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Michael Klare, An All-American Path to War?
Michael Klare, An All-American Path to War?
The single scariest night of my life may have been on October 22, 1962, when I thought that all the duck-and-cover moments of my childhood were coming home to roost. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television (and radio) to warn us all to duck and cover. The Soviet Union, it seemed, had managed to emplace medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba that could reach major East coast cities. He was ordering a naval “quarantine” of the island. As he put it, “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.”
That was the beginning of what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, I’m here today, so neither New Haven, where I was then a freshman in college, nor New York, where I grew up, had its Hiroshima moment, nor did anyplace else in the U.S., Russia, or Cuba. Still, it felt too close for comfort.
Despite all the years of the Cold War still to come, I never again felt that unforgettable sense that a nuclear war might break out. But never say never, not on a planet filled with such weaponry, not when its two major powers, the U.S. and China, are increasingly facing off, particularly over the island of Taiwan.
Last month, for instance, Admiral Sam Paparo, commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet, called China a “pacing threat,” explaining that “I worry about China’s intentions. It doesn’t make a difference to me whether it is tomorrow, next year, or whether it is in six years…
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Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World
What’s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of Nawres Hamid, an Iraqi-American contractor killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite militia believed to have ties to Iran, the answer would be obvious: enough to risk war. After all, the president cited Hamid’s death in going after that militia and then drone-assassinating Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani. In response to the mortar attack, U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Syria killed at least 25Iraqi militia fighters and then, as January began, that drone strike near Baghdad International Airport took out a figure who was often considered the number-two man in Iran, as well as its possible future leader. In addition, it killed an Iraqi militia commander and eight otherpeople.
So you might say that the president considers any American death under such circumstances worth not just 35 Iraqis and Iranians, but the possibility of adding in a significant way to America’s forever wars (that he’s long denounced). Of course, you would have to reach a different conclusion if you considered the deaths in early January of an American soldier and two American contractors at an airport in Kenya after an attack by the Somali terror group al-Shabaab. In that case, there was no obvious response at all, not even a comment from the president. And the same would be true of the two dead and two wounded U.S. soldiers whose vehicle recently ran over a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan (deaths immediately claimed by the Taliban). Again, neither a comment nor a response from you-know-who.
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Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Future History
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Future History
In Donald Trump’s go-back-to-where-you-didn’t-come-from America, where the fear of immigrants (as well as their grotesque mistreatment) still seems on the rise, just wait. There’s so much more to come. Climate change has barely begun to hit this planet big time and yet, while there’s much writing about the grim circumstances (including gangs, drugs, and violence) that continue to send desperate Central Americans north to the U.S. border, global warming is also a growing factor in the equation. If the weather destroys the possibility of growing your food, you’ve got to do something else or go somewhere else. In the coming decades, count on one thing: thanks to the way we’re changing our very planet, ever more people are going to be uprooted from their homes and sent wandering in desperation across this globe of ours. And if you think about it, since Donald Trump is so desperately intent on aiding and abetting the intensification of global warming via fossil-fueled projects of every sort, he should really be considered the ultimate “invader” of this country. Given what we know about the reactions of those not forced to flee to those who are — to, in fact, a planet already filled with the displaced and refugees escaping violence on a scale not seen since the end of World War II — expect things to grow worse. More heat, more upheaval, more wars, and whatever turns out to follow the “populist right” on an increasingly unnerved planet, along with potentially 250 million or more displaced people by perhaps mid-century. Given the backstory so far, it’s not likely to be pretty.
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Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline
Did Donald Trump just make his first genuine mistake in the race for reelection in 2020? As I wrote during the 2016 campaign, The Donald had one striking distinction. He was the only candidate (or essentially American politician) of that moment who didn’t feel obliged to claim that the U.S. was not just great but the greatest of all powers, ever. In a single speech, his opponent Hillary Clinton managed to call the U.S. “the greatest country on Earth,” “an exceptional nation,” and “the indispensable nation” that possessed “the greatest military” ever and she was hardly atypical when it came to American politics then. Trump’s claim was that he would make the country great again; in other words, he was our first declinist candidate for president, the only one who claimed that the country wasn’t then beyond compare. And that message — including, for instance, his claims that a “depleted” U.S. military, driven beyond its limits by its twenty-first-century forever wars, was a “disaster” and its “generals… reduced to rubble” — rang a distinct bell in the heartland. It arguably won him the election by convincing enough white working-class voters, who already sensed their world in decline, that he was their man.
