this role was handed to CIA-controlled Afghan death squads known as Zero Units. In 2020, I went back to Afghanistan to report on them. We met families whose relatives had been murdered in their homes. Another community was attacked in a night raid resulting in several deaths. This included a young boy whose father dug his body from the rubble of a mosque days later.

    Skewed

    There is no doubt that the working class soldiers in Kabul airport want to help the kids there. And clearly puppies and kitten have enormous appeal for the British public. But there’s a danger that these images skew our idea of what the Afghan war was actually about. The real story of the conflict is not one of rescuing kids and dogs. It’s one of twenty years of imperial violence and failure in a war that never needed to be fought.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Central Command Public Affairs

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Neocons Speak: Afghanistan as Political Real Estate

    When the tears dry, it is worth considering why there is so much upset about the fall of Kabul (or reconquest) by the Taliban and the messy withdrawal of US-led forces.  A large shield is employed: women, rights of the subject, education.  Remove the shield, and we are left with a simple equation of power gone wrong in the name of paternalistic warmongering.

    The noisiest group of Afghanistan stayers are the neoconservatives resentful because their bit of political real estate is getting away.  In being defeated, they are left with the task of explaining to the soldiery that blood was not expended in vain against a foe they failed to defeat.  “You took out a brutal enemy,” goes a statement from US President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, “and denied Al Qaeda a safe haven while building schools, sending supplies, and providing medical care.”  The couple throw in the contribution of Dr. Sakena Yacoobi of the Afghan Institute of Learning, behind the opening of “schools for girls and women around the nation.”

    Paul Wolfowitz, who served as Bush’s deputy defence secretary, is less sentimental in his assessment of the Afghanistan fiasco. To Australia’s Radio National, he was unsparing in calling the victors “a terrorist mob that has been hating the United States for the last 20 years.”  They had provided the launching ground for “one of history’s worst attacks on the United States” and were now “going to be running that bit of hostile territory.”

    Being in Afghanistan, he asserted, was not costly for the occupiers – at least to the US.  It made good sense in preventing it from “once again becoming a haven for terrorists”.  For the last year and a half, there had not been a single American death.  He chided the simpletons at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs who dared survey Americans with the question, “Would you like to leave [Afghanistan] and get out?”  They would have been far better framing it differently: “Do you support withdrawal if it means the country is going to be overrun by the same people who hated us 20 years ago and from where an attack that killed 3,000 Americans took place”.

    To talk about “endless wars” was also something to avoid.  In a reminder that the US imperial footprint remains global, Wolfowitz drew attention to the fact that Washington was hardly going to withdraw from South Korea, where it was still officially at war with the North.  It kept troops in countries it had previously been at war with: Germany and Japan.  Americans, he lamented, had not “been told the facts” by their politicians.

    Boiled down to its essentials, such a view has little time for Afghans with a country “more or less ungovernable for long periods of time”.  (What uncooperative savages.)  The Obama administration’s deployment of 100,000 soldiers had been an “overreach” with unclear intention.  It was far better to treat Afghanistan as a state to contain with “a limited commitment” of US forces rather than “extending to the idea that Afghanistan would become a latter-day Switzerland.”  Ringing the real estate, not advancing the people, mattered.

    Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, a caricature of US interventionist policies, never had much time for the withdrawal argument, either.  Earlier in August, with the Taliban humming along with speed in capturing a swag of provincial cities, Bolton warned that it was “literally [President Joe] Biden’s last chance to reverse his and Trump’s erroneous withdrawal policy.  When the Taliban wins, it compromises the security of all Americans.”

    Another voice from the neoconservative stable advocating the need for a continued boot print of US power was Max Boot, who thought it nonsensical to keep US troops in Iraq while withdrawing them from Afghanistan.  US forces needed, he wrote in the Irish Independent (July 29) “to stay in both countries to prevent a resurgence of the terrorist threat to the US and its allies.”  The “imperative” to prevent both countries from becoming “international terrorist bases” remained, but only one had an adequate military presence to provide insurance.  Decent of Boot to show such candour.

    The British, long wedded to the idea of empire as gift and necessity, have also piled onto the wagon of stayers, saying less about the merits of protecting Afghan citizens than keeping trouble boxed and localised.  “We will run the risk of terrorist entities re-establishing in Afghanistan, to bring harm in Europe and elsewhere,” feared General Sir Richard Barrons.  “I think this is a very poor strategic outcome.”

    British Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, a former captain in the Royal Green Jackets, went further by suggesting that plucky Britain best go it alone in the face of foolhardy US withdrawal.  “Just because the US chose to depart does not mean we should slavishly follow suit,” he exhorted. “Would it not make sense to stay close to the Afghan people given the importance of this bit of real estate?”

