Forgotten wars

While our attention is glued on Gaza, other wars and other human catastrophes grind on. 

From Tim Mak - who chose to work in Ukraine as a freelancer when NPR laid him off - comes The Counteroffensive. He landed in the country the day that Russia invaded in the February 2022 and reports (with plenty of help, local and international) from Kyiv.

UKRAINE MEDIA COVERAGE PLUMMETS: CNN has been checking its own output, and reports that after October 7th, its coverage of Ukraine fell from 8 percent of the total coverage to under 1 percent. The network had been one of the most reliable in its regular coverage of the Ukrainian conflict.

Following the war in Gaza, most media coverage of Ukraine has been focused on diplomatic decisions, such as whether to give or not give military aid to Ukraine. But, frontline news on how the war is progressing has been far less present in the media. 

Mak recently traveled to Turkey (failing to get into Syria) to see the consequences of another long running Russian assault against a people struggling against autocracy.

He discovered commonalities among Syrian refugees trying to reconstitute a civil society after having been bombed out by Russia and Assad:

...  The war in Ukraine has now gone on for more than 600 days. The dominant feeling is one of exhaustion and pessimism, at least for the time being. But then you look at the Syrian refugees, their advocates, and ordinary civilians – and it feels pretty self-pitying to talk about how long the war has lasted. Their war has been going on since 2011.

“We used to be the war most people paid attention to. Now, that’s over,” one advocate said to me.

And despite how long it's been, how many airstrikes have landed, many advocates and humanitarian workers – not to mention civilians – are still extremely motivated.

They’re still fighting for a democratic society, still working to overthrow Assad, still finding the energy to promote humanitarian goals.

And the Ukrainians are still fighting for their lives. No choice there.

Normalization

I'm not willing to pretend that this was lawful.

Last week our new President delivered a 500 pound bomb "message."

Biden launched an air strike against the facilities of Iran-backed militias in Syria that have been launching rocket attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq. When asked today what message he was sending, he said: “You can’t act with impunity. Be careful.”

Uncharacteristically, a smidgen of me is sympathetic to what Biden claims to be doing here: he's emphasizing that, though he intends to put all he can into resurrecting the Obama-era "deal" that constrained Iranian development of a nuclear weapon, he's not taking lightly any adjacent provocations, especially threats to U.S. troops. Curbing an Iranian push for nukes is a good idea. And after a president who wouldn't do anything to respond Russia's putting a bounty out for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. president might need to take a stand. 

But it remains worth mentioning that if U.S. troops weren't blundering about in tangled conflicts in other people's countries, there would be less need for such a show of force.

And there doesn't seem much doubt that Biden is continuing one of the worst features of a lawless chief executive: presidents aren't supposed to make war without authorization from Congress. Senators know this and also have mixed feelings.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Friday that Congress "must be fully briefed on this matter expeditiously," noting that "offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances."

Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations committee with Kaine, said that the recent strikes by Iranian-backed militias on Iraq bases were "unacceptable" and that he inherently trusts Biden's national security decision making ability. But he added that retaliatory strikes that are not necessary to "prevent an imminent threat, must fall within the definition of an existing" authorization for use of military force. 

"Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria, where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action," said Murphy.

California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna reacted more bluntly.

"This makes President Biden the seventh consecutive US president to order strikes in the Middle East. ... There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization."

Here in the U.S. we don't think much about this (comes of being an empire) but this airstrike violated international law. So explains Rutgers Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque at Just Security:

The U.S. airstrikes almost certainly violated international law, for two basic reasons. The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time ... And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor (or two, or more)... These two reasons, combined, are decisive. It cannot be lawful to use armed force on the territory of another State when it is clear that no armed attack by a non-State actor is ongoing or even imminent.

It's very difficult for this country to understand that we can't claim to be essential pillars of "the international liberal order" if we ignore the legal apparatus that order has fostered when we find it convenient.

What has been lost in Rojava

It's been a depressing reality of the Forever Wars subsequent to the 9/11 attacks that well-intentioned U.S.-based peace activists and anti-imperialists have been corralled in a poster of pure opposition. Unlike past U.S. imperial forays into Central America and mid-20th century Vietnam, nobody in the countries we have been blasting apart seemed to be building anything we could much affirm. The Arab Spring offered a momentary hope, but as that democratic eruption was crushed by the usual monarchs, oil barons, generals, and patriarchs, we retreated to thinking as little as possible about places like Syria and Yemen where our country's armed forces continued to wage war.

And so, when Donald Trump did a solid for his brother strongmen Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Vladimir Putin of Russia by abruptly pulling back U.S. forces in Syria last month, we were largely unequipped to understand that an innovative, even exciting, social experiment was being wiped out. In their embattled enclave on the Syrian-Turkish border, Kurds had built Rojava -- a society based on the communal, libertarian, feminist theories of their imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan. Turkey says he's a terrorist -- though there have been no terrorist attacks on Turkey from this area in 20 years.

