Tag Archives: Foreign interventionism

The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on November 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

It would require a rational foreign policy to stop creating veterans, and that isn’t on the horizon. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

The US will be celebrating Veterans Day tomorrow, and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war machine.

Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won’t be any of them left. Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.

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The Limits of Power – The Myth of the Magical American Soldier, by Maj. Danny Sjursen

Posted on October 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

By now the belief that the US can solve problems in foreign lands just be sending over the troops should be dead, but it’s not. From Maj. Danny Sjursen, who admits he’s not a miracle worker, at antiwar.com:

Americans worship their fighting men and women; but it is dangerous to believe the mere presence of U.S. troops will achieve the miraculous in the Greater Middle East – it won’t

We aren’t miracle workers. We’re just soldiers after all – kids barely out of their teens and officers in their mid-20s do most of the fighting. Still, policymakers in Washington, and citizens on Main Street both seem convinced that the mere presence of a few hundred or thousand American troops can alter societies, vanquish the wicked, and remake the world.

A colleague of mine refers to this as the myth of the magic soldier: sprinkle US troops in some horrific mess of a country and voilà – problem solved!

It sounds great, but this sort of delusional thinking has led the United States into one failed quagmire after another, killing some 7,000 US troops and close to one million locals. After 17 years of fruitless, indecisive war, its quite incredible that a bipartisan coalition of mainstream Republicans (neocons, mostly) and Democrats (neo-liberal relics) still cling to the idea that American soldiers wield magic powers. It’s long past time to review the record of our over-adulated troopers and reframe the actual – limited – capabilities of military force.

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Are the Interventionists Now Leaderless? by Patrick Buchanan

Posted on August 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

We can be quite sure that a new “leader” of the interventionists will crawl out of the woodwork. There’s too much money at stake. Someone will cozy up to the Deep State and the military-industrial complex and claim the title. From Pat Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“McCain’s Death Leaves Void” ran The Wall Street Journal headline over a front-page story that began:

“The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country’s security relations since World War II.”

Certainly, the passing of the senator whose life story will dominate the news until he is buried at his alma mater, the Naval Academy, on Sunday, leaves America’s interventionists without their greatest champion.

No one around has the prestige or media following of McCain.

And the cause he championed, compulsive intervention in foreign quarrels to face down dictators and bring democrats to power, appears to be a cause whose time has passed.

When 9/11 occurred, America was united in crushing the al-Qaida terrorists who perpetrated the atrocities. John McCain then backed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which had no role in the attacks.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, he slipped into northern Syria to cheer rebels who had arisen to overthrow President Bashar Assad, an insurgency that led to a seven-year civil war and one of the great humanitarian disasters of our time.

McCain supported the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic, right up to Russia’s border. When Georgia invaded South Ossetia in 2008, and was expelled by the Russian army, McCain roared, “We are all Georgians now!”

He urged intervention. But Bush, his approval rating scraping bottom, had had enough of the neocon crusades for democracy.

McCain’s contempt for Vladimir Putin was unconstrained. When crowds gathered in Maidan Square in Kiev to overthrow an elected pro-Russian president, McCain was there, cheering them on.

He supported sending arms to the Ukrainian army to fight pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass. He backed U.S. support for Saudi intervention in Yemen. And this war, too, proved to be a humanitarian disaster.

John McCain was a war hawk, and proud of it. But by 2006, the wars he had championed had cost the Republican Party both houses of Congress.

In 2008, when he was on the ballot, those wars helped cost him the presidency.

By 2016, the Republican majority would turn its back on McCain and his protege, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and nominate Donald Trump, who said he would seek to get along with Russia and extricate America from the wars into which McCain had helped plunge the country.

To continue reading: Are the Interventionists Now Leaderless?

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‘We’re Killing These Kids, We’re Breaking the Army!’, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on January 19, 2018 | 1 comment

Does America have the manpower and resources to keep up with the global interventionist dream? Fro Danny Sjursen at theamericanconservative.com:

Our soldiers are still redeploying at a frenetic pace that cannot keep up with reality—and the cracks are showing.

