Tag Archives: Gulf War

Political Rants

An unhealthy dose of imperial fetishism

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As I’ve mentioned more times than I should have, I have had very low expectations for the Biden foreign policy since the beginning. By “the beginning”, I mean well before his election, when you couldn’t find foreign policy positions on his campaign web site for love or money. Biden’s fifty-year track record on foreign affairs is not a particularly good one. I remember him saying he was “ashamed” of Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy towards apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s. Um …. that’s about it.

These past two weeks have done little to change my mind on this. The drone assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader, prompted a lot of fist-pumping on the part of mainstream Democrats and some never-Trump Republicans. A similar amount of jingoism accompanied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, as well. I’m not certain what the expected takeaway is for either of these decisions, but it the point was to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current Democratic leadership is well vested into America’s imperial enterprise, they certainly succeeded.

A child of bad policy

Ayman al-Zawahiri was a terrible person, there’s no question. I think, though, as we are the one global super-power, it’s probably a good idea to consider how our policy may have contributed to his no-goodness. Al-Zawahiri started down the road to al Qaeda when he was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, where he and his fellow prisoners from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were tortured, killed, and otherwise abused. Egypt, I will remind you, has long been a major recipient of U.S. aid, far beyond what nearly every other nation has received from us. If Egypt’s notoriously brutal prison system contributed to al-Zawahiri’s radicalism (which it most certainly did), we bear considerable responsibility for that.

Secondly, there likely wouldn’t have been an al-Qaeda for him to join up with if it hadn’t been for (1) the Afghan CIA operation during the 1980s, and (2) the first gulf war in 1990-91, when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia for the first time, remaining there long after Iraq was driven from Kuwait. Again, these were policy choices, not forces of nature. Without multiple interventions in the middle east and southwest Asia, America might not have been such a big, attractive target for these people. Can’t be sure, but …. might have been worth a try.

Worst of the worst?

Then there’s the question of how many lives were lost at the hands of al-Zawahiri. I would argue far too many. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last week, he had a long history of planning terrorist actions, including being one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and so on. So, thousands of live lost. Not a nice person, right?

Now, there should be some reckoning as to how that record stacks up to the record of his pursuers. All killing is intrinsically bad, so I’m not suggesting that the rapacious policies of the United States somehow lessen the severity and the cravenness of al-Zawahiri’s attacks. But if it’s bad when he does it, then it’s bad when others do it as well, right? And if others do a lot more killing than he did, well … that makes them particularly bad, right?

Let’s just stick to the wars that followed 9/11. How many people died as a result of our actions? Was it less or more than the number of al-Zawahiri’s victims? In all honesty, America’s victims through this period run in the high six-figures to perhaps seven figures. Several countries were destroyed essentially beyond recovery. Fist pump, anyone?

Unfair comparisons

Okay, I know …. it’s really not fair to compare nation states like the U.S. to non-state actors like al Qaeda or individuals like al-Zawahiri. Nation states have international obligations, responsibilities, and should at least formally be accountable to their populations. Terror networks are kind of a law unto themselves, though international law does bear on them. But honestly …. shouldn’t we expect more out of our own government then that they should be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of times the number of deaths caused by our most ruthless enemies?

Seems like kind of a low bar.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Meeting the indefensible with the unthinkable

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The onslaught continues, in more ways than one. Putin’s wholly unjustified invasion of Ukraine is entering its third week with no end in sight. At the same time, the corporate media is propagandizing the living hell out of the conflict, platforming rhetoric that could lead to World War III. Nothing less than that.

The Biden Administration has thus far remained cautious with regard to involving the U.S. or NATO directly in Ukraine. They deserve some credit for that, though I’m not sure what the appropriate prize is for NOT burning down the house. Of course, the neocon wing of the Republican party and the various networks are pushing hard to get Biden to agree to some crazy shit. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how irresponsible they’re being, but it is kind of shocking.