Here are some thoughts from Peter Galbraith, no leftist, just a competent U.S. citizen-observer who has been engaging with Kurds, Kurdish nationalism, and Kurdish politics beginning with a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan in 1987 as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He's disgusted that most everyone in his own country has responded to the destruction of Rojava merely as a possible set back to the fight against ISIS.

If policymakers looked beyond the Kurds’ military utility, they would see a remarkable social revolution with potential implications well beyond Kurdish territory. As Assad’s opponents captured more land in 2012, the Syrian army withdrew from the strategically less important northeast. The PYD was the strongest of the Kurdish political parties that filled the void there, and it looked to Öcalan for guidance.

When he founded the PKK in 1978, Öcalan was a Marxist who modeled himself on Josef Stalin, to whom he bore an uncanny physical resemblance. In 1999 Turkish commandos captured Öcalan in Kenya. Until 2009, he was the only prisoner on İmralı island in the Sea of Marmara. He has had a lot of time to read. With both Marx and Stalin long out of fashion, his lawyers gave Öcalan Turkish translations of two books by my fellow Vermonter Murray Bookchin, who argued for a society based on strict gender equality, direct democracy based on representing communities, and radical environmentalism. Öcalan was impressed and wrote Bookchin in Burlington to say he was one of his best students. Through his lawyers—and occasional visitors—Öcalan also communicated Bookchin’s views to his cadres.

Following Bookchin’s philosophy, northeast Syria’s many communities are represented in multilayered governmental structures. Legislative bodies—city councils or cantonal parliaments—include Kurds, Arabs, Christians, and Yazidis and are equally divided between male and female legislators. Each canton has a male and female co–prime minister, each municipality a female and male co-mayor, and male and female coleaders of each political party. No more than 60 percent of civil servants can be from the same gender. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) sits atop these governmental structures. It has a Kurdish woman and an Arab man as its copresidents.

... The NES has shortcomings, of course, and the biggest is an unwillingness to accept real dissent. In the course of my visits, I have met the leaders of at least twenty different political parties, all of whom expressed nearly identical positions on the major issues. Meanwhile, the NES authorities closed the offices of the Kurdish National Council, the PYD’s rival, and periodically arrested or expelled its leaders. During my trips to northeast Syria since 2014, no topic consumed more of my time than the release of political prisoners.

Nevertheless, it is hard not to appreciate the revolutionary nature of what the Kurds have accomplished. In 2016 I traveled to the front line on the outskirts of Raqqa. Members of the Kurdish militia known as the Women’s Defense Units had just captured a police station. They bivouacked with their male counterparts and demonstrated the same mastery of weaponry as the men. An ISIS fighter lay dead among the debris nearby, with an uncertain fate in paradise: ISIS fighters believe a jihadi killed by a woman will not get his seventy-two doe-eyed virgins, a significant disincentive to martyrdom when taking on the Women’s Defense Units.

On my last visit, I was out for a stroll in Amuda, a small Kurdish city in sight of the Turkish border wall, and I passed a TV station. My interpreter suggested we go in. Every employee—from top management to cleaning staff and including anchors, reporters, camera operators, and technicians—was a woman. Jin TV broadcasts four hours a day from Amuda, and its reporters explained the station’s mission as promoting women’s rights by ending child marriages and polygamy. There is nothing like it anyplace in the Middle East, or, so far as I know, in the world. It is certainly not a culture normally associated with terrorism. ...

If this sounds like a story you'd like to know more about, you can listen to this from WNYC's On the Media, direct from Rojava.
I've thought a good deal about why we in the peace movement have not been making ourselves more aware of Rojava's accomplishments. Syria has been a no-go place for good long time. Sadly. There have been some appreciative stories in progressive outlets. The feminist author Meredith Tax tried to alert us. But such efforts were a little obscure. Were Öcalan's sophisticated anarchists just not our kind of revolutionaries? An article in Jacobin fixated on Kurdish nationalism as a "Gramscian game," apparently loathe to take Rojava on its own terms.

We missed something, I suspect. We miss a lot.

Photo credit: A sewing cooperative by Janet Biehl

Fog of war in the time of the Tweeter

Ever wondered what people serving in the U.S. armed forces make of the incoherent leadership they are getting from the President? Here's military reporter Jeff Schogol trying to make sense of what he gets from the Pentagon.

In past wars, it was possible to mark the U.S. military's positions with flags on paper maps. But we live in the age of Twitter, and since the commander in chief seems to be visited by the Good Idea Fairy every 15 minutes, there is no way to have an updated map of where U.S. forces are.

With regards to Syria, the U.S. military isn't leaving. It's repositioning forces because the mission has changed from fighting ISIS to protecting the oil. (This also may make the first time a sitting president has not tried to camouflage sending troops to protect oil by claiming the United States was liberating oppressed people.)