    The one who tops all of this off must be former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, always one given to evangelising wars waged in the name of a sinister, tinfoil humanitarianism.  As executive of an institute bearing his name (modest to a fault), he railed against a withdrawal executed “in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘forever wars’”.  Like Wolfowitz, he dismissed the use of such terms and comparisons, noting the diminishing troop deployment on Afghan soil and the fact that “no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.”

    Despite the withdrawal, Blair suggested that options were available to “the West” which needed some “tangible demonstration” that it was not in “retreat”.  A “list of incentives, sanctions and actions” had to be drawn up against the Taliban.  In doing so, his motivation was simple: that these turbaned fanatics represented a strategic risk, part of “Radical Islam” that had been “almost 100 years in gestation”.

    Far from ditching the prospect for future interventions, the high priest of illegal war is all-embracing of the formula.  “Intervention,” he opines, “can take many forms. We need to do it learning the proper lessons of the past 20 years according not to our short-term politics, but our long-term strategic interests.”  Be fearful for Afghanistan’s sovereignty, and woe to those lessons.

    The post The Neocons Speak: Afghanistan as Political Real Estate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • New Song: Give It Away, Uncle Sam

    I made this song for my dear darling Dad as a present for this coming Father’s Day which is held on the first Sunday in September in Australia. The words are his. They come from an impassioned poem he wrote from the depths of his guts when he heard the news that the pointless tragedy that was the US mission in Afghanistan had finally stuttered to an ignominious end.

    So this one is for all the boomer rebels who not only lit the spark, they maintain the rage to this day. I love you all. Thank you, sincerely, for your service. 

    ________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Will Americans Who Were Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored?

    Protest in Westwood, California 2002. Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

    That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

    While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly U.S. officials prepared to plunge our nation into graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

    Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted “…best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) at same time – not only UBL (Usama Bin Laden)… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

    So within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior U.S. officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

    Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to use military force “…against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons…”

    In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks.

    The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Barbara Lee of Oakland. Lee compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed, “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

    In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. Bush insisted Afghanistan must come first, but privately promised Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle that Iraq would be their next target.

    In the days after September 11, the U.S. corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed.

    But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR (National Public Radio) a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

    Clark: …do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 (sic) people?

    Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

    Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

    Ferencz:  We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

    Clark:  So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

    Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

    The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Rep. Barbara Lee and Ben Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism.

    On September 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why we say no to war and hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and me (Medea). Our statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan.

    The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, wrote that, “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” I (Medea) wrote that ”a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.”

    Our analysis was correct and our predictions were prescient. We humbly submit that the media and politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of to lying, delusional warmongers.

    What leads to catastrophes like the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing anti-war voices but that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves.

    That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control U.S. politics on a bipartisan basis.

    In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that there are military “solutions” for them.

    Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of U.S. military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the U.S. post-Cold War “power dividend“.

    Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war-hawks when she confronted General Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    As Secretary of State in Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal U.S. invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the illegality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

    In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand their control of U.S. foreign policy.

    But after spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait.

    Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic. So our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer but only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

    Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional U.S. political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia, and these trends are most pronounced among America’s long-time allies in Europe and in its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

    On October 19, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

    Now that dropping over 80,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years has failed to change the way they live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live.

    We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

    Then we should  pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

    Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

     

    The post Will Americans Who Were Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Right-Leaning Columnist Calls Forever War a “Myth”

    People chant behind a banner reading "END US WARS AT HOME AND ABROAD" in both english and spanish during a pre-covid rally

    As this appears to be my week for taking the piss out of shabby right-wing news personalities, I bring you now Jeff Jacoby, pet conservative of the Boston Globe editorial page. Long-time readers of this space may remember the last time I made a foray into the talking points bulletin board passing for Jacoby’s ideas: His near-giddy 2017 assertion that there were a number of positives to be gained thanks to runaway anthropogenic climate disruption. His headline: “There Are Benefits to Climate Change.” No, you read that correctly.

    “In the church of climate alarmism, there may be no heresy more dangerous than the idea that the world will benefit from warming,” opined Jacoby. “Polar melting may cause dislocation for those who live in low-lying coastal areas, but it will also lead to safe commercial shipping in formerly inhospitable northern seas.”

    Take all the time you need with that. My favorite bit is “may cause dislocation” vs. “will lead to safe commercial shipping.” Ghastly priorities revealed by the chosen use of simple verbs is pretty much Jacoby’s speed. Reading that piece four years later amid all the climate chaos of the moment, I can’t help but be reminded of the three crucified fellows singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It is exactly, precisely that absurd.

