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Category: Iraq

  • 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. 

    ________________________

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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.

  • US Foreign Policy Adrift: Why Washington is No Longer Calling the Shots

    Jonah Goldberg and Michael Ledeen have much in common. They are both writers and also cheerleaders for military interventions and, often, for frivolous wars. Writing in the conservative rag, The National Review, months before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Goldberg paraphrased a statement which he attributed to Ledeen with reference to the interventionist US foreign policy.

    “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” Goldberg wrote, quoting Ledeen.

    Those like Ledeen, the neoconservative intellectual henchman type, often get away with this kind of provocative rhetoric for various reasons. American intelligentsias, especially those who are close to the center of power in Washington DC, perceive war and military intervention as the foundation and baseline of their foreign policy analysis. The utterances of such statements are usually conveyed within friendly media and intellectual platforms, where equally hawkish, belligerent audiences cheer and laugh at the war-mongering muses. In the case of Ledeen, the receptive audience was the hardline, neoconservative, pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

    Predictably, AEI was one of the loudest voices urging for a war and invasion of Iraq prior to that calamitous decision by the George W. Bush Administration, which was enacted in March 2003.

    Neoconservatism, unlike what the etymology of the name may suggest, was not necessarily confined to conservative political circles. Think tanks, newspapers and media networks that purport – or are perceived – to express liberal and even progressive thought today, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, have dedicated much time and space to promoting an American invasion of Iraq as the first step of a complete US geostrategic military hegemony in the Middle East.

    Like the National Review, these media networks also provided unhindered space to so-called neoconservative intellectuals who molded American foreign policy based on some strange mix between their twisted take on ethics and morality and the need for the US to ensure its global dominance throughout the 21st century. Of course, the neocons’ love affair with Israel has served as the common denominator among all individuals affiliated with this intellectual cult.

    The main – and inconsequential – difference between Ledeen, for example, and those like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, is that the former is brazen and blunt, while the latter is delusional and manipulative. For his part, Friedman also supported the Iraq war, but only to bring ‘democracy’ to the Middle East and to fight ‘terrorism’. The pretense ‘war on terror’, though misleading if not outright fabricated, was the overriding American motto in its invasion of Iraq and, earlier, Afghanistan. This mantra was readily utilized whenever Washington needed to ‘pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall’.

    Even those who genuinely supported the war based on concocted intelligence – that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction, or the equally fallacious notion that Saddam and Al-Qaeda cooperated in any way – must, by now, realize that the entire American discourse prior to the war had no basis in reality. Unfortunately, war enthusiasts are not a rational bunch. Therefore, neither they, nor their ‘intellectuals’, should be expected to possess the moral integrity in shouldering the responsibility for the Iraq invasion and its horrific consequences.

    If, indeed, the US wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan were meant to fight and uproot terror, how is it possible that, in June 2014, an erstwhile unknown group calling itself the ‘Islamic State’ (IS), managed to flourish, occupy and usurp massive swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territories and resource under the watchful eye of the US military? If the other war objective was bringing stability and democracy to the Middle East, why did many years of US ‘state-building’ efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, leave behind nothing but weak, shattered armies and festering corruption?

    Two important events have summoned up these thoughts: US President Joe Biden’s ‘historic’ trip to Cornwall, UK, in June, to attend the 47th G7 summit and, two weeks later, the death of Donald Rumsfeld, who is widely depicted as “the architect of the Iraq war”. The tone struck by Biden throughout his G7 meetings is that ‘America is back’, another American coinage similar to the earlier phrase, the ‘great reset’ – meaning that Washington is ready to reclaim its global role that had been betrayed by the chaotic policies of former President Donald Trump.

    The newest phrase – ‘America is back’ – appears to suggest that the decision to restore the US’ uncontested global leadership is, more or less, an exclusively American decision. Moreover, the term is not entirely new. In his first speech to a global audience at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, Biden repeated the phrase several times with obvious emphasis.

    “America is back. I speak today as President of the United States, at the very start of my administration and I am sending a clear message to the world: America is back,” Biden said, adding that “the transatlantic alliance is back and we are not looking backward, we are looking forward together.”

    Platitudes and wishful thinking aside, the US cannot possibly return to a previous geopolitical standing, simply because Biden has made an executive decision to ‘reset’ his country’s traditional relationships with Europe – or anywhere else, either.  Biden’s actual mission is to merely whitewash and restore his country’s tarnished reputation, marred not only by Trump, but also by years of fruitless wars, a crisis of democracy at home and abroad and an impending financial crisis resulting from the US’ mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately for Washington, while it hopes to ‘look forward’ to the future, other countries have already staked claims to parts of the world where the US has been forced to retreat, following two decades of a rudderless strategy that is fueled by the belief that firepower alone is sufficient to keep America aloft forever.

    Though Biden was received warmly by his European hosts, Europe is likely to proceed cautiously. The continent’s geostrategic interests do not fall entirely in the American camp, as was once the case. Other new factors and power players have emerged in recent years. China is now the European bloc’s largest trade partner and Biden’s scare tactics warning of Chinese global dominance have not, seemingly, impressed the Europeans as the Americans had hoped. Following Britain’s unceremonious exit from the EU bloc, the latter urgently needs to keep its share of the global economy as large as possible. The limping US economy will hardly make the substantial deficit felt in Europe. Namely, the China-EU relationship is here to stay – and grow.

    There is something else that makes the Europeans wary of whatever murky political doctrine Biden is promoting: dangerous American military adventurism.

    The US and Europe are the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which, since its inception in 1949, was almost exclusively used by the US to assert its global dominance, first in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, then everywhere else.

    Following the September 11 attacks, Washington used its hegemony over NATO to invoke Article 5 of its Charter, that of collective defense. The consequences were dire, as NATO members, along with the US, were embroiled in their longest wars ever, military conflicts that had no consistent strategy, let alone measurable goals. Now, as the US licks its wounds as it leaves Afghanistan, NATO members, too, are leaving the devastated country without a single achievement worth celebrating. Similar scenarios are transpiring in Iraq and Syria, too.

    Rumsfeld’s death on June 29, at the age of 88, should serve as a wake-up call to American allies if they truly wish to avoid the pitfalls and recklessness of the past. While much of the US corporate media commemorated the death of a brutish war criminal with amiable non-committal language, some blamed him almost entirely for the Iraq fiasco. It is as if a single man had bent the will of the West-dominated international community to invade, pillage, torture and destroy entire countries. If so, then Rumsfeld’s death should usher in an exciting new dawn of collective peace, prosperity and security. This is not the case.

    Rationalizing his decision to leave Afghanistan in a speech to the nation in April 2021, Biden did not accept, on behalf of his country, responsibility over that horrific war. Instead, he spoke of the need to fight the ‘terror threat’ in ‘many places’, instead of keeping ‘thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country’.

    Indeed, a close reading of Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan – a process which began under Trump – suggests that the difference between US foreign policy under Biden is only tactically different from the policies of George W. Bush when he launched his ‘preemptive wars’ under the command of Rumsfeld. Namely, though the geopolitical map may have shifted, the US appetite for war remains insatiable.

    Shackled with a legacy of unnecessary, fruitless and immoral wars, yet with no actual ‘forward’ strategy, the US, arguably for the first time since the inception of NATO in the aftermath of World War II, has no decipherable foreign policy doctrine. Even if such a doctrine exists, it can only be materialized through alliances whose relationships are constructed on trust and confidence. Despite the EU’s courteous reception of Biden in Cornwall, trust in Washington is at an all-time low.

    Even if it is accepted, without any argument, that America is, indeed, back, considering the vastly changing geopolitical spheres in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Biden’s assertion should, ultimately, make no difference.

    The post US Foreign Policy Adrift: Why Washington is No Longer Calling the Shots first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Reminder: The U.S. Gov’t Lies, Manipulates, and Kills Without Remorse

    On July 25, 1990, Saddam Hussein entertained a guest at the Presidential Palace in Baghdad: U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. She told the Iraqi president: “I have direct instructions from President (George H.W.) Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait.” Glaspie then asked, point-blank: “Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?”

    “As you know, for years now I have made every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait,” replied Hussein, deploying his own rendition of wartime spin. “There is to be a meeting in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief chance.”

    Eight days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait and provided the Land of the Free™ with the pretext it needed to commence a relentless onslaught in the name of keeping the world safe for petroleum. This brings me to a forgotten anniversary. While August 6, 2021, of course, marks the 76th anniversary of the willful nuking of civilians in Hiroshima by the Home of the Brave™, it also marks 31 years since the U.S. war against Iraq was initially launched. 

    For most people — particularly willfully ignorant anti-war activists — the starting date for the war in Iraq is March 19, 2003. However, to accept that date is to put far too much blame on one party and one president. It also invalidates decades of intense suffering. A more accurate and useful starting date is August 6, 1990, when (at the behest of the U.S.) the United Nations Security Council imposed lethal sanctions upon the people of Iraq.