... Every time Trump tweets about the military, the Defense Department has to pretend the president's latest missive is all part of a wider plan that has been properly thought out ahead of time.

By giving as little information as possible, the Pentagon hopes to avoid revealing that it is actually reacting on the fly to try to make Trump's latest great idea not end in a total disaster.

Schogol does point out that the Obama administration was also often not very transparent about troop deployments. The Pentagon is used to these games and resents them....Now Trump is crowing that U.S. forces have killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. The guy will certainly not be missed if the report is accurate. That's a real success. But given the number of times that the U.S. has reported the demise of various al Qaeda and ISIS leaders only to have them turn up the next week, a more disciplined leader than Tweeter in Chief might have waited for all the evidence.

A Defense Department official said before the president’s announcement that there was a strong belief — “near certainty” — that Mr. al-Baghdadi was dead, but that a full DNA analysis was not complete. The official said that with any other president, the Pentagon would wait for absolute certainty before announcing victory. But Mr. Trump was impatient to get the news out ...

Democrats probably don't have to worry that killing Baghdadi will give Trump a big political boost outside his base. Killing Osama bin Laden never did much for Obama's standing either.

People here get worried by the school shooting next door or the white supremacist murdering our neighbors. Trump isn't doing anything about that while Democratic candidates struggle to figure out how to reduce the armaments in private hands in this country.

There are all too many reasons to impeach Donald Trump

He's a multi-tasking criminal, after all.

Erudite Partner lays out an exhaustive (and exhausting) and lethal catalog in her latest essay. Trump "may yet do more harm than his Republican predecessor."

... we’re threatening to impeach a president, this time for a third-rate attempt to extort minor political gain from the government of a vulnerable country (without even the decency of a cover-up). But we’re ignoring Trump’s highest crime, worse even than the ones mentioned above.

He has promised to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, the 2015 international agreement that was meant to begin a serious international response to the climate crisis now heating the planet. Meanwhile, he’s created an administration that is working in every way imaginable to ensure that yet more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. He is, in other words, a threat not just to the American people, or to the rule of law, but to the whole human species.

Read it all.

Let's give peace a chance

This won't receive much attention what with Trump's government shutdown and his bleating about a fictional border crisis that requires a fantasy wall -- but Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group and Jon Finer of the Council on Foreign Relations offer some thoughtful advice to people concerned for peace who are revolted by the Preznit. It comes down to a simple thought: just because he's an impulsive, ignorant hate merchant, his instincts about ending endless wars are not crazy, merely ineptly executed (if indeed they come to be executed).

There is no shortage of policies and decisions made by President Trump worth criticizing, but since the earliest days of his presidential campaign, he has expressed at least one belief that deserves to be encouraged, not denigrated: the desire to disentangle the United States from costly overseas conflicts...

So much is objectionable about the Trump era that it is hard for critics to know which targets to strike. But principled opposition requires that progressive opponents of President Trump not distort their beliefs for quick rhetorical wins. Whatever administration eventually follows will have many messes to clean up and will need to distinguish those that truly matter.

Inevitably, the United States will face threats that will require the use of military force. But we ought to continually question our enduring involvement in faraway conflicts, particularly when they come at a terrible cost to the United States and local populations as in Afghanistan and Iraq; make us complicit in abuses as in Yemen; entangle us with unsavory partners as occurred with some elements of the Syrian opposition; or exacerbate anti-American sentiment as our broader counterterrorism campaign often did.

Troop withdrawals can be messy and costly even in the best of circumstances. But that is not a reason to drift into forever wars while searching for the perfect exit. It is a reason to be disciplined about objectives and judicious about intervening in the first place....

... So much is objectionable about the Trump era that it is hard for critics to know which targets to strike. But principled opposition requires that progressive opponents of President Trump not distort their beliefs for quick rhetorical wins. ...

It's worth reading it all.

Once again, a humane political stance demands that we learn to walk and chew gum at the same time: No Ban, No Wall, No Forever Wars.

Just pawns on a chessboard

We knew he'd be at his most dangerous when his ramparts of lies and corruption began to collapse. Perhaps he would start a war?

Nope, he moves to take our troops out of one and confounds his audience on all sides.

What's a war here or there? We have plenty of wars to spare around the world.

Rumors of war in That Part of the World

E.P. has taken on the thankless task of surveying the carnage -- made in America, made by other powers, and homegrown -- in what we call the Middle East. With Trump running amok in other areas, we've tended to look away from the region that so inflamed our fears for the last 15 years. But we can't really. The consequences could be too dire.

With President Trump and his secretary of state now talking openly about a possible “escalation between us and the Iranians,” there is a real risk that some combination of the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia could initiate a war with Iran. If there’s one lesson to be learned from US wars since 9/11, it’s “don’t start another one.”

Read it all at the link.