Preaching to the choir

I can’t remember a time when the media worked so hard to convince the American people to support something they already agree with. Their coverage of Ukraine is wall-to-wall, and there’s a meme-like repetitiveness to the content they’re pushing out. I have seen that little boy crying while he’s walking up the street so many times. Then there’s the armed men in the balaclavas who talk about revenge on the Russians and demand a no-fly zone.

I’m not denying the authenticity or even the heartrending nature of some of these clips. But their repetition seems to have a point – we should be doing more. And when the corporate media talks about doing more, it’s always in the context of a conversation with a general. They have been entranced with the U.S. military since the Gulf War, and the national security state is their go-to source on how to end a conflict.

There’s a reason why a majority of Americans support a no-fly zone in Ukraine: they hear it talked about incessantly on T.V. Even when the commentators say it’s a bad idea, the conversation continues as if there’s some controversy.

The planes, boss, the planes

Then there’s the debate over delivering fighter planes to the Ukrainians. Someone cooked up a plan to have Poland give them 26 old MIGs in return for new planes from the United States. The Poles reasonably considered this a bad idea, as it would make it seem as though they were directly involved in the conflict. Then they doubled back and suggested the United States do the transfer via a base in Germany. Not so good.

This story has been hashed over by the press almost incessantly. Very few, however, have questioned the utility of this effort on Ukraine’s behalf. Where would they base these planes, or keep the Russians from bombing them to bits on the first day? How would these 40-year-old MIGs fare against a far larger, modern Russian air force? This is totally beside the fact that such an obvious move would be tantamount to joining the fight in earnest. And yet, the conversation continues, in part because the Ukrainians want the planes, like they want the no-fly zone.

Backing away from the brink

It is incumbent upon those of us who are still sane to encourage the administration and the political class more generally not to make the mistake of becoming a combatant in this war. While many have seemingly forgotten that we are living on a nuclear powder keg, the rest of us need to encourage our fellow Americans not to play with matches.

This is not 1939, folks, Churchill allusions notwithstanding. There were no nukes in 1939. Russia is not prewar Germany, which was the world’s greatest industrial and military power at the time. This is more like 2003, when a rogue superpower decided to defy the world and invade another country for no good reason. There can be no Russo-American war – not now, not ever. Not if the world is to survive. It’s that simple.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Albright: He always told the truth

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Former General Colin Powell died this week of complications from COVID-19. I’m sure you’ve heard this about a million times by now. You’ve probably also heard that he was a hero, a man of great stature, an inspiration, etc. I can tell you that a lot of hagiographic remembrances came floating up from the television on Monday and Tuesday.

I don’t think it will surprise any readers of this blog that I was not a fan of the former Secretary of State. Yes, like many on the left, I never forgave him for his Feb 5, 2003 performance at U.N. headquarters in New York – a key moment in the rush to the Iraq invasion. (Some may recall that they draped Picasso’s Guernica during Powell’s presentation, which was just a little too on-the-nose.) But his career had a lot of bloody patches.

Spinning from the beginning

Powell was a Vietnam veteran. He did, actually, play a small role in concealing the My Lai massacre, suggesting that the story was unrealistic because Americans and Vietnamese had such a great rapport. What? (For more on that love fest, I suggest Nick Turse’s Kill Everything That Moves.) This has been kind of a consistent pattern in Powell’s career – deflection from the facts and subservience to power.

He served in various capacities during the Reagan administration, working closely with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. When Weiberger was under scrutiny by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Powell helped the Secretary conceal his knowledge of that operation by initially supporting Weinberger’s contention that he didn’t keep a diary. (Powell later admitted that he observed Weinberger writing in a book or tablet that he kept on his desk.)

Worthy adversaries

One of the Powell sound bites the corporate media never tires of playing is the General’s comments at the start of the Gulf War: “First we’re going to cut it off. Then we’re going to kill it.” The “it” he’s talking about was a third-world army principally comprised of conscripts. The U.S. military did just what Powell said, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers in full retreat along Route 80 from Kuwait – the “Highway of Death”.