    It is widely accepted that these sanctions were responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-90s was Madeleine Albright. In 1996, Leslie Stahl asked her on 60 Minutes if a half-million dead Iraqi children was a price worth paying to pursue American foreign policy. Albright famously replied: “We think the price is worth it.”

    Shortly afterward, Albright was named U.S. Secretary of State by noted liberal Democrat hero, Bill Clinton. Killing brown children by the hundreds of thousands, it seems, is a real boost for the resume in God’s Country™.

    In the words of the immortal I.F Stone: “Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.”

    The post Reminder: The U.S. Gov’t Lies, Manipulates, and Kills Without Remorse first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Marches in Minsk and Pegasus protests: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Haiti to Pakistan

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Open Letter to George W. Bush

    With the recent passing of your close associate Donald Rumsfield, we felt compelled to share with you our many thoughtful remembrances.  Many of us are also approaching our final years, and have already suffered the first indications of failing memory.  (In public figures of Rumsfeld’s and your high stature, the condition is termed “I do not recall syndrome.”)  Despite your outstanding impact on the state of the world as of 2021, you too, like any other 75-year-old, may already be experiencing the tragic signs of failing memory.  It is in this spirit of helpful remembrance that we write to you, determined to remind you of some of the highlights — notably in your first term — of your astonishing career.

    Your carefully chosen collaborators were outstanding — in “enabling” you to realize your dreams regarding “preventive war.”  Does the date of August 26, 2002 ring a bell?  That was the day that your vice-president, armed with a speech that must have been fine-tuned by an army of P. R. geniuses, stood at the podium of the VFW Convention, solemnly declaring — to repeated applause and cheers — that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction…to use against our friends, against our allies, against us.”  This world-historic speech — packed with unusual facts-and-figures which had been uniquely re-arranged, modified, and interpreted in a highly original way — heralded the end of that halcyon summer.  Fall — the ideal time, according to your P.R. adviser, Andrew Card, to promote a “new product” — had officially begun.  And the product you were selling was War, war against Iraq, war against a sovereign state — its people already beaten down and impoverished by the first Gulf War and the draconian sanctions imposed in its aftermath.

    Can you remember that time?  The moment in the Oval House when you made one of those terribly difficult decisions that presidents so often make.  (Did you decide that the people of Iraq had not suffered enough?)  In any event, you proceeded boldly, not to say impudently: soon the media was flooded with your voice, an urgent voice that became almost a chant that went something like this:  “Saddam Hussein!!…Weapons of Mass Destruction!!… Saddam!!…WMD!!”  Several months of this “sales campaign” ensued, climaxed by your order to invade and attack — on March 19 of the following year.

    Can you even remember those hapless UN inspectors?  Or the ever-polite, ever-so-cautious Kofi Annan?  Probably not — and certainly Americans can’t.  (By now — and you no doubt confidently expected this — most can barely even remember the War itself!)  Anyway, as you might still recall, by 2002 or so the inspectors were coming up empty; it appeared, notwithstanding your innuendos, that Saddam had indeed complied with the Security Council Resolution 687.  What did you do then?  Was this one of your famous “decision points”?

    Your advisors quickly offered an alternate (if wildly far-fetched) “reason” for invading Iraq.  Within the shadow of Israel’s large nuclear arms arsenal, and despite the terrible condition of his nation, Madman Saddam was nonetheless tirelessly at work 24/7 — feverishly building an Atomic Bomb!  In those months of 2003, you spoke with great urgency (if not logic) about the diabolical Saddam — a shadowy mastermind who by then had even eclipsed the devilish Osama bin Laden as the personification of pure evil!

    Those few conscious, coolly sceptical Americans dimly recalled that an A-bomb requires a good supply of uranium “yellowcake,” which is refined using powerful centrifuges designed for that purpose.  Maybe you “don’t recall” the rather slipshod, forged sales documents involved.  Ambassador Joe Wilson, dispatched to Niger to confirm the sale, found no such thing, and — remarkably — refused to play along with your charade.  Too bad — and on top of that, the supposed centrifuge-arms Iraq had purchased were actually not designed for that purpose at all.

    Are you beginning to remember?  It’s surprising how many elderly people, convinced that “it never happened,” are unpleasantly startled by the return of some (unwelcome) memories.  But we who write to you today are among your biggest admirers.  As a machiavellian, you outrank Machiavelli in history (and in notoriety).  Why try to truthfully educate confused Americans — your employers, if we recall the Constitution — when you could, with breathtaking mauvaise foi, ignite a wildfire of fear, hatred, and bellicose vengefulness?

    You focused your heroic call-to-arms especially on young Americans, often out-of-work and looking to serve a Cause they could believe in.  Such young people, who were proud to “serve their country” and follow their president’s call, believed you — and why shouldn’t they have? — when you appealed to their patriotic duty to defend the nation against such an Imminent Threat.  But it’s more than a little sad that thousands later returned to the U.S.– under secrecy and at night — in body-bags.  And tens of thousands, maimed physically and/or emotionally by battlefield trauma, returned to the U.S. as shadows of what they once had been.  Tens of thousands more, depressed and despairing veterans, have already committed suicide — but maybe you overlooked that recent news item on your way to the golf course.

    In the latter half of 2004, the Occupation Force — having bombed, ravaged, and vandalized Iraq (again) — nonetheless were unwilling to announce the discovery of any (non-existent) WMDs.  You found this absence of WMDs, as you later told a baffled journalist (Helen Thomas), “disappointing.”  But undaunted even by this, you boldly (shamelessly? insolently?) decided on another term.  One can only marvel, once more, at your reckless daring: once again, strutting your lying, boasting personage in front of the beleaguered electorate, you were re-elected!  And, on top of that, you even proved the sanctified Abraham LIncoln wrong: as you no doubt brilliantly predicted, it turns out that “you can fool (most of) the people all the time.”

    Even in these benighted and morally confused times, very, very few persons could have mastered, to such a superlative degree, the fine art of being — a scoundrel.  To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, “patriotism is the first resort of a scoundrel.”  After the tragedy of 9/11, you were buoyantly energized in your eagerness for — revenge (no matter how misdirected).  You were, you proudly proclaimed, a “war president.”  Therefore, and in closing, we have formally nominated you to join the exclusive ranks of legendary commanders-in-chief, a truly select company of bold, impetuous conquerors — including Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia, Adolf Hitler, and, last but not least, our hero, George W. Bush!

    The post Open Letter to George W. Bush first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Warmongers Should Be Treated Like Serial Killers And Child Rapists

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    California Representative Ro Khanna announced on Monday that he’d just hung out with Iraq war architect Bill Kristol and had a wonderful exchange of ideas, fully discrediting the myth of the progressive Democrat with a single tweet.

    “Bill Kristol is one of the most thoughtful voices in defending liberalism and democratic institutions in our country,” Khanna tweeted. “Learned a lot in our conversation about shaping also an inclusive narrative around American patriotism.”

    When Khanna’s Twitter followers began reacting with shock and disgust at a congressman who is generally regarded as one of the most progressive elected officials on Capitol Hill saying sweet things about a murderous arch-neocon, he added:

    “I was a strong and early critic of the war in Iraq, and Kristol and I have very different worldviews on foreign policy. But to have a discussion about strengthening liberalism and liberal institutions with people you disagree is in my view needed in a pluralistic democracy.”

    “I’m back in the office after a stimulating lunch with Ro Khanna and see he’s tweeted about it,” Kristol posted on Twitter. “Which is fine! But not with some on the Left! I’m sure Ro can take the heat. As for me, I benefited from our talk, and admire Ro’s willingness to argue—and occasionally (gasp!) agree.”

    It’s really odious how they’re framing this get-together as two men from differing ideological backgrounds overcoming their little disagreements to find common ground. We’re talking about someone who has pushed for psychopathic acts of military violence at every opportunity throughout his entire career, and has had an ungodly amount of success in doing so. As the co-founder of the influential neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century and major Bush administration thought leader, Kristol played a key role in manufacturing support for the invasion of Iraq and ushering in an unprecedented new era of US military expansionism, a fact for which he remains completely unapologetic.

    The invasion killed at least a million Iraqis, and arguably more than twice that. We’re not talking about two people setting aside their disagreements about farming subsidies or net neutrality here, we’re talking about fucking murder. Murder at a scale so massive it’s impossible to fully wrap your mind around it. Mass murder is not a difference of opinion, it’s mass murder. It’s no more an ideological position than stomping on kittens is an ideological position.

    Saying you disagree with Bill Kristol’s engineering the Iraq war but found plenty of common ground on liberalism and patriotism is the same as saying you disagree with Jared Fogle on his raping children but found plenty of common ground on his fondness for Subway sandwiches.

    It’s like announcing you just had lunch with serial killer Edmund Kemper and, while you disagree with his policy of murdering women and copulating with their severed heads, you really respect his opinions on immigration.