    Jacoby’s latest foray into the strange and wrong came on the August 17, and was titled “The Myth That Afghanistan Was a ‘Forever’ War.” For those unfamiliar with the term, the “Forever Wars” refer to the experience endured by the soldiers who have been getting sent to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations in the Middle East and North Africa since the onset of the first Gulf War. For the mathematically disinclined, that is 31 years of war.

    “It is strange, this talking point about Afghanistan being the ‘longest war’ or a ‘forever war,’” writes Jacoby. “Yes, the United States has been involved in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, but the last time American forces suffered any combat casualties was Feb. 8, 2020, when Sgt. Javier Gutierrez and Sgt. Antonio Rodriguez were ambushed and killed. Their sacrifice was heroic and selfless. But it makes little sense to speak of a ‘forever war’ in which there are no fatalities for a year and a half.”

    Let us grant Jacoby the recognition that, yes, the war in Afghanistan did not actually last “forever.” That is a practical impossibility. If the war went on until the sun burned out and all life on Earth perished, it would still not have lasted forever, because the universe would continue on without us, marking time in its own way.

    The pejorative use of “forever” in this matter stems not from a marking of time, but from a sense that nothing will change, end or improve. After 31 years of war, it was a sense that the soldiers fighting in it shared broadly. Thirty-one years may not be “forever,” but for troops on their eighth or tenth deployments, it sure God feels like it.

    The term lies at the beating heart of the war-making expedition undertaken by George W. Bush after 9/11: a policy of open-ended combat against terrorism for as long as terrorism exists, enshrined in two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force that remain the military’s standing orders to this day. It is by definition endless, i.e. “forever,” until the policy changes.

    Speaking of the soldiers, we must take a moment with Jacoby’s assertion that “it makes little sense to speak of a ‘forever war’ in which there are no fatalities for a year and a half.”

    None shall argue that combat, injury and death are the worst aspects of war for any soldier… but war is excruciating in many ways. Soldiers are not suffering from PTSD because the plane ride home was bumpy. A troop on multiple deployments may never see any fighting because they work in the mess hall or as an aide to senior officers far from the violence, but that person will still feel the long emptiness of “forever.”

    Jacoby goes on to name a number of countries — Japan, Germany — where a U.S. military presence has existed far longer than the Afghanistan War, ignoring the fact that the shooting stopped there decades ago, and the possibility of sudden large-scale combat is gone. He concludes with a lament about the U.S.’s “diminished credibility” after the Afghanistan withdrawal, to which I retort: If 20 years, trillions of dollars and thousands of casualties are not proof of commitment, you have to wonder what kind of friends we’re talking about.

    That’s the point, really: The ending itself is the problem for Jacoby and those who think as he does. Afghanistan and Iraq were ATM machines for the warmakers for three decades plus a year. Now, one of those ATMs has been shut off — none can say for how long — and the money spigot pinched.

    Simple terms like “forever wars” bring the pathos of the situation home to a citizenry that has at least partly ignored Afghanistan for two decades. It is part of the reason why a majority wanted the war over, and is why the war has — for now — ended. Attacking the term is a desperate flail at blunting the majority belief that all of this has gone on for far too long.

    Obama, Trump and Biden all campaigned on ending this war, because they are politicians, and know full well what the people want to hear. Biden actually did it, although it should be noted that the manner in which he carried it out has come at enormous cost measured in wrenching human suffering.

    Biden ended the war, and people like Jacoby don’t like it. Wars aren’t supposed to end anymore, see? It’s bad for business, like a healthy ice sheet blocking a potential shipping lane. So frustrating.

    Finally, and not for nothing, it is the soldiers themselves who chose to use the phrase as a shared recognition of their experience. It takes quite a bit of gall for Jacoby or anyone else to unilaterally try and take that away from them by calling it a myth. “Forever” is in the eye of the beholder. For myself, reading Jacoby’s articles can feel like forever, too. It’s all about perspective.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More Than 750 US Military Bases Remain Around the World

    The Bagram Airfield base after all U.S. and NATO forces evacuated in the Parwan province of eastern Afghanistan, on July 8, 2021.

    It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the verge of an uproar. Gathered around our homeroom lunch menu, we were horrified to find that the golden, perfectly crisped French fries we adored had been replaced with something called “freedom fries.”

    “What are freedom fries?” we demanded to know.

    Our teacher quickly reassured us by saying something like: “Freedom fries are the exact same thing as French fries, just better.” Since France, she explained, was not supporting “our” war in Iraq, “we just changed the name, because who needs France anyway?” Hungry for lunch, we saw little reason to disagree. After all, our most coveted side dish would still be there, even if relabeled.