Of course, his most notorious failing was in laying out the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Most of the media describes this case as having fallen apart in the years that followed. Actually, the cobbled-together garbage that Powell handed out that day was debunked almost immediately, and the truth was available to anyone willing to see/hear it. That was immaterial to Powell – like many senators, he was thinking of his political future, not the human cost of what was being contemplated.

Mythmaking in America

The Trump phenomenon has brought many political dynamics into stark relief. But one of the most troubling effects of his presidency is the tendency to frame any conservative alternative to him as virtuous. This is what’s been done with regard to Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, etc. Powell was ahead of all of them, frankly. It largely involves reputation laundering on the part of media figures. We saw a lot of that this week.

When Madeleine Albright appeared on Morning Joe a few days back, her closing comment was that Powell “always told the truth.” It’s a little hard to know what to do with that. It made me think back to that moment I saw at the start of the Iraq war, when Powell mischaracterized the testimony of an Iraqi defector, Hussein Kemal. I had just read the transcript, and I have to think he had seen it in some form. The man just freaking lied about what it said, straight up.

If you can make Colin Powell into a man of peerless virtue, what value does truth have?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Pardoner’s tale.

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When I heard the news that Trump had pardoned the perpetrators of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq, my first reaction was much the same as when I learned of Chelsea Manning’s conviction: If we’re waiting for justice to prevail with regard to our illegal invasion and wanton destruction of Iraq, we will be waiting a very long time. Of course, this is not the first time Trump has freed mass murderers from accountability. For someone who claims to have opposed the Iraq war (even though he really didn’t back in 2002-03), he never seems to extend that sentiment to entail sympathy for the victims of the invasion. He is, of course, a wannabe autocrat, so any display of weakness is to be avoided. Trump likes a “tough” guy, though how machine-gunning unarmed Iraqi motorists, including a young boy, or stabbing to death a prisoner of war in custody amounts to “toughness” I will never understand. More like cowardice. A lot more.

I, like many, was appalled by the actions of these Blackwater mercenary thugs on that fateful day in Baghdad in September of 2007. And I don’t want to minimize the criminality and cravenness of their actions – not one bit. But it’s important to remember that this was one incident in a massive bloodletting that began many years before the start of the 2003 invasion, and which has continued up to this day. There are plenty of people in the United States who are outraged by Trump’s pardon who also supported the war in Iraq, which was itself a continuous Nisour Square massacre that even a casual glance at the news reporting on the ground at the time would confirm. Even those who did not support the war included many who were either supportive of or indifferent to the economic strangulation of the Iraqi people for the twelve years prior to the invasion. And it’s hard to find people who didn’t wave the flag after the Gulf War, which entailed a destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including its water treatment and supply system, that would later contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths. (I won’t go into our support for Saddam Hussein, which is another long and sordid story.)

Again, I’m not trying to minimize the gravity of the Nisour Square crime. It was a rare case of accountability in the context of a war whose prosecution included many who could legitimately be described as war criminals. Trump’s action this week simply reaffirms what most of the world already knew – that America does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants, and will never take responsibility for it. They know that, in fact, America will even resent those it invades for not being grateful for its criminal action. Trump has signaled this quite loudly over his tenure in the political spotlight, and he’s not the only one. Our wars are presented as a civilizing mission in a certain sense, not unlike the claims of prior colonial powers, or those of the Europeans who first overran the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s the same impulse that drives Trump to defend statues of Columbus or hold up the National Defense Authorization Act to keep the names of Confederate generals on U.S. military bases (an example of a snake eating its own tail if ever I heard one).

Trump is a reliable thug and a low-information autocrat, but he is most importantly a reflection and an expression of our worst impulses as a people. It’s best we don’t forget that as we move past this disastrous administration.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Warever.