Members of the Guam Army National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 294th Infantry Regiment, relax during an early-morning, exhausting flight from northern Afghanistan to northern Kabul International Airport aboard a C-160 aircraft in Oct. 2013. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Eddie Siguenza/Released)

I’ll admit I was taken aback. This senior officer and mentor—with nearly 28 years of military service—wasn’t one for hyperbole. No, he believed what he was saying to me just then.

“We’re killing these kids, we’re breaking the army!” he exclaimed.

He went on to explain the competing requirements for standard, conventional army units—to say nothing of the overstretched Special Forces—in 2018: balancingRussia in Eastern Europe, deterrence rotations in South Korea, advise and assistmissions in Africa. Add to that deployments to the usual hotspots in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was genuinely concerned about the physical and emotional toll on the active-duty force, pushed to its limits by 17 years of perpetual combat. After all, with high military suicide rates now labeled the “new normal,” and a recent succession of accidental training deaths, it seems reasonable to wonder whether we are, indeed, “killing [our] kids.”

The overall effects of this rapid operations tempo on morale and readiness are difficult to measure in a disciplined, professional, all-volunteer military such as the one the United States possesses. What we do know is that despite former president Obama’s ongoing promises that “the tide of war is receding” and that America could finally “start nation-building at home,” nothing of the sort occurred then, or is now, under President Trump. Though the U.S. military (thankfully) no longer maintains six-figure troop counts in either Iraq or Afghanistan, American soldiers are still there, as well as serving in 70 percent of the world’s countries in one capacity or another in what has become a “generational war.” America’s troops are still being killed, though in admittedly fewer numbers. Nevertheless, U.S. servicemen continued to die in combat in several countries in 2017, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Niger.

To continue reading: ‘We’re Killing These Kids, We’re Breaking the Army!’

 

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Betrayal by the Brass: Dereliction of Duty, Part Two, by Robert Gore

Posted on September 24, 2017 | 13 comments

Moral abdication and atrocity start at the top.

Part One

I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

United States Army Oath of Enlistment

As the British discovered trying the quell the American rebellion, it’s difficult to fight the natives on their own territory, even when many of them are on your side. The US faced the same situation in Vietnam, its difficulty magnified because Americans were of a different racial stock than those they subjugated.

Also unlike the British, the Americans were perceived—even by their ostensible allies—as another in a long line of imperial conquerors that stretched back to Chinese domination during the first millennium. Belying US rhetoric and propaganda, industrial warfare and atrocities destroyed South Vietnam and killed or alienated many of the South Vietnamese whose freedom we were supposedly defending.

To defeat a local population when much of it wages guerrilla war or covertly supports those who do, the invading power has to kill most and terrorize the rest.

The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.

Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.

“The Killing of History,” John Pilger, Information Clearing House

The population subjugated, the invading power must maintain a satrap and garrison state. The invasion is usually easy compared to the occupation, as the imposed order fights continuing resistance. Garrison states are inherently unstable and the subjugated often outlast their conquerors.

None of this was news in the 1960s. America had its own Revolutionary War plus its and Europe’s experiences with imperialism and colonialism to draw on. By the mid-1960s, it was clear the US political leadership wouldn’t allow the military to completely subjugate either North or South Vietnam. North Vietnam was off-limits because a full-scale invasion might draw in the Chinese and memories of the Korean War were still fresh. South Vietnam was the US’s ostensible ally, but complete subjugation would have exposed US “protecting freedom” rhetoric as a lie. It would have provoked widespread revulsion among the US populace—seeing the war through the eyes of TV and print media already hostile to it—further stoking protest and resistance.

The US military leadership faced a situation where it could neither win nor withdraw. When did it have the duty to tell the civilian leadership that as fought, a war could not be won and continuing would only waste more blood and treasure? The question goes far beyond Vietnam.

After Vietnam, the US was supposedly beset by the Vietnam Syndrome: the public’s aversion to quagmires and refusal to endorse military interventions. That syndrome dissipated after 9/11 and the military has intervened repeatedly in a number of conflicts that have or threaten to become quagmires.