    While 20 years have passed since then, that otherwise obscure childhood memory came back to me last month when, in the midst of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden announced an end to American “combat” operations in Iraq. To many Americans, it may have appeared that he was just keeping his promise to end the two forever wars that came to define the post-9/11 “global war on terror.” However, much as those “freedom fries” didn’t actually become something else, this country’s “forever wars” may not really be coming to an end either. Rather, they are being relabeled and seem to be continuing via other means.

    Having closed down hundreds of military bases and combat outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon will now shift to an “advise-and-assist” role in Iraq. Meanwhile, its top leadership is now busy “pivoting” to Asia in pursuit of new geostrategic objectives primarily centered around “containing” China. As a result, in the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa, the U.S. will be trying to keep a far lower profile, while remaining militarily engaged through training programs and private contractors.

    As for me, two decades after I finished those freedom fries in Germany, I’ve just finished compiling a list of American military bases around the world, the most comprehensive possible at this moment from publicly available information. It should help make greater sense of what could prove to be a significant period of transition for the U.S. military.

    Despite a modest overall decline in such bases, rest assured that the hundreds that remain will play a vital role in the continuation of some version of Washington’s forever wars and could also help facilitate a new Cold War with China. According to my current count, our country still has more than 750 significant military bases implanted around the globe. And here’s the simple reality: unless they are, in the end, dismantled, America’s imperial role on this planet won’t end either, spelling disaster for this country in the years to come.

    Tallying Up the “Bases of Empire”

    I was tasked with compiling what we’ve (hopefully) called the “2021 U.S. Overseas Base Closure List” after reaching out to Leah Bolger, president of World BEYOND War. As part of a group known as the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition (OBRACC) committed to shutting down such bases, Bolger put me in contact with its co-founder David Vine, the author of the classic book on the subject, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.

    Bolger, Vine, and I then decided to put together just such a new list as a tool for focusing on future U.S. base closures around the world. In addition to providing the most comprehensive accounting of such overseas bases, our research also further confirms that the presence of even one in a country can contribute significantly to anti-American protests, environmental destruction, and ever greater costs for the American taxpayer.

    In fact, our new count does show that their total number globally has declined in a modest fashion (and even, in a few cases, fallen dramatically) over the past decade. From 2011 on, nearly a thousand combat outposts and a modest number of major bases have been closed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Somalia. Just a little over five years ago, David Vine estimated that there were around 800 major U.S. bases in more than 70 countries, colonies, or territories outside the continental United States. In 2021, our count suggests that the figure has fallen to approximately 750. Yet, lest you think that all is finally heading in the right direction, the number of places with such bases has actually increased in those same years.

    Since the Pentagon has generally sought to conceal the presence of at least some of them, putting together such a list can be complicated indeed, starting with how one even defines such a “base.” We decided that the simplest way was to use the Pentagon’s own definition of a “base site,” even if its public counts of them are notoriously inaccurate. (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that its figures are invariably too low, never too high.)

    So, our list defined such a major base as any “specific geographic location that has individual land parcels or facilities assigned to it… that is, or was owned by, leased to, or otherwise under the jurisdiction of a Department of Defense Component on behalf of the United States.”

    Using this definition helps to simplify what counts and what doesn’t, but it also leaves much out of the picture. Not included are significant numbers of small ports, repair complexes, warehouses, fueling stations, and surveillance facilities controlled by this country, not to speak of the nearly 50 bases the American government directly funds for the militaries of other countries. Most appear to be in Central America (and other parts of Latin America), places familiar indeed with the presence of the U.S. military, which has been involved in 175 years of military interventions in the region.

    Still, according to our list, American military bases overseas are now scattered across 81 countries, colonies, or territories on every continent except Antarctica. And while their total numbers may be down, their reach has only continued to expand. Between 1989 and today, in fact, the military has more than doubled the number of places in which it has bases from 40 to 81.

    This global presence remains unprecedented. No other imperial power has ever had the equivalent, including the British, French, and Spanish empires. They form what Chalmers Johnson, former CIA consultant turned critic of U.S. militarism, once referred to as an “empire of bases” or a “globe-girdling Base World.”

    As long as this count of 750 military bases in 81 places remains a reality, so, too, will U.S. wars. As succinctly put by David Vine in his latest book, The United States of War, “Bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”

    Over the Horizon Wars?

    In Afghanistan, where Kabul fell to the Taliban earlier this week, our military had only recently ordered a rushed, late-in-the-night withdrawal from its last major stronghold, Bagram Airfield, and no U.S. bases remain there. The numbers have similarly fallen in Iraq where that military now controls only six bases, while earlier in this century the number would have been closer to 505, ranging from large ones to small military outposts.