    I’m actually being charitable here. There’s not a pedophile or serial killer on earth who has contributed as much death and suffering to our world as William Kristol.

    It’s not okay to be a warmonger. Pouring your mental energy into the slaughter of human beings is not some petty ideological quibble that can be looked past in search of common ground. Announcing you’ve just had lunch with a death merchant like Kristol and found plenty to admire about him should carry at least as much stigma as a lunchtime bromance with a genocide-promoting white supremacist, and probably more so given that Kristol has actually succeeded in manifesting his heinous vision for the world.

    These monsters should not be accepted in our society. They should be as reviled as serial killers, child molesters and Nazis, not respected pundits who stroll around having casual lunch breaks with elected officials. They should be afraid to show themselves in public.

    Instead, Kristol and his fellow neocons have been rehabilitated in the fugue of Trump hysteria and are now seen frequently on liberal media panels and viewed favorably by centrist Democrats, even while continuing to promote the annexation of Cuba, regime change in Iran, regime change in China, and keeping US troops in Afghanistan. Such creatures should be expelled from society and chased away until they’re forced to live under a mountain eating cave fish like Smeagol; instead they’re being accepted further and further into what passes for the American “left” today.

    Ro Khanna is catching so much flak for his Kristol cuddle fest because Americans are told very forcefully that they need to support the Democratic Party if they want to advance leftward movement, yet even the very most progressive among them who are operating on the national stage consistently expose themselves as unprincipled imperialist swamp monsters. This is a problem, and it needs to be treated as such.

    Anti-imperialism should be the most obvious, basic, bare-minimum agenda for anyone who cares about peace, truth and justice in our world. Instead, in a globe-spanning empire made of lies, it’s been turned by propaganda into a freakish fringe position that no elected officials are allowed to espouse, while monsters like Kristol are embraced and uplifted.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • In Foreign Policy Australia Proves to be a Slow Learner

    Quod deus vult perdere prius dementat. (Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad).

    One of the more enduring mysteries of Australian foreign policy is its continued adherence to the American way of war. One has only to look at the history of the post-World War II period to be presented with a host of examples of where Australia has followed the United States into one war after another where a compelling Australian national interest is impossible to identify.

    This history of adherence began in Korea in the war that raged in that country between 1950 and 1953. It will be recalled that for years following World War II both the North and the South of Korea waged a guerrilla campaign against each other. The war commenced when the North invaded the South and made major moves on the Southern capital of Seoul and were on the verge of capturing it.

    The United States, already alarmed at the Communists taking over China the previous year, reacted to the North’s invasion of the South.  Taking advantage of the temporary non-presence of the Russians in the Security Council, and with China’s seat still held by the defeated Nationalists (a disgrace that lasted a further 22 years) the United States pushed through a resolution in the Security Council authorising military intervention.

    Australia was one of the countries that willingly joined this ostensible United Nations action to restore the status quo in Korea. An expeditionary force was rapidly gathered and succeeded in expelling the North from the South of Korea. The United States commander Douglas MacArthur was not content with restoring the status quo. He invaded the North and moved all the way to the Chinese border. We now know that his intention was to invade China and endeavour to restore the Nationalist government. That, of course, was never mentioned at the time.

    The United States presence on their border brought the Chinese into the war and they rapidly succeeded in pushing the United States and its allies, including Australia, back south of the border. Stalemate then ensued for the next two years until an uneasy peace deal was reached. This has never been ratified and the North and South of Korea are still technically at war.

    Australia’s next involvement in United States aggression was to take part in the war on Vietnam which was precipitated by the South of the country refusing to allow a national election that would undoubtedly have been won by the North’s Ho Chi Minh.

    Australia’s involvement in that fiasco lasted more than a decade before the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 saw that government withdrawing Australian troops. That action earned the animosity of the Americans, who together with their agent, the Governor General John Kerr,worked tirelessly for the defeat of the Whitlam government which they achieved in November 1975. Since that time no Labor government has dared to cross the United States. Australia’s foreign policy is an unbroken chain of adherence to United States aggression ever since.

    This manifested itself in 2001 when Australia joined the attack on Afghanistan. That commitment ended only two weeks ago when Australian troops were unilaterally and suddenly withdrawn from Afghanistan. The fate of the hundreds of Afghanis who worked with Australian troops during that 20 years is still undecided. They appear to have been abandoned, although public pressure may force a change of heart by the government.

    One of the least mentioned features of that conflict was that the Labor Party, although opposing the initial engagement, did nothing to withdraw Australian troops during the six years they were in government during that 20 year involvement.

    Similarly, Australia was among the first of the western nations to join the entirely illegal invasion of Iraq. Again, the Labor Party retained that commitment when they were in power, although they initially opposed it. The Australian troops still occupy that country despite a unanimous resolution of the Iraqi parliament demanding that they leave. The Australian government does not bother to justify its position to the Australian parliament and in that they are unchallenged by the Labor opposition. That commitment is also rapidly approaching the 20th anniversary.

    Australia’s most recent show of support for United States aggression has been to join the so-called “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea. It is in Australia’s willingness to join in blatantly anti China exercises that the gap between self-interest and adherence to United States aggression is most marked. China is Australia’s largest trading partner by a considerable margin, although the future of that relationship is now seriously in doubt. There can be no clearer example of a country pursuing a foreign policy that is manifestly at odds with its national interest than the Australian government conflict vis-à-vis China.

    The United States alliance goes beyond joining a succession of wars of minimal national interest to Australia. The United States has a number of military bases in Australia, of which arguably the most important is the electronic spying facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. This base had also been targeted by the Whitlam Labor government. It is absolutely no coincidence that the sacking of the Whitlam government by the attorney general John Kerr occurred the day before Whitlam was to announce to the Australian parliament his government’s intention of closing the Pine Gap facility.

    That also is a policy that has been abandoned by the Labor opposition. Their foreign policy is not indistinguishable from that of the Liberal government. The fate of the Whitlam government, the last to demonstrate even an inkling of foreign policy independence, is a lesson has been well absorbed by the president Labor leadership.

    Even the ignominious United States withdrawal from Afghanistan has been insufficient to encourage even a modicum of rethinking Australia’s foreign defence stances. It can only be a matter of time before Australia follows the United States into yet another war of aggression somewhere in the world. There is no reason to believe that the eventual outcome of that conflict will differ in any way from the experience of the past 70 years: vast expense, huge loss of human life and eventual humiliating retreat.

    China may eventually demonstrate to the Australians that there is a price to pay for this endless adherence to the violence of a fading empire. It is a price that Australia will not bear lightly.

    The post In Foreign Policy Australia Proves to be a Slow Learner first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Axis Of Resistance Responds To Biden’s Aggression

    Richard Medhurst: “The Americans have come under attack in numerous places in Iraq and Syria in the last 24 hours. It appears to me, and I think anyone would agree, to be a coordinated move by the resistance. So I am going to show you what has taken place. So you had three attacks that took place. One was at the Ain al Asad Air Base. You may recall that this is the air base that the Iranians fired at after Trump assassinated General Suleimani. There were no casualties because they actually warned the Americans in advance. It was more of a warning, a retaliation without casualties. And this is the strategy that is being pursued. I plotted what is going on on a map…”

    The post Axis Of Resistance Responds To Biden’s Aggression appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Drinking Coffee in the Early Morning Rain and Thinking of Donald Rumsfeld

    It’s been raining incessantly for three days.  It is a cool early morning in the beginning of July and I have just made a cup of coffee. Now an electrical power outage has occurred and so I am sitting in a rocking chair in the semi-darkness savoring my coffee and feeling thankful that I made it in time.  I have a close relationship with coffee and the end of night and the break of day.  As for time, that is as mysterious to me as the fact that I am sitting here in its embrace. The electric clocks have stopped.  I think: To exist – how amazing!

    More than the coffee, however, I am luxuriating in the sound of the tumbling rain.  Its beautiful music creates a cocoon of peace within which I find temporary joy.  The joy of doing nothing, of pursuing no purpose.  Of knowing that whatever I do it will never be enough, for me or anyone, and the world will continue turning until time stands still, or whatever time does or is according to those who invented it.  I will be gone and others will have arrived and the water will flow from the skies and the clocks will still tell people what they don’t know – time – although they will continue to tell it.

    Humans are the telling animals.

    A few weeks ago, when this area was in a mini-drought, the local newspaper, in the typical wisdom of such cant, had a headline that said “there is a threat of rain later this week.”  They are experts at threats.  This is the corporate media’s purpose.   Rain is a threat, joy is a threat, doing nothing is a threat, the sun is a threat – but the real threats they conceal.  To create fear seems to be their purpose, as they do not tell us about the real threats.  Their purpose is not to tell the truth, but if you listen closely you can hear it.