That was then, this is… well, consider the slogan the president recently tried out at the Florida rally he used to launch his reelection campaign: not “Make America Great Again,” but “Keep America Great,” or KAG. In other words, he tossed the “again” out the window and with it his declinist claim about the country. The implication, of course, was that, under his supervision, America had indeed become “great again.” As he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in a recent interview, “My economy is phenomenal. We have now the best economy, maybe in the history of our country… [W]hen I took over, this country, the economy was ready to collapse.”
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Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in Peril
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in Peril
There are a few genuinely upbeat news stories when it comes to this planet and people trying to figure out how to save us from ourselves and our fossil-fuel addiction. This at a moment of record global surface temperatures and record ocean heating when, despite the Paris climate accord of 2015, carbon dioxide from those fossil fuels is once again entering the atmosphere in record amounts. Take little Costa Rica, where Claudia Dobles, an urban planner who just happens to be the wife of the country’s president, has launched a model national decarbonization plan aimed at fully weaning that country off even the slightest reliance on fossil fuels by 2050. Or consider Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, whose mayor, Frank Jensen, is working to make it “carbon neutral” by 2022. Or think about the scientists now exploring far more controversial and futuristic geo-engineering schemes to try to deal with a world that could, in the decades to come, run amuck in global-warming terms — including the possibility of spraying planet-cooling aerosols like sulfur dioxide (in imitation of the gases emitted by volcanoes) into the atmosphere to reverse the effects of global warming.
Of course, while all of the above are hopeful, none of them offer full-scale solutions to a crisis that threatens to quite literally sink not just cities, but potentially civilization itself. As it happens, there is an obvious solution to the climate-change crisis staring us all in the face, one that TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro (author of a particularly timely new book, Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Struggle for Supremacy), brings up today. Forget Costa Rica, Copenhagen, aerosols, even that climate accord. Forget Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. Forget it all.
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How Many Minutes to Midnight?
How Many Minutes to Midnight?
Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can’t use them; who wouldn’t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be “unpredictable” on the subject; who suggested that it might not be “a bad thing for us” if Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea all became nuclear powers; who threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” before he became a chummy correspondent with its dictator; and who called for a nearly 10-fold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal (among many other, often contradictory, comments he’s made on nuclear matters).
Now, think about the bride, National Security Advisor John Bolton, a “statesman” who never saw a nuclear agreement he didn’t want to nuke. Those included President Richard Nixon’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Bill Clinton’s Agreed Framework with North Korea, President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (all of which he helped to deep-six), and most recently President Ronald Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty (a pact that had actually resulted in thousands of ready-to-use nuclear weapons being scrapped). With the help of his neocon bro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton recently succeeded in sticking a knife directly in the back of that treaty. He’s undoubtedly now eying the New START treaty, which put limits on long-range nukes and is up for renewal in 2021. (The president has already called it “one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.”)
As TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll points out today, the first new member of Trump’s and Bolton’s nuclear family, a “low-yield” nuke, was only recently born and given the less-than-apocalyptic name, W76-2.
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Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe
There’s a clear pattern to Donald Trump’s life. Put simply: he gets away with it. Yes, sometimes (but not usually) he has to pay a penalty, but generally he has a knack for leaving others holding the bag. He’s stiffed untold numbers of people (plumbers, painters, cabinet-makers, waiters, lawyers, bartenders) whom he hired to do something — almost anything — for him; he stiffed undocumented immigrants who worked for him; he stiffed the students of Trump University (until they got a $25 million settlement); he stiffed American workers at his Mar-a-Lago and other private clubs, hiring cheaper foreign guest workers instead; and above all, the most successful businessman of all time (by his own account) took down five casinos in Atlantic City as his business empire of that moment crashed and burned — and somehow he came away with the money, leaving his investors holding the bag and his casino workers losing millions of dollars in retirement savings. As the New York Times put it, “[E]ven as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses, and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.”
In other words, there’s a record of “success” that Donald Trump brought to the presidency. The only real question is: When things begin to go badly for this country, who will he stiff this time? It’s not unreasonable to assume that, as with so many previous crews enamored of The Donald, he’s taking this country and his base, in particular, for the ride of their lives and when this particular roller coaster goes down, who will go down with it?