The military and political leadership have gotten clever about the public relations aspects of war. The media is never given the virtually free rein it had in Vietnam. The mainstream media is more docile now, rarely challenging official stories, explanations, and rationales. The alternative media doesn’t have the resources, personnel, and geographic reach to consistently do so.

The draft has been suspended; there are no campus war protests. The number of troops deployed in today’s conflicts are small fractions of what was deployed in Vietnam. Drones, long-range missiles, and other technologies equipped with sophisticated electronics allow the military to inflict destruction and death at long-range with minimal risk to US personnel.

Yet the Vietnam quandary persists: as fought today’s conflicts are not won, but spill blood and waste treasure. The mountains of Afghanistan are not the jungles of Vietnam, but just as in Vietnam, a substantial part of the population engages in guerrilla resistance against the US and its puppet regime. As in Vietnam, the war has bounteously funded the military and its contractors and fueled widespread corruption. It has gone on for sixteen years, making it America’s longest war. A war of complete subjugation and a garrison state would require many times the 11,000 troops the Pentagon officially acknowledges are now in Afghanistan.

With winning off the table, the US wages wars with all downside and no upside. There are the dead and wounded, and the burden of caring for the latter. The ambiguities of war goals, fighting guerrillas, and waging war on non-combatants takes a moral and psychological toll long after the soldiers return home. Hypocrisy and corruption in the military, its contractors, and allied governments embitter US personnel, the subjugated population, and the rest of the world. Wars and weapons make a significant contribution to the $20 trillion national debt. Even regime change wars like Iraq and Libya, ostensibly won, pose the challenges and costs of garrison states amidst insurgencies and sectarian warfare.

Given the costs and preclusion of winning, isn’t a general’s duty to present to the civilian leadership an appraisal and a choice? To state that a war as fought will be never be won; tell them that what it would take—“extermination” that turns the territory into a “desert”—and present the choice: that kind of war or no war at all? Isn’t that what the military leadership owes to the Constitution, to the political leadership, to the men and women they command, and to all Americans, instead of mindless drivel about “generational wars”?

If the political leadership presses wars that will never be won, for political reasons, for venal considerations of personal prestige, careerism, and financial gain, for any reason that senselessly prolongs those wars, shouldn’t an officer resign and publicly state his reasons for doing so? Isn’t that the duty owed to the dead and wounded—an individual effort to stop the carnage so that no more will be slaughtered and maimed, no more treasure wasted?

The Army Oath of Enlistment qualifies the duty to follow orders. It’s subject to the Constitution and to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If it weren’t, the oath would be a Nuremberg defense, a defense the US and its allies rejected after World War II. No one can abandon the requirements of morality simply because they’ve been ordered to do so. Yet that is what the military leadership has done these many years, with disastrous consequences for the country they’ve sworn to defend.

ISN’T IT GREAT TO READ A GREAT STORY?

AMAZON

KINDLE

NOOK

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The Abolition of Foreign Policy, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on January 4, 2017 | 1 comment

What used to be the two sides of the political spectrum are now united in their love of the US government’s foreign intervention. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

What explains the behavior of nations on the world stage? There is no science to guide us, no psychology of nation-states to elucidate the secrets of the national Ego, Super-Ego, and Id. Oh, there are theories galore: the realists, the structuralists, the Marxists, and more. Yet these are thin gruel these days, when all claims of predictability are open to challenge, and one cannot tell the exceptions from the rule. In today’s world, it often seems that there are no rules.

Or are there?

Let us look at the current madness, and its antecedents, and see if we can discern a pattern.

For all the years of the cold war – roughly, from Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech to the fall of the Berlin Wall – American liberals (and the far left) told us that the Soviet threat was largely a figment of the right’s imagination.

Oh, yes, there were cold war liberals, of the sort who gathered around Encounter magazine and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that CIA front that sought to recruit the “soft” left to the cold war cause. Yet these were swimmers against an ideological tide that finally culminated in the tumult of the 1960s, the antiwar movement, and the rise of a form of “left”-isolationism that abjured US intervention abroad and urged America – in George McGovern’s phrase – to “come home.”