U.S. strikes in Syria

In the mad world of instant international media, the Times provides some opinions from Syrians about our latest exercise in murderous futility.
The people of these (dis)United States -- we know nothing of war.

Lest we forget: massacres then and now

Annually on April 24, people of Armenian ancestry and friends remember the genocide instigated (and denied) by the Ottoman Turkish regime in 1915. Perhaps 1.5 million Armenians died of hunger, disease, in forced marches, and by gun and bayonet. A major march will take place in Los Angeles, the metro area with the largest concentration of people of Armenian ancestry in the country.

The Ottomans fought in World War I in alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary as the Central Powers; their realm was dismembered in the aftermath. The victorious powers -- the Allies -- led by Britain and France, redrew the map of what had been the Ottoman "Near East." The land of the Armenians, an ancient people with a religious and ethnic culture distinct from their neighbors, ended up divided between a reconstituted modern Turkey and the emerging Soviet Union in what had been czarist Russia.

A postwar tribunal convicted Ottoman officers of organized mass murder of the Armenian victims, but Turkey allowed these offenders to escape. Many were hunted down and assassinated by Armenian vigilantes in Europe during the 1920s. Meanwhile Turkey denied that there had been a planned and coordinated genocide -- any bad things that Armenians suffered were just accidents of the wider war. Just recently, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, MA, has uncovered a document he insists is the "smoking gun" proving Ottoman intent and execution of the mass killings.

Mr. Akcam’s life’s work has been to puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey.

“My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” he said.

Today the national arrangements imposed on the region after World War I are collapsing amid religious strife, ethnic contention, local power struggles, and great power meddling. Much as we might instinctively call out Turkish responsibility for the Armenian slaughter, both Europe and the United States have plenty of responsibility for the current catastrophes in Iraq, Syria and beyond. Is the agony to which Syrians, Kurds, Iraqis and others are being subjected that different from what was done 102 years ago to Armenians? American diplomats in the Ottoman empire in 1915 provided much of the intelligence about the slaughter of Armenians that reached the rest of the world. But despite international recoil, and the establishment in war propaganda of "starving Armenians" as a trope of ritual horror, little was done to save individual Armenians. Then, as now, we did not open our arms to desperate refugees fleeing annihilation.

A much reduced nation state of Armenia emerged from the collapse of Soviet Russia in 1990. This map shows the area where Armenians once lived, superimposed on post World War I boundaries. How long will those boundaries endure?

This is what normalization looks like

President Cheeto blows something up -- and the media and conventional Washington has a wet dream.

Oh, not quite every one of them. There are realists who point out that nothing whatever is accomplished:

... these attacks are a purely symbolic act devoid of real strategic significance.

A few Congresscritters point out that it's a stretch to claim Cheeto has legal authority for his bombs-away moment -- but hey, Congress has decades of ducking its responsibility for war making.

And then there's the media: the narrative of Trump failure and byzantine White House quarrels was getting tired -- yeah, here's a new story to sell! Margaret Sullivan, now the Washington Post media writer, puts to good use her previous years at the New York Times, pointing out media salivating over customary delights of destruction:

The cruise missiles struck, and many in the mainstream media fawned.

“I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” declared Fareed Zakaria on CNN, after firing of 59 missiles at a Syrian military airfield late Thursday night. (His words sounded familiar, since CNN’s Van Jones made a nearly identical pronouncement after Trump’s first address to Congress.)

“On Syria attack, Trump’s heart came first,” read a New York Times headline.
“President Trump has done the right thing and I salute him for it,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens — a frequent Trump critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist. He added: “Now destroy the Assad regime for good.”

Brian Williams, on MSNBC, seemed mesmerized by the images of the strikes provided by the Pentagon. He used the word “beautiful” three times and alluded to a Leonard Cohen lyric — “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons” — without apparent irony. ...

A former Washington Post guy, Thomas Ricks, a real military reporter who never forgets that people -- usually the wrong ones --die in our purposeless exploits, knows what media and Washington are glossing over in their delight with a few loud bangs:

... we, the American people, right now are governed by a child. He may look like an aging, overweight, hair-dyed man, but mentally and intellectually, he seems to me to be somewhere around 12 years old. As a reminder, here is a scorecard of the various brinks at which our nation now stands after his eleventh week in office:

Syria — The president says it crossed a red line.

North Korea — The president says stuff has to stop, one way or another.

Iran — Put on notice by General Flynn. (remember him?)

ISIS — The president says he’s going to wipe it out.

Germany — The president declined to shake its leader’s hand.

Be very afraid and cry out, once more and ever, against the dogs of war. Resist and protect much.

If only the president weren't most unstable element here ...

As I post this, we're apparently lobbing missiles at targets in Syria. The U.S. can certainly do that; there is no sign whatsoever that there are any plans for what comes after places and people go boom.