    In the middle of the night I woke up to go to the bathroom, and outside the small bathroom window I watched the rain engulfing the lower roof and sluicing down the shingles in two heavy streams.  I thought how the desiccated mind of the headline writer must be feeling now, but then I realized that he or she was asleep, as usual.  There is a moist world and a dry one, and the corporate media is run by arid souls who would like to make the world a desert like their masters of war in Washington.

    Then as I sit here my brief peace is roiled by the memory of reading Tacitus, the Roman historian, and his famous quote of Calgacus, an enemy of Rome:

    These plunderers of the world [the Romans], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

    I think of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on his recent deathbed.  Here was a man whose entire life was dedicated to the American Empire.  He spent all his allotted time making war or making money from the spoils of war.  He was a desert maker, a slaughterer for the Empire.  No doubt he died very rich in gold.

    I can no longer hear the rain because my mind is filled with the loud thought of what Rumsfeld thought as he lay dying.  Was he sorry?  Did he believe in God or was his god Mars, the Roman god of war?   Did he smile a bloody smile or say he was sorry and beg for forgiveness from all his innocent victims?  Did he see the faces of the children of Iraq that he slaughtered?  Or did he pull an Eichmann and say, “I will leap into my grave laughing”?

    Your guess is as good as mine, but mine leans toward the bloody smile of a life well spent in desert making.  But that is a “known unknown.”

    Rolling thunder and a lightning strike in the east jolt me back from my deaf dark thoughts.  The sound of the rain returns.  The coffee tastes great.  Peace returns with the unalloyed gift of the ravishing rain.

    Yet the more I sit and listen and watch it soundly stipple the garden and grass, the more thoughts come to me, as my father once told me: Thoughts think us as much as we think thoughts.  It’s what we do with our thoughts that count, he said, and like lightning, if we don’t flash when we are given the gift of life, when we’re gone, it will be as if we never were, like the lightning before it flashed.

    Thomas Merton’s prophetic words from his hermitage in the Kentucky woods in 1966 think me:

    Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

    There are moments in many lives when, if one is lucky, they are initiated into a ritual that sustains them throughout life.  To others these experiences can easily seem paltry and meaningless, but to the receiver they offer a crack into deeper dimensions of being and becoming.  For me it was my introduction to coffee during a hurricane.

    My father had driven my mother, three of my sisters, and me to Jones Beach on Long Island.  This was before people checked the weather every minute.  The sky in the southwest grew darker as we drove, but on we went.  The beach was deserted except for some gulls and the parking lot empty.  My father parked the car close to the beach and while my sisters and mother sat in the car, and my mother, listening to the weather reports, issued warnings to us, my father and I ran like wild dogs into the heavy surf despite her admonitions that the hurricane from the south was arriving sooner than expected.  It started to rain hard. The surf picked up.  We swam and got battered and shouted exultantly and came out shaking with the chills.  A pure white sea gull landed on my wet head and my father laughed.  Awe-struck, I stood stock still and my shaking stopped. In its mouth the sea gull held a purple ribbon, which it dropped at my feet as it flew off.  I grabbed the ribbon and we jogged up to the concession building where there was one man working.  My father ordered coffee and a hot chocolate for me.  But they had run out of hot chocolate.  So my father ordered two coffees and filled mine with three or four sugars. I had never sampled coffee and didn’t like the smell, but my father said to drink it, with the sugar it will taste good and it will warm you up.  It strangely tasted like hot chocolate. We toasted our adventure as I drank my Proustian madeleine at eleven-years-old.

    I had put the ribbon on the counter as we drank.  When we were going back to the car, I noticed there were words on the ribbon. They said: Rest in peace.  I have long lost the ribbon but retain its message.

    So now every morning between the end of night and the break of day, I sit with my coffee and listen.  And even when it isn’t raining, I watch the birds emerge from their nightly rests to greet the day with their songs.  They tell me many things, and they are all free.

    This morning I am wondering if Donald Rumsfeld ever heard them.

    I suspect their message was an “unknown unknown” for him, just like the gift of rain.  He preferred the rain of death from the skies in the form of bombs and missiles.  He was only doing his job.

    He made a desert and called it peace.

    The post Drinking Coffee in the Early Morning Rain and Thinking of Donald Rumsfeld first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Rumsfeld Remembered as ‘Complex,’ ‘Energetic’—Not as Killer of Multitudes

     

    NYT: Donald H. Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary During Iraq War, Is Dead at 88

    The New York Times (6/30/21) wrote that Donald Rumsfeld “seemed like an All-American who had stepped off the Wheaties box.”

    One thing you won’t find in corporate media obituaries of Donald Rumsfeld is any estimate of how many people died in the wars he was in charge of launching.

    You do see occasional references to the US troops he sent to their deaths—as in the AP‘s obit (6/30/21):

    Defiant to the end, Rumsfeld expressed no regrets in his farewell ceremony, at which point the US death toll in Iraq had surpassed 2,900. The count would eventually exceed 4,400.

    And in the New York Times (6/30/21):

    Mr. Rumsfeld, more than four years out of office, still expressed no regrets over the decision to invade Iraq, which had cost the United States $700 billion and 4,400 American lives.

    But the Afghan and Iraqi lives lost as the result of the wars Rumsfeld managed—which by the most careful estimates outnumbered the US dead by a factor of a hundred or more (PLOS Medicine, 10/15/13; Lancet, 10/12/06)—simply go unmentioned. This, of course, greatly facilitates the job of the obituary writer, who is required to present every deceased member of the Washington establishment as a complicated, ultimately lovable character, regardless of the scale of their crimes.

    Or as the Washington Post (6/30/21) put it: “Mr. Rumsfeld was more complex and paradoxical than the public caricature of him as a pugnacious, inflexible villain would suggest.”

    ‘Handling’ Iraq

    Of course, a catastrophe on the scale of the Iraq War can’t be presented as an unvarnished success for Rumsfeld. But neither can it be presented as a criminal act of aggression, because that would indict Rumsfeld’s co-conspirators, many of whom are still alive and plenty of whom still have jobs either in the federal government or the nation’s premier media outlets. (During that war, many professional journalists covered Rumsfeld with an enthusiasm that approached idol worship, referring to him as “America’s new rock star,” a “father figure,” a “sex symbol” and “America’s stud”—Extra!, 3–4/02).

    So you need a strategy for criticizing Rumsfeld without directly addressing the fact that he supervised wars of aggression that killed multitudes of people.  Perhaps it was his management style, as the Post suggested when it reported that “his handling of the Iraq War eventually led to his downfall.”

    Donald Rumsfeld, a Cunning Leader Undermined by Iraq War

    AP (6/30/21) eventually changed this headline, but the notion that Rumsfeld was to be pitied as a victim of a war he started remained the framing of the story.

    Rumsfeld “failed to set a clear policy for the treatment of prisoners,” the Post‘s Bradley Graham wrote, which is a peculiar way of saying that Rumsfeld specifically approved most of the forms of torture used at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, including the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation and threats from dogs—along with “mild, non-injurious” beatings.

    He could have been more of a people person, the Post intimated:

    While capable of great charm and generosity, he often seemed to undercut himself with a confrontational, gruff and belittling manner that many found offensive.

    Or, perhaps, Rumsfeld was really the victim and not the perpetrator of the Iraq War—as the AP suggested with its original headline, “Donald Rumsfeld, a Cunning Leader Undermined by the Iraq War.” AP later switched that to “…Who Oversaw a Ruinous Iraq War,” but the attempt to evoke pity for Rumsfeld is still there is reporter Robert Burns’ lead:

    Calling Donald H. Rumsfeld energetic was like calling the Pacific wide. When others would rest, he would run. While others sat, he stood. But try as he might, at the pinnacle of his career as Defense secretary he could not outmaneuver the ruinous politics of the Iraq War.

    ‘Success’ in Afghanistan

    WaPo: Donald H. Rumsfeld, influential but controversial Bush defense secretary, dies at 88

    In its Rumsfeld obituary, the Washington Post (6/30/21) tried to disabuse readers of the “public caricature of him as a pugnacious, inflexible villain.”

    Another tactic employed by AP was to “balance” the problematic Iraq experience with the supposed bright spots of Rumsfeld’s career—notably the invasion of Afghanistan:

    US forces invaded Afghanistan on October 7, and with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon helm the Taliban regime was toppled within weeks…. Within months of that success, President George W. Bush’s attention shifted to Iraq, which played no role in the September 11 attacks.

    The Washington Post likewise presented Afghanistan as an example of Rumsfeld’s characteristic brilliance:

    Mr. Rumsfeld was initially hailed for leading the US military to war in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks…. In the wake of the Afghan invasion, Mr. Rumsfeld hoped to devise a similarly innovative war plan for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

    Reading these tributes, you could almost forget that in Afghanistan Rumsfeld launched the US’s longest overseas war, one that has killed nearly a quarter of a million people (including 70,000 civilians) without achieving any of the democracy-building, rights-protecting goals that were used to sell the occupation—or even completing its original task of capturing Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden. (He was instead assassinated years later in Pakistan.)