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Planet of War: Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global Combat
Planet of War: Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global Combat
American militarism has gone off the rails — and this middling career officer should have seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the U.S. military not surprisingly focused on counterinsurgency as it faced various indecisive and seemingly unending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Back in 2008, when I was still a captain newly returned from Iraq and studying at Fort Knox, Kentucky, our training scenarios generally focused on urban combat and what were called security and stabilization missions. We’d plan to assault some notional city center, destroy the enemy fighters there, and then transition to pacification and “humanitarian” operations.
Of course, no one then asked about the dubious efficacy of “regime change” and “nation building,” the two activities in which our country had been so regularly engaged. That would have been frowned upon. Still, however bloody and wasteful those wars were, they now look like relics from a remarkably simpler time. The U.S. Army knew its mission then (even if it couldn’t accomplish it) and could predict what each of us young officers was about to take another crack at: counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fast forward eight years — during which this author fruitlessly toiled away in Afghanistan and taught at West Point — and the U.S. military ground presence has significantly decreased in the Greater Middle East, even if its wars there remain “infinite.” The U.S. was still bombing, raiding, and “advising” away in several of those old haunts as I entered the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Nonetheless, when I first became involved in the primary staff officer training course for mid-level careerists there in 2016, it soon became apparent to me that something was indeed changing.
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Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters
Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters
In June, Austin “Scott” Miller, the special-ops general chosen to be the 17th U.S. commander in Afghanistan, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like so many of the generals who had preceded him, he suggested that he saw evidence of “progress” in the Afghan war, even if he refused to “guarantee you a timeline or an end date.” Smart move, general!
As it happens, just over a week ago, he got a dose, up close and personal, of what the Afghan version of “progress” really means. He was visiting key American allies in the southern province of Kandahar when the “insider” attack of all insider attacks occurred. In the sort of event that’s been going on since at least 2010, an ostensible ally, in this case a local member of the Afghan security forces who had evidently joined the Taliban, turned his gun on Kandahar’s chief of police (a crucial powerbroker in the region), the local intelligence chief, and the provincial governor, killing the first two and wounding the third. In the process, he ensured that, with local leadership literally down the tubes, elections in Kandahar would be postponed for at least a week. Three Americans, including a brigadier general, were also wounded in the attack. (In 2014, an American major general was killed in just such an insider strike.) In one of the rarest acts for an American commander in memory, General Miller reportedly drew his sidearm as the bullets began to fly, but was himself untouched. Still, it was a striking reminder that, 17 years after the U.S. invaded that country, the Taliban are again riding high and represent the only forces making “progress” or “turning corners” in that country.
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Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe
In other words, there’s a record of “success” that Donald Trump brought to the presidency. The only real question is: When things begin to go badly for this country, who will he stiff this time? It’s not unreasonable to assume that, as with so many previous crews enamored of The Donald, he’s taking this country and his base, in particular, for the ride of their lives and when this particular roller coaster goes down, who will go down with it?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
Give them credit. As TomDispatch’s Nick Turse has so vividly reported over the last decade, America’s previously “elite” Special Operations forces — once small, specially trained units in a large military — have now essentially become a military in their own right, all 70,000 of them (larger, in fact, than many national armed forces). And they are more or less everywhere, more or less all the time. They aren’t just “elite” forces anymore; they’re America’s secret military, which, as Turse has shown, is increasingly deployed to something startlingly close to all the countries on the planet (aside from a few obvious ones like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea). They are raiding and fighting from Syria to Afghanistan, Somalia to Niger. They are training allied special ops types and other forces across the globe. It’s increasingly hard to think of places where they don’t show up, even, for instance, in a rain-soaked cave that recently trapped 12 Thai soccer players and their coach. And here’s the good news: if a bill sponsored by Congressman Richard Hudson, whose North Carolina district includes Fort Bragg (home of U.S. Army Special Operations Command), passes in Congress, the more America’s special operators deploy in combat-like ways to places that the IRS doesn’t consider war zones (but indeed are), the more likely that they and their families will… yep, get a special tax break for their efforts! (War, what is it good for?)