Erudite Partner has published an exhaustive catalog of the crimes the Great Tangerine has indicated he'd like to commit in lieu of developing a foreign policy with discernible objectives: Donald Trump Has a Passionate Desire to Bring Back Torture.

And that's if he doesn't decide he can only demonstrate his manhood by nuking someone ...

Scary debate takeaway

One of the many unfortunate consequences of the GOP serving up a fascist, sexist, white nationalist presidential candidate is that there's very little psychic and intellectual space left over within which to examine what the Democratic candidate is offering. At least that's how the Clinton/Trump race works for me. We have to elect Hillary -- and we almost certainly will -- but the horror of Trump almost precludes thinking about her.

So, for the record, I'm sharing Josh Marshall's take on Clinton's foreign policy pronouncements at Sunday nights' debate.

What bothered me was what Clinton said about Syria and Russia. I grant that Vladimir Putin seems to be trying to influence the election on Trump’s behalf and that he may have ambitions in Eastern Europe that could lead to serious conflict with NATO. But there’s a real danger in turning the Obama administration’s rift with Putin over the Ukraine and Syria into the grounds for a return to the Cold War. That’s what I heard Clinton doing during the debate.

The Obama administration’s primary adversary in Syria has been Bashar Assad’s regime. It [I think Marshall means Assad though some might debate this] has been responsible for transforming what was initially a civilian Arab Spring-type call for political reform into a brutal civil war that has degenerated into a contest between a dictator bent on retaining his rule even at the cost of destroying his own country and a ragged group of rebels led by Islamist terrorist organizations. Russia, which has historically backed Assad and has a naval base in Syria, has taken Assad’s side, and we have backed Assad’s opponents, while covertly cooperating with Russia and Assad’s other ally, Iran, in fighting one of these terrorist groups, ISIS. It’s a really ugly situation that defies easy answers or obvious choices for alliance.

But in characterizing the war in Syria, Clinton astonishingly blamed the war’s atrocities on “Russian aggression.” And she advocated setting up a “no-fly zone,” a proposal that if it were not seriously narrowed, could lead to an air war between the United States and Russia. The Obama administration has wisely rejected this kind of strategy. Should Clinton’s remarks be taken seriously? There is a precedent: in the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy out-hawked Richard Nixon on Cuba. Kennedy’s hawkishness on Cuba led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and to a fifty-five years of a destructive policy toward that country. Could Clinton’s posture during the campaign carry over to her presidency? That worries me. But I’ll still take my chances with her over Trump, and I suspect the country will, too, in November, regardless of who won last night’s debate.

My emphasis.

While covering Sunday's debate, Farai Chideya at 538 pointed out:

In one of the latest Clinton emails revealed by Wikileaks, she said in 2013: “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk — you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians.” Tonight, she reiterated her support for a no-fly zone.

Clinton seems to instinctively lean toward policies that will increase the carnage. There has to be another way.

Futile war without end

The subtitle is the true theme of Andrew J. Bacevich's America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. A retired colonel, a professional Army officer before becoming a scholar, Bacevich brings a military professional's eye to decades of U.S. imperial folly, beginning with Jimmy Carter's commitment to keep oil flowing to an insatiable country, through Afghan wars I and II, through Iraq I and II, through Bosnia, Lebanon, the "Arab Spring," Libya, the Syria civil war and beyond. He judges all this violent misery harshly:

I should state plainly my own assessment of this ongoing war, now well into its fourth decade. We have not won it. We are not winning it. Simply trying harder is unlikely to produce a different outcome. ...

This is not a book that judges the morals and motives of U.S. leaders who stumbled from crisis to catastrophe leaving carnage (mostly for other people) behind. He's asking whatever were they thinking? What they thought they might accomplish? Why the military means employed seemed so utterly incapable of accomplishing much anything except destruction (mostly of other people)? And, so now what?

He's a scathing critic, for example of President Jimmy Carter who he describes as allowing domestic politics to lead him into blundering quagmires in Iran and Afghanistan:

... when it came to the exercise of power, Carter was insufficiently devious. He suffered from a want of that instinctive cunning that every successful statesman possesses in great abundance. ...he lacked guile ..."

But his real bile is directed toward his own profession, the U.S. military and permanent "national security" establishment. Victory in the Cold War

brought the armed services and their various clients face to face with a crisis of the first order. With the likelihood of World War III subsiding to somewhere between remote and infinitesimal -- with the overarching purpose for which the postwar U.S. military establishment had been created thereby fulfilled -- what exactly did that establishment and all of its ancillary agencies, institutes, collaborators, and profit-making auxiliaries exist to do?

The Pentagon wasted no time in providing an answer to that question. ... The Greater Middle East was to serve -- indeed, was even then already serving -- as the chosen arena for honing military power into a utensil that would maintain America's privileged position and, not so incidentally, provide a continuing rationale for the entire apparatus of national security. That region's predominantly Muslim population thereby became the subjects of experiments ranging from the nominally benign -- peacekeeping, peacemaking, and humanitarian intervention -- to the nakedly coercive.