To continue reading: The Abolition of Foreign Policy

 

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Where Did the American Century Go? by Tom Engelhardt

Posted on July 8, 2016 | Leave a comment

The world’s sole superpower can’t win a war or unstick itself from the Middle East. From Tom Emgelhardt at antiwar.com:

Think of us, in fact, as the default superpower in an ever more recalcitrant world.

Seventy-five years ago, at the edge of a global conflagration among rival great powers and empires, Henry Luce first suggested that the next century could be ours. In February 1941, in his magazine LIFE, he wrote a famous essay entitled “The American Century.” In it, he proclaimed that if only Americans would think internationally, surge into the world, and accept that they were already at war, the next hundred years would be theirs. Just over nine months later, the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, plunging the country into World War II. At the time, however, Americans were still riven and confused about how to deal with spreading regional conflicts in Europe and Asia, as well as the rise of fascism and the Nazis.

That moment was indeed a horrific one, and yet it was also just a heightened version of what had gone before. For the previous half-millennium, there had seldom been a moment when at least two (and often three or more) European powers had not been in contention, often armed and violent, for domination and for control of significant parts of the planet. In those many centuries, great powers rose and fell and new ones, including Germany and Japan, came on the scene girded for imperial battle. In the process, a modern global arms race was launched to create ever more advanced and devastating weaponry based on the latest breakthroughs in the science of war. By August 1945, this had led to the release of an awesome form of primal energy in the first (and thus far only) use of nuclear weapons in wartime.

In the years that followed, the United States and the Soviet Union grew ever more “super” and took possession of destructive capabilities once left, at least in the human imagination, to the gods: the power to annihilate not just one enemy on one battlefield or one armada on one sea but everything. In the nearly half-century of the Cold War, the rivalry between them became apocalyptic in nature as their nuclear arsenals grew to monstrous proportions. As a result, with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they faced off against each other indirectly in “limited” proxy wars that, especially in Korea and Indochina, were of unparalleled technological ferocity.

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded and, for the first time in historical memory, there was only one power that mattered. This was a reality even Henry Luce might have found farfetched. Previously, the idea of a single power so mighty that it alone loomed over the planet was essentially relegated to fictional fantasies about extraordinary evil. And yet so it was – or at least so it seemed, especially to the leadership that took power in Washington in the year 2000 and soon enough were dreaming of a planetary Pax Americana.

In a strange way, something similarly unimaginable happened in Europe. On that continent laid waste by two devastating twentieth-century wars, a single “union” was formed, something that not so long before would have been categorized as a madly utopian project. The idea that centuries of national rivalries and the rabid nationalism that often went with it could somehow be tamed and that former great powers and imperial contenders could be subsumed in a single peaceful organization (even if under the aegis of American global power) would once have seemed like the most absurd of fictions. And yet so it would be – or so it seemed, at least until recently.

To continue reading: Where Did the American Century Go?

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Washington’s Military Addiction, by Tom Engelhardt

Posted on May 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

Perhaps the best way of thinking of the US government’s penchant for foreign military intervention is as an addiction. From Tom Engelhardt at tomdispatch.com:

There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then there are the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let me concoct an example for you:

“Top American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up the fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly sending more U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington confirmed the second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.”

Oh wait, that was actually the lead sentence in a May 3rd Washington Times piece by Carlo Muñoz. Honestly, though, it could have been written anytime in the last few months by just about anyone paying any attention whatsoever, and it surely will prove reusable in the months to come (with casualty figures altered, of course). The sad truth is that across the Greater Middle East and expanding parts of Africa, a similar set of lines could be written ahead of time about the use of Special Operations forces, drones, advisers, whatever, as could the sorry results of making such moves in [add the name of your country of choice here].

Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing anything but worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking has become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition. It’s as if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked “solutions” and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking, over-armed soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.