    Describing Rumsfeld’s arrival in Washington, the Times‘ Robert McFadden wrote:

    He seemed like an All-American who had stepped off the Wheaties box—a strikingly handsome Midwesterner radiating confidence, taking on big tasks and doing everything well.

    Could any war criminal ask to be remembered more fondly?

     

    The post Rumsfeld Remembered as ‘Complex,’ ‘Energetic’—Not as Killer of Multitudes appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • UK foreign policy link to nine times increase in asylum queues

    UK asylum queues have grown massively since 2010. New figures obtained by the Refugee Council say that waiting lists are nine times longer than they were a decade ago. But a quick look at where asylum seekers are coming from tells a very important story. Thousands are fleeing countries where the UK and its major allies have waged literal or economic wars.

    The Refugee Council’s new report, titled Living in Limbo, warns that as of March 2021 there were over 66,000 asylum seeker awaiting “an initial decision from the Home Office“. This is nine times the number of people waiting in 2010.

    Interventions

    When countries of origin are taken into account, the long list of asylum seekers starts to make sense. For instance, a 2019 House of Commons report lists Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia and Venezuela, as the top five asylum seeking nationalities in the EU. Pakistan, Nigeria, and Iran all made the top ten. These are counties which have suffered, or are suffering, occupation or intervention by the UK and its allies.

    UN figures for 2020 on UK asylum put Iraq and Iran in the top four. The same document highlights that Iraqi and Iranian children were very prominent among Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC) figures.

    Right-wing claims

    Despite right-wing claims, UN figures show that the UK takes few refugees relative to other countries. The vast majority stay in their “region of displacement”. Turkey and Pakistan had the most as of 2019, with 3.6 million and 1.4 million respectively.

    The UK also doesn’t have a high number of asylum seekers overall. Again, according to UN figures, Germany, France, Spain, and Greece all have tens of thousands more.

    Offshoring

    This hasn’t stopped UK officials pushing for hardline policies to deal with asylum seekers and refugees.

    On 28 June, it was reported that the UK was again considering ‘offshoring’ asylums seekers like Australia, whose refugee policies have been widely criticised.

    UK officials are in talks with Denmark, Al Jazeera reported. In June, the Danes passed a law to deport refugee outside the EU And Rwanda was mentioned as a possible destination for asylum seekers.

    Accountability?

    Bashing poor and desperate people is what UK governments are all about. But the figures tell a story. A majority of displaced people in the EU, and many who make it to the UK, are victims of UK foreign policy. There are reasons that places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are so well represented in refugee statistics and the UK’s ever-growing asylum-seeker backlog.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Takver.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Rumsfeld Was Not ‘Controversial’

    When word came down yesterday that former Defense Secretary and brazen orchestrator of mass death Donald Rumsfeld had shuffled loose the mortal coil at age 88, CNN and the other networks began to do their standard back-and-fill exercises to shore up the fiction while burying the truth after a genuine monster drops dead. “Controversial,” they called Rumsfeld, while showing footage of him scurrying around the wreckage after the Pentagon attack on September 11. “I think that’s what we’ll all remember,” said one talking head of those images.

    Not if I have anything to say about it.

    See, on the same day he was doing no more or less than what any average citizen would likely do at an emergency scene, Rumsfeld returned to his office and immediately began scheming to use the attacks as a pretense for invading Iraq.

    The post Rumsfeld Was Not ‘Controversial’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Known Knowns of Donald Rumsfeld

    “On the morning of September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld ran to the fire at the Pentagon to assist the wounded and ensure the safety of survivors,” expressed a mournful George W. Bush in a statement.  “For the next five years, he was in steady service as a wartime secretary of defense – a duty he carried out with strength, skill, and honor.”

    Long before Donald Trump took aim at irritating facts and dissenting eggheads, Donald Rumsfeld, two times defense secretary and key planner behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was doing his far from negligible bit. When asked at his confirmation hearing about what worried him most when he went to bed at night, he responded accordingly: intelligence.  “The danger that we can be surprised because of a failure of imagining what might happen in the world.”

    Hailing from Chicago, he remained an almost continuous feature of the Republic’s politics for decades, burying himself in the business-government matrix.  He was a Congressman three times.  He marked the Nixon and Ford administrations, respectively serving as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity and Defense Secretary.  At 43, he was the youngest defense secretary appointee in the imperium’s history.

    He returned to the role of Pentagon chief in 2001, though not before running the pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle and making it as a Fortune 500 CEO.  It was under his stewardship that the US Food and Drugs Administration finally approved the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame.  A report by a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry had claimed that the drug “might induce brain tumors.”  This did not phase Rumsfeld, undeterred by such fanciful notions as evidence.

    With Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, and Rumsfeld’s membership of the transition team, the revolving door could go to work. The new FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., was selected while Rumsfeld remained Searle’s CEO.  When Searle reapplied for approval of aspartame, Hayes, as the new FDA commissioner, appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the 1980 findings.  When it became evident that a 3-2 outcome approving the ban was in the offing, Hayes appointed a sixth person.  The deadlocked vote was broken by Hayes, who favoured aspartame.

    In responding to the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, Rumsfeld laid the ground for an assault on inconvenient evidence.  As with aspartame, he was already certain about what he wanted.  Even as smoke filled the corridors of the Pentagon, punctured by the smouldering remains of American Airlines Flight 77, Rumsfeld was already telling the vice-chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff General Richard Myers to find the “best info fast … judge whether good enough [to] hit SH@same time – not only UBL.” (Little effort is needed to work out that SH was Saddam Hussein and UBL Usama/Osama Bin Laden.)

    Experts were given a firm trouncing – what would they know?  With Rumsfeld running the Pentagon, the scare mongers and ideologues took the reins, all working on the Weltanschauung summed up at that infamous press conference of February 12, 2002.  When asked if there was any evidence as to whether Iraq had attempted to or was willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, given “reports that there is no evidence of a direct link”, Rumsfeld was ready with a tongue twister.  “There are known knowns.  There are things we know we know.  We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.  But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”  This was being frightfully disingenuous, given that the great known for Rumsfeld was the need to attack Iraq.

    To that end, he authorised the creation of a unit run by the under-secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, known as the Office of Special Plans, to examine intelligence on Iraq’s capabilities independently of the CIA.  Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit a year prior to the invasion, described the OSP’s operations in withering terms.  “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.”

    One of Rumsfeld’s favourite assertions – that Iraq had a viable nuclear weapons program – did not match the findings behind closed doors. “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program,” claimed a report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “is based largely – perhaps 90% – on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”

    None of this derailed the juggernaut: the US was going to war.  Not that Rumsfeld was keen to emphasise his role in it.  “While the president and I had many discussions about the war preparations,” he notes in his memoirs, “I do not recall him ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision.”

    With forces committed to both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States found itself in the situation Rumsfeld boastfully claimed would never happen.  Of this ruinously bloody fiasco, Rumsfeld was dismissive: “stuff happens.”  Despite such failings, a list of words he forbade staff from using was compiled, among them “quagmire”, “resistance” and “insurgents”.  Rumsfeld, it transpired, had tried regime change on the cheap, hoping that a modest military imprint was all that was necessary. The result: the US found itself in Iraq from March 2003 to December 2011, and then again in 2013 with the rise of Islamic State.  Afghanistan continues to be garrisoned, with the US scheduled to leave a savaged country by September.

    Rumsfeld was not merely a foe of facts that might interfere with his policy objective.  Conventions and laws prohibiting torture were also sneered at.  On December 2, 2002, he signed a memorandum from General Counsel William J. Haynes II authorising the use of 20-hour interrogations, stress positions and the use of phobias for Guantanamo Bay detainees.  In hand writing scrawled at the bottom of the document, the secretary reveals why personnel should not be too soft on their quarry, as he would “stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”  The results were predictably awful, and revelations of torture by US troops at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 led him to offer his resignation, which President Bush initially rejected.

    By November 2006, military voices had turned against him.  With the insurgency in full swing and Iraq sliding into chaos, the Army Times called for the secretary’s resignation.  “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised.  And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear the brunt.”  Bush eventually relented.

    It is interesting that so little of this was remarked upon during the Trump era, seen as a disturbing diversion from the American project.  When Trump came to office, Democrats and others forgave all that came before, ignoring the manure that enriched the tree of mendacity.  The administration of George W. Bush was rehabilitated.

    In reflecting on his documentary on Rumsfeld Errol Morris found himself musing like his protagonist.  “He’s a mystery to me, and in many ways, he remains a mystery to me – except for the possibility that there might not be a mystery.”  The interlocutor had turned into his subject.

    The post The Known Knowns of Donald Rumsfeld first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rumsfeld Was Not “Controversial.” He Played a Leading Role in Mass Murder.

    Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prepares to testify before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 17, 2005.