And they aren’t just “operators” anymore. They’re path-breakers in the “science” of war. As they fight terrorists around the globe, for instance, they’re developing “loitering munitions” in their Maritime Precision Engagement program that will act as “suicide drones” (operated from speedboats). Hey, if ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the rest of that crew have their version of suicide drones — humans with explosives strapped to them, not to speak of off-the-shelf drones — why shouldn’t the U.S. military have the technological equivalent?
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The Destruction of a Vast Transnational Nursery?
The Destruction of a Vast Transnational Nursery?
“If the oil execs aren’t terrarists, then who is? And if that doesn’t make the big energy companies criminal enterprises, then how would you define that term? To destroy our planet with malice aforethought, with only the most immediate profits on the brain, with only your own comfort and wellbeing (and those of your shareholders) in mind: Isn’t that the ultimate crime? Isn’t that terracide?”
Of course, that was in the good old days before Donald Trump and his cronies filled a whole administration to the tipping point with so-called climate skeptics and outright climate-change denialists. And this continues to happen, even as one report or study after another confirms that humanity and its fossil fuels are heating the planet at a remarkable rate and filling its atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a record pace. In the end, Trump and his crew may prove to be the biggest collection of criminals — in terms of harm to this world — ever. And it should be considered a historical irony (of sorts) that, on this issue, the Republicans, once the American party of the environment, are with them all the way.
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In Donald Trump’s Washington, The House Always Wins
In Donald Trump’s Washington, The House Always Wins
It drove me crazy throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton (with all those high-priced consultants and aides) just kept pounding away at Donald Trump’s personality, which his many followers adored, and those unreleased tax returns of his, even though Americans have always loved hucksters capable of outwitting the government. That was so apparent to the candidate that he didn’t hesitate to brag about not paying taxes, adding, “That makes me smart.” As I wrote at the time, “I guarantee you that Trump senses he’s deep in the Mississippi of American politics with such statements and that a surprising number of voters will admire him for it (whether they admit it or not). After all, he beat the system, even if they didn’t.”
Unlike her predecessor, Barack Obama, who, in the 2012 campaign, nailed Mitt Romney as a “vulture capitalist,” Clinton ignored the obvious path to taking Trump down. His promise to make America great again was simple enough: I’m a successful businessman, he told voters. If you elect me president, I’ll treat this country the same way I treated my businesses and we’ll sail to success. As it happened, however, he had driven a number of his businesses down in classic fashion, especially his five casinos in Atlantic City. They all went bankrupt.
This was hardly a secret. In June 2016, for instance, New York Times journalists Russ Buettner and Charles Bagli offered a vivid anatomy lesson in the Trump version of bankruptcy and who took the fall for him. (“The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.”) It was such a simple formula really that it’s almost a miracle Clinton and her advisers ignored it most of the time. And we’re now seeing it in action in the White House.
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Tomgram: Nomi Prins, In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full?
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full?
Remember when “draining the swamp” was something the Bush administration swore it was going to do in launching its Global War on Terror? Well, as we all know, that global swamp of terror only got muckier in the ensuing years. (Think al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, think ISIS.) Then, last year, that swamp left terror behind and took up residence in Washington, D.C. In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump swore repeatedly that, along with building his wall and locking “her” up, he was going to definitively drain the Washington swamp, ridding the national capital of special interests once and for all. (“It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.,” he typically said. “This is why I’m proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again.”) “Drain the swamp” became one of the signature chants at his rallies.
No sooner had he been elected, however, then he decided to “retire” the concept of draining the swamp — and little wonder. After all, he quickly began appointing hordes of “former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants” to agencies where they were to help “craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck.” Then his administration started issuing waivers to those new appointees, allowing them to “take up matters that could benefit former clients.” News of just who got those waivers was kept secret and only released after publicity about them took a truly bad turn. Here’s a typical example of one of them, as reported by the New York Times: “A… waiver was given to Michael Catanzaro, who until January was registered as a lobbyist for companies including Devon Energy, an oil and gas company, and Talen Energy, a coal-burning electric utility.
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Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse
With 2015 in the history books, it’s easy enough to think of our changing weather as part of that history, but that would be a mistake. Climate change, if allowed to come to full fruition, will be something else altogether — not history, but the possible end of it. History, after all, is something we’re generally familiar with.
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