{"id":50697,"date":"2020-01-24T06:45:43","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T11:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50697"},"modified":"2020-01-24T06:45:48","modified_gmt":"2020-01-24T11:45:48","slug":"tomgram-danny-sjursen-mad-policies-for-a-mad-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50697","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of Nawres Hamid<\/a>, 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<\/a> Hamid\u2019s death in going after that militia and then drone-assassinating<\/a> Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani. In response to the mortar attack, U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Syria killed at least 25<\/a>Iraqi 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<\/a> an Iraqi militia commander and eight other<\/a>people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s forever wars (that he\u2019s long denounced<\/a>). Of course, you would have to reach a different conclusion if you considered the deaths<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World\u00a0 What\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18770,522,776,6463,827,1174],"class_list":["post-50697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-danny-sjursen","tag-middle-east","tag-syria","tag-tom-dispatch","tag-united-states","tag-us-foreign-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50698,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50697\/revisions\/50698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}