    When word came down yesterday that former Defense Secretary and brazen orchestrator of mass death Donald Rumsfeld had shuffled loose the mortal coil at age 88, CNN and the other networks began to do their standard back-and-fill exercises to shore up the fiction while burying the truth after a genuine monster drops dead. “Controversial,” they called Rumsfeld, while showing footage of him scurrying around the wreckage after the Pentagon attack on September 11. “I think that’s what we’ll all remember,” said one talking head of those images.

    Not if I have anything to say about it.

    See, on the same day he was doing no more or less than what any average citizen would likely do at an emergency scene, Rumsfeld returned to his office and immediately began scheming to use the attacks as a pretense for invading Iraq. “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden],” read the notes by an aide taken that day. “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

    Ten months later and nine months before the war, “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of that invasion, as was explained in the Downing Street Memo, and through the testimony of actual patriots like Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who watched Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith and his George W. Bush cronies concoct fraudulent “evidence” for that war in the Office of Special Plans.

    The world we live in today was created in fire and blood by Donald Rumsfeld and his think tank pals at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) — along with all the Republicans and Democrats complicit in empowering their sordid plans. Having been gifted on 9/11 the “new Pearl Harbor” extolled in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the PNAC plan for military domination of the Middle East, powerful PNAC men like Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney proceeded to throw a generation of Americans and Iraqis into a meat grinder that is still turning out bodies some 18 years later. They did this to win elections, accrue power, and the war profits were in the trillions.

    Rumsfeld and his people did not operate in a vacuum, of course. To this day, the ranks of congressional Democrats and Republicans still contain those who voted to initiate and fuel this ongoing calamity. One of them — former Senator Hillary Clinton — lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, in no small part because of her record on Iraq. Another enabler, Joe Biden — who claims he was “fooled” by the Bush administration on Iraq after he voted for it, but was not — is now president of the United States despite his record on Iraq.

    Rumsfeld’s tactic of choice in grasping for war? Fear. “Every day since September of 2002, we heard from Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Fleischer, Rice, Powell, and several times from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, that Iraq’s weapons program represented an immediate and severe danger to the American people,” I wrote on June 22, 2003. “The shadow of September 11 loomed long and dark over these statements, and the approval ratings for combat indicated that Americans were willing to believe these Bush administration claims rather than accept even the most remote possibility that Iraqi weapons could be used on the home front.”

    Plastic sheeting and duct tape, remember? Because Rumsfeld and Co. said Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile biological weapons labs, and uranium from Niger for use in a “robust” nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq enjoyed connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.

    “We know where they are,” Rumsfeld said of the fictitious WMD on March 30, 2003. “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” In a 2011 memoir titled Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld expressed regret for claiming to know where the WMD were, but insisted the toppling of Saddam Hussein was worth the price. Of course he did; he didn’t pay it, at all.

    A properly detailed obituary of Donald Rumsfeld would run longer than a Gore Vidal novel. For that obit to be complete, it would have to include the mainstreaming of torture by the willing hand of the secretary of defense.

    “We are awash in photographs of Iraqi men – not terrorists, just people – lying in heaps on cold floors with leashes around their necks,” I wrote on May 10, 2004. “We are awash in photographs of men chained so remorselessly that their backs are arched in agony, men forced to masturbate for cameras, men forced to pretend to have sex with one another for cameras, men forced to endure attacks from dogs, men with electrodes attached to them as they stand, hooded, in fear of their lives.”

    Flash forward to February of 2016, and we had then-presidential candidate Donald Trump proudly declaring, “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” His crowds went wild every time they heard this. By 2018, Mike Pompeo was promoted to secretary of state, and Gina Haspel took his place as the head of the CIA.

    “She was not just another pro-war shouter back in DC,” I wrote at the time of her nomination to that post. “Haspel was in it [torture] up to her throat. For a time, she ran one of the “black sites,” this one located in Thailand, and was so proud of her work that she destroyed the tapes of her interrogations. For this, she was neither fired nor prosecuted, and pending confirmation will be in charge of one of the largest intelligence organizations in the world.”

    Before Congress, Rumsfeld took full responsibility for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and other sites. Eventually, he was fired for his gross incompetence, and is now remembered by most as the worst defense secretary in U.S. history. His boss, George W. Bush, spends his days painting portraits of the soldiers he sent to slaughter, while Dick Cheney likely lingers in a hyperbaric chamber somewhere, drinking children’s tears from a crystal goblet. None of them have experienced a nanosecond of consequences for what they did, all of which was done deliberately and with intent.

    Aided and abetted by active complicity from both parties, Donald Rumsfeld and his PNAC ilk are in the national bloodstream, poisoning us from the inside out. Although they hardly acted alone, they played key roles in fueling the imperialism and militarism that characterize the United States. Trump was only one element of the consequences their actions brought upon us and the world.

    The TV people can call Rumsfeld “controversial” as they please — many of them are complicit in supercharging his lies into the national zeitgeist, so it’s little wonder they’re disinterested in the truth — but all I see is another war criminal who got away with mass murder, torture and grand theft. His war was a smash-and-grab robbery writ large, and we will likely never fully recover from it. Neither will Iraq.

    Rest in pieces, Mr. Secretary. May we never see your like again.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The System Isn’t There To Protect Us From Criminals, It’s To Protect Criminals From Us

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    Iraq war architect Donald Rumsfeld has died. Not in a prison cell in The Hague, not murdered by bombs or bullets, but peacefully in his home, surrounded by loved ones, a week and a half shy of his 89th birthday.

    The imperial media are giving their fallen master a king’s tribute, with headlines describing the psychopathic war criminal as “a cunning leader“, “a man of honor and conviction“, or simply as “Former defense secretary at helm of Iraq, Afghanistan wars“.

    The cancerous Washington Post, who just the other day mocked the life of the late antiwar hero Mike Gravel with an obituary branding him the “gadfly senator from Alaska with flair for the theatrical,” describes the child killer Rumsfeld as the “influential but controversial Bush defense secretary” in its headline about his death. 

    The New York Times wasn’t much better. Take the headline “Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91 — He made headlines by fighting for an oil pipeline and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud. After 25 years of obscurity, he re-emerged with a quixotic presidential campaign.” Compare this to the headline “Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary During Iraq War, Is Dead at 88 — Mr. Rumsfeld, who served four presidents, oversaw a war that many said should never have been fought. But he said the removal of Saddam Hussein had ‘created a more stable and secure world.’”

    There’s been criticism as well, of course; online sentiments about Rumsfeld’s death have not been nearly as worshipful and hagiographic as they’ve been toward other disgusting war whores like John McCain. But in the end all that matters is that he lived a long, full life, without ever having faced even the slightest single consequence for the horrors he unleashed upon our world; without even so much as sustaining any meaningful damage to his reputation.

    This despite the fact that it’s been public knowledge for years that Rumsfeld began orchestrating the unforgivable invasion of Iraq within hours of the 9/11 attacks and told numerous lies in order to set that invasion in motion. He also oversaw the intervention in Afghanistan which he and his Bush administration cohorts had been planning before 9/11, beginning a decades-long occupation about which the public has been pervasively lied to from the very beginning by US officials in general and by Rumsfeld in particular. (But remember kids, only crazy conspiracy theorists question the official narrative about 9/11.)

    When we are little, we are taught that we live in a nation of laws, where bad guys are thrown in prison by the good guys who are in charge of things. Because our mental programming continues for the rest of our lives in the form of mass-scale propaganda designed to manufacture consent for the status quo, most of us tend to hold onto this childish model of the world to some extent throughout adulthood.

    In reality, exactly zero percent of the world’s worst people are in prison, but some of the best people are. The fact that Donald Rumsfeld lived a long life of freedom while Julian Assange wastes away in Belmarsh Prison proves the world doesn’t work the way we were taught in school. The very worst bad guys are not put in prison by the good guys who run things, because the very worst bad guys are the ones who run things.

    The system isn’t designed to protect us from society’s worst, it’s designed to protect society’s worst from us. It’s designed to keep us turning the gears of industry without looking around and noticing that we’re all getting fucked in the ass by an alliance of plutocrats and security state insiders who only care about power and money. It’s designed to keep us too busy and propagandized to use the power of our numbers to take back what the bastards have stolen from us, and to make sure there’s enough guns on their side to kill us all dead if we try.

    Donald Rumsfeld was all the worst things about our world. He perfectly embodied the corrupt, bloodthirsty, ecocidal, omnicidal, oppressive, exploitative, deceitful status quo that is driving humanity toward extinction. The US-centralized empire is Donald Rumsfeld. It might as well have his face and his name.

    Don’t let his passing fool you: Donald Rumsfeld is dead, but he is also as alive as ever. He lives on in the continued violence he helped initiate in the Middle East. In the death and destruction rained down by the US and its allies in the name of preserving a unipolar world order that none of us ever asked for. In the dying gasps of starving children under imperial blockades in Yemen and Venezuela. In the thousands of US military bases encircling our planet like a noose. In the war ships and missiles pivoting toward China in preparation for a long-anticipated confrontation which should terrify us all.