Beginning in 1980, U.S. forces ventured into the Greater Middle East to reassure, warn, intimidate, suppress, pacify, rescue, liberate, eliminate, transform and overawe. They bombed, raided, invaded, occupied, and worked through proxies of various kinds. ... The results actually produced over the course of several decades of trying have never come even remotely close to satisfying ... expectations.

I appreciated this book. I learned from this book. But throughout I felt (as well as understood even if only incompletely) that far too much was missing. In particular, Bacevich never really integrates the impact of the festering moral wound that was and is Israeli theft of their homeland from Palestinians. That lurks there in the background; this history cannot be written without bringing it to the foreground, despite its adding new layers of complexity.

Bacevich's lumped together region -- his Greater Middle East -- has little texture, few sub-genres, not nearly enough local quirks, and hardly any diverse people in his telling. U.S. readers have access to far more granular and human accounts of what we have wrought. I recommend especially Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near on Iraq before we facilitated that country's dismemberment and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.

But I would recommend this book as well. There are so many vantages from which to condemn the ongoing national war folly ... we need them all.

Criminals in our midst

A British report -- named after the author Sir John Chilcott -- has told us what we already knew about the U.S. and British war on Iraq: this was an con job perpetrated by elites on their own peoples. They knew or could have known (and if you are the government that's just as bad) that Saddam Hussein was no threat to anyone but his own people. They knew or could have known that they had no plans for what would happen once their armies had crashed into Iraq's cities. They knew or could have known that the country was likely to tear itself apart in sectarian and ethnic rivalries once the dictator was removed. They knew or could have known that thousands of Iraqis who had never wronged them in any way would die and/or be made refugees on their initiative. But they made their war anyway and have paid no penalty for instigating the carnage that continues to this day. They should be defendants on a trial for disturbing the peace of the world, not comfortably retired.

Erudite Partner (Rebecca Gordon) responded to the report at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, always a good source on the interactions between the Muslim world and the West. Her article, Surprise! It was a War Crime, is worth checking out in full. Some highlights:

... members of the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and his longtime associate Paul Wolfowitz, actually came into office with an explicit plan ... The ultimate goal would be a realignment of power in the Middle East, with Syria destabilized, a Hashemite king ruling Iraq, and a new regional alliance among Turkey, Jordan, and Israel.

Syria has certainly been “rolled back” in a civil war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and made over half its population either internal or external refugees.The US invasion or Iraq did not cause the Syrian civil war, but it unleashed the shock waves—as Wolfowitz and his co-authors predicted and hoped—that made it possible, as well as creating the conditions for the rise of extremist forces like the Islamic State.

... It’s clear, too, from the Senate torture report and other public records, that U.S. torture in the “war on terror” began because Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush needed a reason to invade Iraq. The CIA tortured Abu Zubaydah into saying that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. They shipped a Libyan named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who probably had been an al Qaeda trainer, to Egypt. There he was waterboarded until he agreed to the proposition that, as President Bush put it in an October 2002 speech to the nation, “Iraq has trained al Qaeda in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” Donald Rumsfeld wrote his famous memo okaying torture at Guantánamo in hopes that someone there would say the same thing. ...

These men, and their underlings, and their abettors should be in the dock.

"Oh! what a lovely war ..."

Homage to past glories on our national day.

Since we're celebrating "rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air" today, it seems like a good moment to check in on our wars. It's not a pretty picture.

Bombs have sure been bursting in Istanbul, in Dhaka, and in Baghdad.

Our governments (I'll include among that "us"not just U.S. allies, but also governments at the scenes of carnage) blame ISIS. And I don't think ISIS is denying authorship of these horrors.

Peter Beinart points out the killers are not without pretexts for their atrocities, even though there is no excuse for random murder.

The mid-20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that, “America was menaced as much by its own pretensions to virtue as it was by world disorder.” Niebuhr was no pacifist, nor did he draw a moral equivalence between the U.S. and Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR. But he urged American leaders to acknowledge that even in just wars, “tyranny [is] defeated with instruments tainted by evil.”

The United States has intervened militarily to prevent ISIS from conquering Iraq and Syria. In that effort, it has carried out more than 10,000 air strikes—strikes that kill many people but go largely unnoticed in the American press. America’s current war may be justified. But America is not innocent. By pretending it is, [Marco] Rubio and other politicians [including Ms. Clinton] mislead Americans about the reasons for ISIS terrorism. And they prevent an honest debate about the costs and benefits of America’s war.

We would rather look away, but we could do with some reminding. The Soufan Group says ISIS is being defeated militarily, but that only points to more suffering and butchery.