    Dismantling and shutting down such bases in those lands, in Somalia, and in other countries as well, along with the full-scale departure of American military forces from two of those three countries, were historically significant, no matter how long they took, given the domineering “boots on the ground” approach they once facilitated. And why did such changes occur when they did? The answer has much to do with the staggering human, political, and economic costs of these endless failed wars. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the toll of just those remarkably unsuccessful conflicts in Washington’s war on terror was tremendous: minimally 801,000 deaths (with more on the way) since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.

    The weight of such suffering was, of course, disproportionately carried by the people of the countries who have faced Washington’s invasions, occupations, air strikes, and interference over almost two decades. More than 300,000 civilians across those and other countries have been killed and an estimated nearly 37 million more displaced. Around 15,000 U.S. forces, including soldiers and private contractors, have also died. Untold scores of devastating injuries have occurred as well to millions of civilians, opposition fighters, and American troops. In total, it’s estimated that, by 2020, these post-9/11 wars had cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion.

    While the overall number of U.S. military bases abroad may be in decline as the failure of the war on terror sinks in, the forever wars are likely to continue more covertly through Special Operations forces, private military contractors, and ongoing air strikes, whether in Iraq, Somalia, or elsewhere.

    In Afghanistan, even when there were only 650 U.S. troops left, guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul, the U.S. was still intensifying its air strikes in the country. It launched a dozen in July alone, recently killing 18 civilians in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. According to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, attacks like these were being carried out from a base or bases in the Middle East equipped with “over the horizon capabilities,” supposedly located in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, and Qatar. In this period, Washington has also been seeking (as yet without success) to establish new bases in countries that neighbor Afghanistan for continued surveillance, reconnaissance, and potentially air strikes, including possibly leasing Russian military bases in Tajikistan.

    And mind you, when it comes to the Middle East, the UAE and Qatar are just the beginning. There are U.S. military bases in every Persian Gulf country except Iran and Yemen: seven in Oman, three in the UAE, 11 in Saudi Arabia, seven in Qatar, 12 in Bahrain, 10 in Kuwait, and those six still in Iraq. Any of these could potentially contribute to the sorts of “over the horizon” wars the U.S. now seems committed to in countries like Iraq, just as its bases in Kenya and Djibouti are enabling it to launch air strikes in Somalia.

    New Bases, New Wars

    Meanwhile, halfway around the world, thanks in part to a growing push for a Cold War-style “containment” of China, new bases are being constructed in the Pacific.

    There are, at best, minimal barriers in this country to building military bases overseas. If Pentagon officials determine that a new $990 million base is needed in Guam to “enhance warfighting capabilities” in Washington’s pivot to Asia, there are few ways to prevent them from doing so.

    Camp Blaz, the first Marine Corps base to be built on the Pacific Island of Guam since 1952, has been under construction since 2020 without the slightest pushback or debate over whether it was needed or not from policymakers and officials in Washington or among the American public. Even more new bases are being proposed for the nearby Pacific Islands of Palau, Tinian, and Yap. On the other hand, a locally much-protested new base in Henoko on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Futenma Replacement Facility, is “unlikely” ever to be completed.

    Little of any of this is even known in this country, which is why a public list of the full extent of such bases, old and new, around the world is of importance, however difficult it may be to produce based on the patchy Pentagon record available. Not only can it show the far-reaching extent and changing nature of this country’s imperial efforts globally, it could also act as a tool for promoting future base closures in places like Guam and Japan, where there at present are 52 and 119 bases respectively — were the American public one day to seriously question where their tax dollars were really going and why.

    Just as there’s very little standing in the way of the Pentagon constructing new bases overseas, there is essentially nothing preventing President Biden from closing them. As OBRACC points out, while there is a process involving congressional authorization for closing any domestic U.S. military base, no such authorization is needed abroad. Unfortunately, in this country there is as yet no significant movement for ending that Baseworld of ours. Elsewhere, however, demands and protests aimed at shutting down such bases from Belgium to Guam, Japan to the United Kingdom — in nearly 40 countries all told — have taken place within the past few years.

    In December 2020, however, even the highest-ranking U.S. military official, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, asked: “Is every one of those [bases] absolutely positively necessary for the defense of the United States?”

    In short, no. Anything but. Still, as of today, despite the modest decline in their numbers, the 750 or so that remain are likely to play a vital role in any continuation of Washington’s “forever wars,” while supporting the expansion of a new Cold War with China. As Chalmers Johnson warned in 2009, “Few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities… If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.”

    In the end, new bases only mean new wars and, as the last nearly 20 years have shown, that’s hardly a formula for success for American citizens or others around the world.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sean Hannity Uses Afghanistan Crisis to Advertise MyPillow Products

    Supporters of then-President Donald Trump watch a video featuring Fox host Sean Hannity ahead of Trump's arrival to a campaign rally at Oakland County International Airport on October 30, 2020, in Waterford, Michigan.