    Unless we can purge from our cells everything within us that resembles Donald Rumsfeld, there is no future for Homo sapiens on this planet. We must evolve beyond everything he stood for, as individuals, as a society, and as a species, and move into a peaceful and collaborative relationship with each other and with our ecosystem.

    ________________________

    The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  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, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Afghanistan Evacuation

    The Biden administration announced that it will accelerate plans to relocate Afghans who worked with the U.S. military. Their situation demands the most urgent response possible.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Biden’s Latest Middle East Airstrikes Give “More Fuel” to Conflict With Iran

    Biden’s Latest Middle East Airstrikes Give “More Fuel” to Conflict with Iran

    Criticism is growing of recent U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, which the Biden administration says targeted Iran-backed militias. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi condemned the attack as a “blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security.” The U.S. airstrikes come as the Biden administration is holding indirect talks with Iran about reviving the Iranian nuclear deal. Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, says the U.S. needs to end its “constant tit for tat” with Iran across the Middle East. “By failing to pivot away from that and instead bombing targets inside of Iraq, we are giving more fuel to this conflict,” he says.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez.

    A U.S. military base near a major oil field in eastern Syria came under attack Monday, one day after the Biden administration launched airstrikes in Syria and Iraq targeting an Iranian-backed militia. Shortly before 8 p.m. local time, multiple rockets hit the U.S. base near the U.S.-controlled Al-Omar oil field. The U.S. responded directing artillery fire at nearby rocket launching positions.

    This comes as criticism of the U.S. airstrikes grow. Iraq’s prime minister condemned the U.S. attack as a, quote, “blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security,” unquote. A symbolic funeral was held today in Baghdad for four members of the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces killed in the U.S. strikes. Syrian media is [reporting] Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused the United States of, quote, “disrupting security in the region.”

    On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the U.S. military strikes, claiming they were done in self-defense.

    SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: We took necessary, appropriate, deliberate action that is designed to limit the risk of escalation, but also to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message. This action, in self-defense, to do what’s necessary to prevent further attacks, I think, sends a very important and strong message. And I hope very much that it is received by those who were intended to receive it.

    AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. military airstrikes come at a time when the Biden administration is holding indirect talks with Iran about reviving the Iranian nuclear deal.

    We’re joining right now by Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council.

    Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you respond to these attacks?

    JAMAL ABDI: Well, you know, it’s hard to find something novel to say about the United States bombing Iraq at this point in time. We’ve been doing this for 30 years. But this comes at a time when the Biden administration has potentially the opportunity to pivot off of this track that was laid for them by the Trump administration, where they are engaged in this constant tit for tat and attempting to roll back Iranian influence and striking Iranian forces. And as we see, by failing to pivot away from that and instead bombing targets inside of Iraq, we are giving more fuel to this conflict. And instead of disincentivizing further attacks by Iran-linked groups, we see immediately retaliation. And this is how these things continue to bog the United States down in the region. And unless Biden is able to break out of this cycle, this is the norm that we’re going to be continuing.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jamal, what is the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces, and what is their connection, if any, to Iran? And also, what’s the status of U.S. troops in Iraq these days? How many are there?

    JAMAL ABDI: Yeah. So, the groups that Biden struck are part of the Popular Mobilization Units, which were formed to combat ISIS and have been integrated in the Iraqi Security Forces. And so, this is very much, from the Iraqi perspective, a violation of their sovereignty. This is an attack on, you know, groups that are part of the Security Forces.

    The United States is still in Iraq. The Iraqis actually — the parliament voted to kick the United States out back when Donald Trump was doing these strikes and when Donald Trump actually killed the Iranian general, Soleimani, and the leader of one of the groups that Biden then struck yesterday. After those strikes in 2020, the Iraqis voted to kick the United States out. The U.S. is still there. I think there are about 3,000 troops in an advise-and-assist role to support the Iraqi government. But, as we see, you know, this is not having a stabilizing effect, and actually the United States is a target for these groups that, prior to the Donald Trump administration, were actually working, if not in coordination with the United States, then in close proximity with the United States, and we weren’t having these conflicts.

    And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that that was when the United States and Iran had a deal. We were at the diplomatic table, we had a nuclear agreement, and we actually started to see this trend reverse. Now we’re back in a state where we don’t have a nuclear agreement. We’re trying to get back to there. The U.S. is in Iraq but in a different role. And Biden supposedly wants to withdraw from the region or draw down from the region. And the failure of diplomacy, combined with the willingness to engage in these strikes to supposedly create a deterrent, but actually put a big target on our backs, is a very bad place to be. And it’s hard to see a way out of it, unless there is a diplomatic breakthrough.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jamal, this is like a rite of passage, and Biden already did this once, so this is the second time since he’s come to office. But he is the sixth U.S. president in a row to bomb Iraq. I mean, you have George H.W. Bush, you have President Clinton, President George W. Bush, you have President Obama, you have President Trump, and then you have Biden. Now, let me play how the White House spokesperson Jen Psaki defended the airstrikes.

    PRESS SECRETARY JEN PSAKI: The targeted strikes were directed at facilities used by Iran-backed militias involved in these ongoing attacks for purposes including weapons storage, command logistics and unmanned aerial vehicle operations. So, Article II, the self-defense, the defense of the United States and our interests, is our domestic justification for the strikes announced yesterday. … The president’s view is that it was necessary, appropriate and deliberate action, these strikes, designed to limit the risk of escalation.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, they’re saying — the U.S. is saying it was self-defense. But it’s also interesting that the airstrikes come two weeks after the House of Representatives voted to repeal the AUMF, the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which grants sweeping war powers to the president. What will this mean for the nuclear deal that supposedly is — President Biden is attempting to revive?

    JAMAL ABDI: As you know, the talks to revive the nuclear deal are ongoing. We’re now in this awkward position where we have a lame-duck administration in Iran, who — the Rouhani government, who placed all of its political hopes and capital in the prospect of détente with the West and with the United States and getting this nuclear deal, to then have the rug pulled out from under it by Donald Trump, and now we are where we are today, where Iran is expanding its nuclear program and Iranians are suffering under sanctions, COVID, government mismanagement, and it’s a terrible situation.

    The talks are ongoing, and I think that the talks may still yield a return to the deal. I don’t think that’s necessarily off the table. But I think these actions make it a lot more difficult and have a risk of poisoning the atmosphere there. That being said, you know, I do think that the Iranian supreme leader has signaled that he does want to get this deal, and the incoming president, the hard-line Ebrahim Raisi, has also, if not signaled his support for the deal, signaled that he will accept it.

    And I think what really is going to determine whether that happens, it may be these negotiations with this outgoing sort of, quote-unquote, “friendly” administration in Iran, but it also may come under this new government. And the question then is: What does that then build towards? Is there further diplomacy that can happen? It does not look like that’s going to be the case.

    I think, for Congress, you know, you hear a lot of voices from Congress criticizing these talks and saying, you know, either we need to not be talking to Iran or we need to seek this bigger and better deal that Donald Trump was trying to get. So, there’s no bigger, better deal on the table unless we return to these obligations. And I just think the fact that the Biden administration is using this legally dubious grounds for these strikes and keeping Congress out of that conversation — Congress is supposed to be authorizing the wars. They’re not involved, so they’re totally detached from the consequences of the failure of diplomacy. And so it’s very easy to cheerlead these strikes and to criticize diplomacy, for members of Congress who don’t actually have any skin in the game when it comes to having to authorize these strikes that are very unpopular among the American public.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also — this whole issue of self-defense. Given that the United — isn’t this the essence of how an imperial power operates? If you station enough troops around the world — and, of course, the United States has troops in scores of countries around the world — you could always claim self-defense of the United States, because you’re so extended in so many different parts that have really no direct relation to our own country.

    JAMAL ABDI: Yeah, absolutely. And the U.S. presence in Iraq — I mean, going back to 1991, the U.S. presence in Iraq and the region have only put targets on the United States’s back and given rationalization to groups that want to see, you know, legitimately or illegitimately — you know, I let you decide — but want to see the United States out of the region. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. You know, counter to popular belief, Iran is not going to leave the region. They’re stuck there. They’re geographically stuck there. The United States isn’t. And the notion that we’re going to perpetually be, whether it’s having a large-scale troop presence there or even this more limited presence but continuing to engage in these deterrent strikes and this tit for tat, is going to lead to any new results just belies the past 30 years of history with the United States in the region.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jamal Abdi, we want to thank you for being with us, and, of course, we’re going to continue to cover this, president of the National Iranian American Council.