Over the past two years, the West has focused on this phenomenon: the persistent and rising threat of attacks such as those in Istanbul, Paris, Tunis, Brussels, San Bernardino, and Orlando, altering policies, laws, and tactics. As the Islamic State enters its third year as a self-proclaimed caliphate, this phenomenon—in which the Islamic State inspires people around the world to act in its name—has completely detached itself from the physical group. This threat to the West will remain, and perhaps grow, as the group suffers increasing losses on the ground. 

But to the millions of Syrians and Iraqis who experience the Islamic State less as a phenomenon and more as a daily existential threat, the announcement of a caliphate was the weary culmination of a long-term corrosion of governance and stability. Life in Raqqa, Mosul, Fallujah, and many other cities and villages was dreadful in the years before the announcement and remains dreadful two years on. Only in the West did the events of June 2014 come as a surprise. 

... As Syria and Iraq mark the second anniversary of the Islamic State, there is reason to hope that a third will not come; however, there is little reason to hope that the group will not re-emerge in some shape or form in the future. The scale of the problem in Iraq—and, even more so in Syria—is beyond comparison and beyond the current capabilities of local, regional, and international actors to resolve. 

Meanwhile, we've got 51 State Department officials calling for deeper U.S. dabbling in the Syrian civil war. Nothing in likely-President Hillary Clinton's past or present pronouncements suggests she knows better. In fact she'd likely embroil us all more deeply. (And yes, we do have to elect her; this is no time for purism.) And then comes word that the Syrian faction allied with al Qaeda has captured the leader of a U.S.-favored "moderate" combatant group -- and presumably all those lovely weapons we've sent him.

Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum got it right when contemplating our leaders' prescriptions:

This stuff never stops. Everyone wants a miracle cure in the Middle East: the mythical "just right" military response that doesn't involve ground troops; won't get any Americans killed; and doesn't take very long — but that will be magically effective anyway. It's nuts. ... It's snake oil.

Very deadly snake oil, mostly for other people.

Some history to ponder

On March 29, 1973, the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnam. Almost 59,000 U.S soldiers had died; 2.6 million U.S.personnel had served in Vietnam by the time of the withdrawal. More than one million Vietnamese had died in the 17 year long war. The fighting didn't stop for another two years, at which point North Vietnamese forces overran the unpopular South Vietnamese government that the U.S. had propped up. The final fall of Saigon is the source of the famous photo of people trying to board helicopters from the U.S. embassy roof. But by then, our troops had been out for two years.

In those days, when the U.S. "left" one of its imperial experiments, it left. In Vietnam, this was because the other side "won". Ditto Laos and Cambodia.

These days we don't seem to ever get out. Having kicked the hornet's nest, we stay on but pretend the troops we leave in place aren't in combat. A Marine was killed in northern Iraq last week. In January, a U.S. soldier died in Marjah, Helmand province, Afghanistan -- an insignificant place which has suffered from U.S. attention off and on since 1946. Rajiv Chandrasekaran told that story.

ISIS is a plague on the planet. Any responsible government would be trying to eradicate it. The terror of terrorism makes us stupid and mean, as it is intended to. What we need is to be smart and brave. That's hard, but it is the only stance that is going to preserve healthy communities and states.

Oddly, the billionaire George Soros, himself a refugee from Nazi barbarism before he took up crashing currencies for profit, understands this as well as anyone.

Jihadi terrorist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida have discovered the achilles heel of our western societies: the fear of death. Through horrific attacks and macabre videos, the publicists of Isis magnify this fear, leading otherwise sensible people in hitherto open societies to abandon their reason.

... Science merely confirms what experience has long shown: when we are afraid for our lives, emotions take hold of our thoughts and actions, and we find it difficult to make rational judgments. Fear activates an older, more primitive part of the brain than that which formulates and sustains the abstract values and principles of open society.

The open society is thus always at risk from the threat posed by our response to fear. A generation that has inherited an open society from its parents will not understand what is required to maintain it until it has been tested and learns to keep fear from corrupting reason. Jihadi terrorism is only the latest example. The fear of nuclear war tested the last generation, and the fear of communism and fascism tested my generation.

... To remove the danger posed by jihadi terrorism, abstract arguments are not enough; we need a strategy for defeating it. ... one idea shines through crystal clear: it is an egregious mistake to do what the terrorists want us to do. ...

We can't fight ISIS by demonizing Muslims or shutting our borders to refugees. The challenge that confronts the generation that Feels the Bern is not only to take our communities back from the plutocrats, but also to demonstrate that it is possible to build a society where people of all colors and all faiths can work together for the common good. That's the true threat to the terrorists -- and also to the plutocrats.

Checking in on the Forever War as Obama's term winds down

The Tampa Tribune, located where the U.S. Central Command makes its headquarters, treats as a local beat the doings of the force charged with carrying on U.S. military activity in the Middle East. President Obama is bringing in three new commanders this year, all of whom come out of the tight-lipped domain of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Reporter Howard Altman offers insight about the probable direction of the ongoing campaign.