    It is getting exponentially more difficult to maintain a positive attitude these days. As if COVID’s rampaging Delta variant and the climate screaming, “Told you so!” by way of fire and flood were not sufficiently disheartening, there is the last act of our 20-year calamity in Afghanistan to contend with. The corporate “news” networks are reveling in footage of Afghan civilians running for their lives while pundits gravely opine about nothing of depth or substance beyond the six opportunistic inches in front of their faces.

    This, though, is verging deeply into last-straw territory: On Tuesday night, Fox News wretch Sean Hannity took a moment during his nightly show to offer a few words for the families of those Americans still trying to find a way out of the chaos in that country, just in case they were in a mood to do some shopping.

    “How would you like to be in Kabul today, as an American, and you can’t get to the airport?” asked Hannity. “Where are you thinking your life is headed? If you’re one of those family members, I bet you’re not sleeping. I don’t even think My Pillow can do it. MyPillow.com. That’s where I go. I fall asleep faster, I stay asleep longer. These are going to be a lot of sleepless nights for so many of our fellow Americans. We’ve got to get them home.”

    That happened, and on live television. With the deft touch of a lowered bulldozer blade, Hannity perfected the ruthless art of disaster capitalism. That he used the plight of those families to pitch a product, made by a guy running around the country barfing up dangerous 2020 election fictions, took another bad year and turned it positively surreal. It was as filthy as anything I have ever seen, which makes it about par for the current course.

    Hannity’s execrable pillow peddling was reinforced one short night later by Fox’s vile potato monster Tucker Carlson, who stomped right through the gruesome aftermath of the U.S.’s 21st century wars to offer yet another reason to target immigrants and love the GOP. There is concern within European governmental circles, you see, that the far right could capitalize politically on another refugee crisis arising from the Middle East, as they did in 2015. Carlson cottoned to this, and made for daylight like a rattlesnake in the corn.

    “[W]e are now living through the biggest influx of American refugees in American history,” Carlson said on Wednesday night. “We are on pace for at least 2 million illegal immigrants arriving in America this year alone. That’s far more than the number of asylum applicants who arrived in Europe in 2015. That was over 1 million, just over 1 million, that totally changed Europe forever.”

    Quick quiz: What do the 2015 refugee crisis and the current Afghanistan refugee crisis have in common? If you guessed “failed American wars,” go pick yourself out a prize. The calamity of Iraq — which spawned the war in Syria and the violent rise of ISIS just across the border — was the catalyst for the 2015 tide of humanity seeking to flee the carnage. The cause of the crisis unfolding today is, again, another U.S. warmaking debacle. Can’t talk about that on Fox News, though, or any other major media outlet for that matter. Makes it harder to sell those pillows.

    Two years ago to the day, Donald Trump told the press his administration was having “having very good discussions” with the Taliban about establishing a peace deal and ending the war. He was, as usual, half-assing his way toward a cheap talking point and a few minutes of positive TV coverage, as current events most vividly demonstrate. This was also the day Trump announced that the U.S. was interested in buying Greenland. “It’s something we talked about,” he said. “Denmark essentially owns it, we’re very good allies with Denmark.”

    So it goes, I suppose, in the land of the free, or something. Hannity tries to sell fascist pillows to the families of Americans caught in a post-war zone of fear and uncertainty, while Carlson once again tried to spook the Fox-watching horses about refugees (the ones we caused to flee their homeland with 20 years of bombs and shooting) and immigrants, and all two years after the world heavyweight champion of shabby presidents told us all was so well that he was in the market for a large partially melting land mass.

    You could write all this off as standard-issue Fox/Trump material, but that would be a dangerous mistake. Racism, war and shamelessly voracious capitalism are the nucleotide bases within the DNA of the business deal we call “The American Dream.” This is not new; it is, in fact, as old as the first European invasion of this land. The fact that it has its own dedicated TV network is only slightly more malevolent than the reality that the other networks are almost — but not quite — as bad.

    Anyone want to buy a pillow? They’re great at soaking up tears.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Corporate Media Are Erasing US’s Long-Term Culpability for Afghanistan War

    George W. Bush is interviewed while surrounded by his "paintings"

    For a time back in the bad old days of Donald Trump, it seemed as if the corporate “news” media had ever so slightly corrected their hard-wired rightward tilt. They were still awful when viewed from a progressive vantage point, and Fox News was going to Fox News no matter what, but as the daily grind of the Trump presidency grew into a roaring existential threat to the country, that media often said what needed saying, providing context, background, fact checks and experts by the score to warn against “normalizing” fascism.