    This is Democracy Now! Next up, Vice President Harris did go to the border Friday, went to El Paso, Texas, but didn’t go to this massive emergency shelter for migrant children at Fort Bliss military base. The Border Network for Human Rights held a protest there with other groups yesterday demanding that the site for the children be shut down. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Bombing Of Iraq And Syria Only Serves The Weapons Industry

    U.S. Citizens Derive No Benefit, But Instead Suffer Great Loss, From Endless War In The Middle East. But Their Interests Are Irrelevant To Decisions Of Bipartisan Washington.

    The post Biden’s Bombing Of Iraq And Syria Only Serves The Weapons Industry appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Again Bombs Nations On Other Side Of The World In ‘Self-Defense’

    The US is again illegally bombing nations on the other side of the planet which it has invaded and occupied and branded this murderous aggression as “defensive”.

    “At President Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces earlier this evening conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region,” reads a statement by Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby. “The targets were selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq. Specifically, the U.S. strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq, both of which lie close to the border between those countries.”

    The post US Again Bombs Nations On Other Side Of The World In ‘Self-Defense’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Again Bombs Nations On Other Side Of The World In “Self-Defense”

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    The US is again illegally bombing nations on the other side of the planet which it has invaded and occupied and branded this murderous aggression as “defensive”.

    “At President Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces earlier this evening conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region,” reads a statement by Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby. “The targets were selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq. Specifically, the U.S. strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq, both of which lie close to the border between those countries.”

    Even more absurd than the fact that we’re all still pretending this clearly dementia-addled president is “directing” anything is the claim that these actions were “defensive” in nature. It is not possible for occupying invaders to be acting defensively in the nations they are occupying an invading; US troops are only in Iraq by way of an illegal 2003 invasion, a bogus 2014 re-entry, and a refusal to leave at the Iraqi government’s request last year, and they are in Syria illegally and without the permission of the Syrian government. They can therefore only ever be aggressors; they cannot be acting defensively.

    It’s like if you broke into your neighbor’s house to rob him, killed him when he tried to stop you, and then claimed self-defense because you consider his home your property. Only in the American exceptionalist alternate universe is this considered normal and acceptable.

    The only actual defensive action that the US could legitimately take to protect troops in Iraq and Syria would be to remove US troops from Iraq and Syria.

    As former US representative Justin Amash pointed out following the bombing, there is no actual legal authorization for US troops to be in Iraq or Syria in the first place. As journalist Glenn Greenwald highlighted, there is also no legal basis for bombings on the military personnel in those nations either, no matter how “Iranian-backed” they are.

    “I know it’s boring to note this but Biden has no legal authorization to bomb ‘Iranian-backed’ targets in Syria and Iraq, making it illegal,” Greenwald tweeted, adding, “But Obama bombed Libya after the House voted against doing so, and few of the Sacred Rule Of Law mavens cared.”

    The legal justification the Biden administration is using for this airstrike is the same bogus one it used for its airstrikes in Syria this past February: not counter-terrorism, but an extremely weird and broad interpretation of Article II of the US Constitution.

    “As a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” Kirby writes in the aforementioned statement. “The strikes were both necessary to address the threat and appropriately limited in scope. As a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq.”

    This claim the Executive Branch has been leaning on lately, that Article II permits unilateral acts of war on the other side of the planet without congressional approval, has come under criticism from legal scholars across the US political spectrum. As Tess Bridgeman wrote for Just Security following Biden’s February airstrikes:

    “With former President Donald Trump’s term in office over, it’s time to evaluate his war powers legacy and where it leaves the Biden administration as it begins to grapple with how and when to use force abroad in the absence of congressional authorization. The picture that emerges from Trump’s war powers reporting to Congress is one of an extraordinarily broad vision of the president’s authority to use force abroad without congressional authorization, and of a willingness to exploit loopholes in reporting requirements in a way that obscures information on the use of force from the public.”

    A willingness to exploit loopholes is right. But as long as acts of mass military violence serve as the glue which holds a globe-spanning empire together, death finds a way.

    ____________________

    The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  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, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Turkey attacks Kurdish refugee camp in northern Iraq

    About 13,000 Kurdish refugees from south-eastern Turkey live inside the UNHCR-recognised Makhmur refugee camp, which is being attacked by Turkish forces, reports Peter Boyle.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • California Rent Forgiveness Shows It’s Possible to Shift Our National Priorities

    Renters and housing advocates attend a protest to cancel rent and avoid evictions in front of a court house on August 21, 2020, in Los Angeles, California.

    Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people have found themselves out of work, clinging to credit cards or a savings account, making use of the local food bank, and worrying about making the rent each month as the cash dried up.

    The relief packages passed by Congress were a lifeline for many, from the checks to the extended unemployment benefits and, perhaps most importantly, the eviction protections for those who simply couldn’t make rent because there was no work. The peril was ever-present, even with that help; if that firewall fell and landlords were allowed to evict for unpaid rent, the avalanche of immediate homelessness could have quite possibly been a country-killing event. Untold thousands put out on the street in the middle of a lethal pandemic? Unspeakable.

    Every time the nation has come to the expiration deadline for the last set of eviction protections, landlord coalitions pushed to have them end and renter’s groups pleaded to have them extended. To this point, they have been extended each time, but protecting people from the collapse of the economy has become another conservative plaything; a number of Republican governors have moved to slash unemployment benefits under the long-running racist, classist lie that relief money makes people not want to work. How soon until they try to apply that argument to rent?

    On Monday, however, the state of California, responding to sustained pressure from organizers and activists, showed the country a whole new way to go:

    Gov. Gavin Newsom says California will pay off all the past-due rent that accumulated in the nation’s most populated state because of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a promise to make landlords whole while giving renters a clean slate…. California has $5.2 billion to pay off people’s rent, money from multiple aid packages approved by Congress. That appears to be more than enough to cover all of the unpaid rent in the state, according to Jason Elliott, senior counselor to Newsom on housing and homelessness.

    While employment among middle- and high-wage jobs has exceeded pre-pandemic levels, employment rates for people earning less than $27,000 a year are down more than 38% since January 2020, according to Opportunity Insights, an economic tracker based at Harvard University. “The stock market may be fine, we may be technically reopened, but people in low-wage jobs — which are disproportionately people of color — are not back yet,” said Madeline Howard, senior attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

    How deeply embedded into the national psyche is the capitalist ethos? If an announcement like this came under the headline, “Spaceship From Planet XQ41 Appears Above Sacramento, Pays All Rent, Departs Through Hole in Sky,” my level of surprise would have been pretty much the same. How long was I asleep last night? What country is this?

    Bless my heart, it’s the United States of America, where government — local, state and federal — can actually help people if we choose to make doing so a priority. The federal government did so with the relief bills, states like California took their own necessary steps like this, and local governments along with activists labored mightily to keep as many people afloat as possible. Cries of “socialism” were muted for much of the pandemic, because even a Republican knows a boat with no bottom is going to sink no matter what Ronald Reagan or Grover Norquist has to say about it.

    To be sure, California’s historically robust economy is one of the main reasons why this action was possible. “The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies,” reports Bloomberg News. “The state’s gross domestic product increased 21 percent during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14 percent) and No. 3 Texas (12 percent), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gains added $530 billion to the Golden State, 30 percent more than the increase for New York and Texas combined and equivalent to the entire economy of Sweden. Among the five largest economies, California outperforms the U.S., Japan and Germany with a growth rate exceeded only by China.”

    Again, we return to the idea of priorities. President Bill Clinton amassed a huge budget surplus at the end of his second term, but it was all but gone by April 2001 because the Bush administration gave it away to its rich friends in the form of tax breaks. The rest of us — many of us, anyway — got $300 and a suddenly fragile national economy that was almost immediately knocked reeling by September 11. The rest of those funds, along with trillions more, were squandered on two failed wars that stole the economic future from a generation of Americans.

    In 2001 and 2002, Congress passed Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to lay the groundwork for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The economic damage done by the money wasted on these bloody endeavors is almost impossible to quantify, but real enough to make California’s statewide rent amnesty seem a laughable fantasy, until it happened.

    Last week, almost 20 years after its inception, the repeal of the 2002 AUMF regarding Iraq was passed by the House. Its ultimate demise will be voted on by the Senate on June 22. The far more muscular 2001 AUMF remains intact, but there is a groundswell of support for ending it, as well. Congress has to deal with its little brother first, and then we shall see.

    Among many other shabby things, the combined 39 years given to those two authorizations were the sign and signal of our national priorities. The money spent on those wars left us uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19, as all the social and medical infrastructure needed to combat it was revealed to be cash-starved and withered to the point of collapse. Only when we embraced some “socialist” policy priorities were we able to pull back from the brink. Note well: Rep. Barbara Lee was right.

    Newsom could have argle-bargled about “job creators” and pulled a Bush, using his state’s budget surplus as an ATM for the wealthy and corporations. Instead, thanks to pressure from progressives, he paid the rent and delivered billions in tax relief to small businesses affected by the pandemic. The fact that this is remarkable tells us all we need to know about how far gone our priorities have become, but more importantly, it tells us what we can accomplish if we choose to change them.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.