The most significant change leading to this JSOC Trifecta is the choice of Army Gen. Joseph Votel as head of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, which oversees U.S. military operations in Iraq, Syria and 18 other nations in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

Votel lives next door to the current Centcom commander, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin III at MacDill Air Force Base, where both commands are headquartered. He will become the first Centcom commander to have come from the ranks of Special Operations Forces.

Army Lt. Gen Anthony “Tony” Thomas is likely to follow the route of JSOC commanders stepping up to take over Socom. Votel and his predecessor, retired Adm. William McRaven, were both JSOC commanders before taking over Socom.

And Maj. Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, current commander of the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence, will likely get his third star and take over JSOC.

... Clearly, Obama’s preference, in Iraq, Syria and in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Africa as well (and Yemen before we got kicked out) has been JSOC raids and drone strikes.

So Obama is putting the burden of the Forever War squarely in the lap of this secretive elite force, not the regular branches. Journalist Jeremy Scahill reported the exact moment when Obama discovered these operatives were his best bet for dialing down the visibility of the Forever War (which we don't like when we can see its carnage as in Iraq) while beating back the U.S. panic about terrorism. Remember when merchant ship Captain Richard Phillips was rescued by JSOC snipers from Somali pirates? Those shooters that day handed Obama a public relations triumph (and a live captain) and seems to have made him a believer in using such forces to lead our military adventures.

Obama knows perfectly well the tightrope he's trying to walk. He laid it out in the State of the Union speech.

“Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped,” he allowed. “But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story [the Islamic State] wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.”

... And then came an appeal to the carpet-bombing constituency. Calling the Islamic State “killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed,” Obama boasted: “With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we are taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, and their weapons. We are training, arming, and supporting forces who are steadily reclaiming territory in Iraq and Syria.”

Peter Certo, Common Dreams

The people of this country get from our rulers as much war-making as we want. JSOC gives any President a means to keep much of our military force projection hidden domestically. Meanwhile our war is certainly not hidden from the people involuntarily on the wrong end of those airstrikes.

The Forever War will go on as long as we demand unrealistic "security" and it can be kept secret from us as long as we refuse to look at what we are doing. We do still need a peace movement.

Desperately seeking a peace movement

Unlike the United States, the Brits still have a functioning legislature -- and consequently there was an actual debate on Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's plan to commit British bombers to attacking ISIS in Syria in the wake of the Paris massacres. The result was never really in doubt, though some Labour MPs including their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, pointed out that it was unlikely the bombing would accomplish anything the U.S. wasn't already doing better.

At the London Review of Books, James Meek, who has reported from Afghanistan and Iraq, brought to the fore what has gotten completely lost in the debate and in the metastasizing wars we are encouraged to consider a normal state.

Critics of Western intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya lament the deaths of civilians, the eruption of previously contained sectarian or tribal conflicts, and the provocation of terrorist attacks on the interveners’ home countries. Less talked about is a fourth unpleasant consequence – more interventions. For all the concern at the spread of Salafist ideology around the world, there is surprisingly little concern at the spread of interventionist ideology – the creed that country A is entitled to take military action against, or within, country B, without the consent of the government of country B (if it has one) or any evidence that it poses a threat to country A.

Such overt interventions – that is, not through proxies – happened many times between the United Nations being set up and the end of the Cold War. Britain and France intervened in Egypt, the USSR intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the US intervened in Grenada. But the pivotal intervention was Iraq. What we are beginning to see is how the US and Britain’s invasion of that country not only seemed to other countries to legitimise their own interventions, but has inspired a set of newly prosperous countries to acquire and use the interveners’ tools.

Since 2003, we have seen Russian military intervention in Georgia and Ukraine; we have seen Saudi intervention in Yemen, with airstrikes galore. In August last year, the United Arab Emirates seemed to surprise the United States by using the fancy fighters and airborne refuelling aircraft it had bought from Western countries to fly thousands of miles and, with Egypt’s help, bomb Libya. As Cameron was mustering support for his Syria bombing vote, China announced it was setting up its first overseas military base, in Djibouti, close to the American base that flies drones to Somalia and Yemen.

In the long term, heavily armed, interventionist-minded states rubbing up against one another are a greater danger than scattered bands of intolerant dreamers performing sporadic acts of terror. In the short term, strong states are the answer to IS. Not states that demonstrate their strength by bombing Syria, but states that demonstrate their strength by guiding their clients within Syria towards a suspension of fighting as a prelude to peace.

Yes, the world still needs a peace movement.

"We are NOT a nation of cowards!"

Catch the inimitable Katie Sherrod unmasking some politicians' shameful incitement of fear directed against refugees fleeing violence in Syria:
Now there's a theme for the Christmas season about to engulf us.***I'm on the road this week observing the Thanksgiving holiday, so blog posts may be somewhat erratic.