    Maybe it was only a sense of self-preservation that wrought the change — the news media are, of course, “the enemy of the people” according to Trump, and would have been a certain target of his wrath had he ever been able to fully slip the leash. Having the angry mob turn its eyes to you, knowing that they know your name, has a mystic way of concentrating the mind.

    That appears to be over now as the world encompasses the sudden change of power in Afghanistan, and it’s ugly as hell.

    As always, Fox News is going to Fox News, but that network is outdoing even itself when it comes to dangerous and misleading coverage of the situation in Afghanistan. During his Monday broadcast, vile potato monster Tucker Carlson warned that the collapse of the Afghan government would release a death tide of refugees that would wash over the U.S. and straight up your driveway.

    “If history is any guide, and it’s always a guide, we’ll see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months,” Carlson intoned, “probably in your neighborhood. And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade and then we’re invaded.” Laura Ingraham went on to push the theme: “Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of refugees from Afghanistan?”

    “Probably in your neighborhood.” If you were wondering whether incoherently hateful immigration polemics were again going to be a GOP staple of the upcoming campaign season, look no further. Fox got the RNC talking points and lacquered them to the bathroom doors, probably.

    Take a deeper dive into that, and what you see is a brazen example of a news network running as fast as it can from a mess of its own devising. Among a variety of things, the collapse of Afghanistan can be laid at the feet of two decades of presidents, politicians and military commanders deliberately bullshitting the public on the actual situation in that country. During that time, the main delivery vector for flag-humping hyper-nationalistic rubbish like that has been Fox News.

    That streak remains unbroken. The daytime Fox broadcasts spent most of their time yesterday breathlessly blaming President Biden for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, gleefully bypassing an ocean of history and nuance that — if provided — might help the right-leaning public avoid getting led by the nose into another war that is almost old enough to buy a beer. By the evening, they were folding their nonsense coverage into racist GOP talking points. An opportunity squandered, try to contain your shock.

    The other alphabet soup networks, along with a forest’s worth of newspapers, have fared little better in the delivery of useful information. Instead, we have been fed a steady diet of pundit-heavy drivel about “winners and losers,” with an unmistakable avoidance of anything which might remind viewers and readers that, more often than not, this sort of galloping tragedy is what happens when a war is lost.

    I’m not here to stand in front of Joe Biden. He voted for this mess back in 2001, and while it is abundantly clear more should have been done to extricate our allies and personnel before the country fell, he faced a grim Hobson’s Choice: Get out the way we did, or begin pulling people out months ago and perhaps precipitate a running slaughter all the way to Kandahar and Kabul. Nothing is more vulnerable than an army in retreat, and that’s precisely what we were.

    That being said, the president deserves at least some of his lumps, if for no other reason than because he’s where the buck stops. Yet this buck has stopped a few places before landing on Biden’s desk, but you’d never know it listening to the broadcasts or reading the boiling-oil editorials.

    Former President Obama has barely merited a mention, despite having presided over and expanded this war, and despite having clearly failed to end it. Former President Trump signed a half-assed peace deal with the Taliban in February of 2020, which essentially handcuffed the Biden administration to some form of the current outcome.

    The top-page motive behind Trump’s deal in Doha, according to BBC News: “The move would allow US President Donald Trump to show that he has brought troops home ahead of the US presidential election in November.” The GOP is so proud of all this, in fact, that they removed an RNC web page praising Trump for the deal.

    And let us not forget the biggest soup bone in this particular stew, though the corporate “news” media devoutly wishes we would. You will be heartened to know that George W. Bush and his wife Laura have been “watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness.” One would hope so. After all, here is the man who started the war, and then abandoned it for his Iraq misadventure without ending it, leaving office with the Afghanistan mission a rudderless mess that set the tone for the next dozen years to come.

    Journalist Eric Boehlert has some thoughts:

    The U.S. has spent trillions in Afghanistan stretching back 20 years, yet Biden, who has been in office for seven months and who campaigned on bringing the troops home, is being tagged as an architect for the Taliban’s inevitable rise to power there. A convenient, gaping hole in the coverage and commentary? The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was unalterably damaged when President George W. Bush hijacked that post-9/11 military mission and foolishly turned the Pentagon’s time, attention, and resources to a doomed invasion of Iraq….

    Today the media’s role in marketing the Iraq War has been flushed down the memory hole, even though Iraq should be central to any discussion about the U.S.’s running failure in Afghanistan. “Remarkably, the word ‘Bush’ was not mentioned once on any of the Sunday shows” this weekend as they focused nonstop on Afghanistan, noted Jon Allsop, at the Columbia Journalism Review. You cannot discuss the rise of the Taliban in 2021 without talking about the U.S.’s doomed Iraq War in 2003. But the press today wants to try.