How Much, How Many, How Often, and How Destructively

In Iraq and Syria, it’s been mission creep all the way. The B-52s barely made it to the battle zone for the first time and were almost instantaneously in the air, attacking Islamic State militants. U.S. firebases are built ever closer to the front lines. The number of special ops forces continues to edge up. American weapons flow in (ending up in god knows whose hands). American trainers and advisers follow in ever increasing numbers, and those numbers are repeatedly fiddled with to deemphasize how many of them are actually there. The private contractors begin to arrive in numbers never to be counted. The local forces being trained or retrained have their usual problems in battle. American troops and advisers who were never, never going to be “in combat” or “boots on the ground” themselves now have their boots distinctly on the ground in combat situations. The first American casualties are dribbling in. Meanwhile, conditions in tottering Iraq and the former nation of Syria grow ever murkier, more chaotic, and less amenable by the week to any solution American officials might care for.

And the response to all this in present-day Washington?

You know perfectly well what the sole imaginable response can be: sending in yet more weapons, boots, air power, special ops types, trainers, advisers, private contractors, drones, and funds to increasingly chaotic conflict zones across significant swaths of the planet. Above all, there can be no serious thought, discussion, or debate about how such a militarized approach to our world might have contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the very problems it was meant to solve. Not in our nation’s capital, anyway.

To continue reading: Washington’s Military Addiction

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America as a Dangerous Flailing Beast, by John Chuckman

Posted on June 25, 2015 | 1 comment

From John Chuckman, a former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company, as posted on theburningplatform.com, with a preliminary comment from by Stucky from that site:

I like this article. Not that it has a lot of new stuff. Rather, it’s a wonderful collection of old important stuff in one place. Also, the author does not go off the deep end in histrionics as authors of such doom&gloom articles are sometimes wont to do in order to attract readers. Just a nice, reasonable approach. “Just the facts, Ma’am” …. and man, are we fucked six ways to Sunday.

America as Dangerous Flailing Beast

Despite pretty talk about “democracy” and “human rights,” U.S. leaders have become the world’s chief purveyors of chaos and death – from Vietnam through Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and many other unfortunate nations, a dangerous dilemma addressed by John Chuckman.

——————-

When I think of America’s place in the world today, the image that comes to mind is of a very large animal, perhaps a huge bull elephant or even prehistoric mammoth, which long roamed as the unchallenged king of its domain but has become trapped by its own missteps, as caught in a tar pit or some quicksand, and it is violently flailing about, making a terrifying noises in its effort to free itself and re-establish its authority.

Any observer immediately knows the animal ultimately cannot succeed but certainly is frightened by the noise and crashing that it can sustain for a considerable time.

I think that is the pretty accurate metaphor for the situation of the United States today, still a terribly large and powerful society but one finding itself trapped after a long series of its own blunders and errors, a society certain ultimately to become diminished in its prestige and relative power with all the difficulties which that will entail for an arrogant people having a blind faith in their own rightness.

America simply cannot accept its mistakes or that it was ever wrong, for Americanism much resembles a fundamentalist religion whose members are incapable of recognizing or admitting they ever followed anything but the divine plan.

America has made a costly series of errors over the last half century, demonstrating to others that the America they may have been in awe of in, say, 1950, and may have considered almost godlike and incapable of mistakes, has now proved itself indisputably, in field after field, as often not even capable of governing itself. The irony of a people who are seen as often unable to govern themselves advising others how to govern themselves brings a distinct note of absurdity to American foreign policy.

America’s establishment, feeling its old easy superiority in the world beginning to slip away in a hundred different ways, seems determined to show everyone it still has what it takes, determined to make others feel its strength, determined to weaken others abroad who do not accept its natural superiority, determined to seize by brute force and dirty tricks advantages which no longer come to it by simply superior performance.

Rather than learn from its errors and adjust its delusional assumptions, America is determined to push and bend people all over the world to its will and acceptance of its leadership. But you cannot reclaim genuine leadership once you have been exposed enough times in your bad judgment, and it is clear you are on the decline, just as you cannot once others realize that they can do many things as well or better than you.

In the end, policies which do not recognize scientific facts are doomed. Policies based on wishes and ideology do not succeed over the long run, unless, of course, you are willing to suppress everyone who disagrees with you and demand their compliance under threat. The requirement for an imperial state in such a situation is international behavior which resembles the internal behavior of an autocratic leader such as Stalin, and right now that is precisely where the United States is headed.

To continue reading: America as a Dangerous Flailing Beast

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/06/25/america-as-a-dangerous-flailing-beast/

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