    There is more to this than the corporate “news” media’s self-serving, myopic coverage. The United States lost the war in Afghanistan, just as we lost the war in Iraq, just as we lost the war in Vietnam not so terribly damn long ago. These wars represent more than 60 years of profiteering to the benefit of a preciously guarded few, while the rest of us drown in the blood and soot of aftermath.

    These things are not discussed by the corporate “news.” Bad for business, you see.

    However, if you are looking for a bit of context, here is some to consider: After the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989, the U.S.S.R. collapsed and ceased to exist only two years later. The Soviet Union’s war was ten years shorter than ours, and it was not contending with viral variants of COVID-19 when it left.

    I doubt the corporate “news” media will talk about that, either, but it’s the truth.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The people who wrecked Afghanistan are arguing over who wrecked Afghanistan

    As a veteran of the war, and a journalist who has reported from the country, the endgame in Afghanistan is a bizarre and rather personal spectacle.

    To see generals and politicians who were involved in the disaster finger-pointing at each other, even as the UK deploys troops to evacuate the last remaining Britons, demeans the tragic human story of that country.

    The news of the rescue mission comes as the Taliban take territory at an alarming rate. The latest major city to fall is Kandahar, the insurgent group’s spiritual home. One report suggests that Kabul could fall within 90 days. Or perhaps even within a month.

    Nearer to home, the same sorts of people – and, in some cases, literally the same people – who oversaw the disaster for decades have picked out US president Joe Biden as the culprit.

    Biden’s decision to pull out, they claim, risks plunging the country into chaos.

    Finger pointing

    I am hardly a fan of Biden, who on matters of war is as imperialistic as a Bush, an Obama, a Trump, Blair or Cameron. But those protesting loudest are just as implicated.

    To name just a few, the finger-pointers include:

    All of them say the decision to pull out (albeit, of a place the west never had any right to occupy) is a terrible one for all concerned.

    General Richards also attacked the UK government. As did members of the Murdoch press, which supported the disastrous wars throughout. Among those levelling blame at the UK government is the Times‘ Tom Newton Dunn:

    But the truth is, it isn’t quite as simple as any of these figures want to suggest. They talk as if the decision that doomed Afghanistan was made in 2021. But the truth is that it is was made in 2001.

    Squandered peace

    As political hip-hop artist Lowkey has correctly pointed out, it never had to be this way. Way back in the beginning, the 20-year conflict could have been avoided. And with it hundreds of thousands of deaths. Including those of several people I knew personally.

    US journalist Spencer Ackerman, whose new book on the wars has just been released, makes a similar point:

    Remember that the Taliban offered terms in December 2001. Donald Rumsfeld rejected them. Everything that followed made the Taliban stronger.

    Elsewhere, NATO, which officially oversaw the US-led occupation for most of the 20-year period, announced that leaders would meet Friday to discuss the crisis. And in London, a Cabinet Office Briefing Room (better known as ‘Cobra’) meeting of senior ministers and military figures was announced for 13 August. 

    Unfolding disaster

    Amid the chaos, it seems likely the rescue party of troops will be from the Parachute Regiment. That’s ironic given that the unit’s deployment in 2006 led to years of fighting in Helmand province – the location where most of the UK’s 456 deaths occurred. I remember it well. I deployed with 16 Air Assault Brigade that spring.

    What’s missing among the finger pointing is a little honesty about the events of that period. That deployment was neither necessary nor wise. Before 2006, the Taliban were a spent force. Their leadership had mostly fled to Pakistan – an ally of the UK and US whose intelligence services consistently support the Taliban to this day.

    I have no doubts that that deployment – codenamed Operation Herrick – led us to this point. Our presence there became a lighting rod for an insurgency which previously had not existed. And it set the pattern for the following years, energising locals against our unwanted presence.

    And I am aware today that the reasoning behind the 2006 deployment was deeply hubristic: the British had failed in Iraq in American eyes. This left the British desperate for another theatre in which to prove their usefulness to the US. Helmand, with horrific results, was that opportunity.

    And, as fate would have it, the army brigade which lobbied successfully for a new deployment was my own. Within months what was framed as a peacekeeping-style operation had turned into a brutal counter-insurgency war.

    Blame

    This background, just one of the important details missing from the analysis of people like Richards, Tugendhat and Stewart, is key to understanding how we got here.

    Their arguments for pulling out being a bad idea forget to mention that we never had any right to be there in the first place.

    Their disingenuous appeal to humanitarian ideals ignores the fact that the UK isn’t in the business of morality when it comes to international affairs.

    And their placing blame on particular governments or leaders skips over the fact that they themselves were happy to be key players in the disaster which is unfolding today.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Sgt Steve Blake RLC.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.