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John Bolton and Mike Pompeo made the rounds of every American president’s favorite region this past week, on behalf of their grizzly leader. The press story was that they were explaining the administration’s plan for withdrawal from Syria; really, this will be a much more gradual process than the president promised over the holidays to howls of protest from the national security talking heads. Of course, it’s a case of Trump doing a potentially positive thing in a really ham-handed fashion and for all the wrong reasons. So naturally he had to walk it back. Not the promise of “The Wall”, you understand … just the more recent promise of total withdrawal from Syria. And partial withdrawal Afghanistan.

Only ever right for the wrong reasons.I’ll believe it when I see it. The U.S. presidency has evolved to a point of foreign policy cravenness that pulling all troops out of any conflict, no matter how pointless or long-winded, is simply not an option. And before someone reminds me, yes, we do still have troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea after more than 70 years. It’s basically the same dynamic. Pull the troops out and they’ll say you’re weak. No president, particularly not the current one, can willingly swallow that accusation. And so it continues – occupations stretching out to the vanishing point, burning up uncounted billions of defense dollars (and I really mean uncounted) and staking our young people out in hopeless situations that no application of military power can solve.

In essence, we are trapped in the box that was constructed in the wake of the Vietnam war. The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” that George H.W. Bush declared cured in 1991 had two major components. One was a quite reasonable public distaste for foreign wars and military interventions, developed quite independently of articulate elite opinion, which almost universally supported the aims of our murderous adventure in Indochina. The second piece was a reluctance on the part of elected officials to institute conscription. Draft registration has been in effect since it was reestablished in 1980, but no draft has been declared since the end of the Vietnam War and none is likely to be. The reason is simple: politicians are unwilling to ask for that level of sacrifice from the American public. There’s no conscription because that would make presidents, senators, and congressmembers unpopular – period.

That’s what drives these endless wars. We are not compelled to fight, and our wars are financed on the U.S. Treasury’s credit card, so we don’t have to pay extra taxes, either.  So if you’re wondering why we still have our all-volunteer army in Afghanistan, that’s basically why. Start drafting people (or even taxing people) and it would be over in six months, tops.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Lying in state.

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John McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years. That’s a long stretch in a third world prison, particularly when it’s in a country that’s been under sustained withering attack from a superpower for longer than that. He was abused, and that was reprehensible – prisoners should not be maltreated or deliberately deprived of proper care, nutrition, etc. I am against mistreatment and torture regardless of who is being subjected to it, and McCain was far from the worst; just a cog in a genocidal war machine that he eventually came close to seeing as  inappropriately applied in that conflict. And late in life, he admitted that the Iraq war had been a “mistake” and expressed regret for his part in bringing it about.

Lest we forget ... the real McCain.Those are the two best things I can say about the late senior senator from Arizona. The fact is, he spent his entire political career pressing for war every time the opportunity arose; it was central to his brand. He simply never met a war he didn’t like, from Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America and elsewhere, to the Gulf War, to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, you name it. He was pressing for direct American involvement in the Syrian civil war early on. And in spite of his celebrated vote against the Obamacare repeal, he has supported Trump’s legislative agenda more than eighty percent of the time, most notably voting to pass the $1.5T tax giveaway to the richest people in the country – a bill that also hobbled the ACA by canceling the mandate.

Of course, the mainstream news media reference none of this in their wall-to-wall coverage of his passing, preferring to expound endlessly on what a peerless leader of men McCain was. MSNBC’s amnesia regarding this topic is breathtaking. I clearly remember his 2008 presidential campaign, and it was full of divisive rhetoric, particularly what emanated from his crackpot vice presidential pick, Sara Palin. McCain, too, made rally speeches about how Obama was not like you and me. He obsessed about Russia in Georgia (note: a chief foreign policy advisor was on Georgia’s payroll at the time) and advocated for a federal spending freeze when the financial crisis hit – a Hoover-esque move that would have brought on another great depression. And yet with all this (and much else), MSNBC only shows that one moment in that one rally when McCain shut down some crazy old racist with a clumsily bigoted rejoinder about how Obama was not an “Arab” but, rather, a good family man.

I could go on, but seriously … the point is that the corporate media loved McCain and were incapable of reporting on him honestly. That they would continue spinning the maverick myth even after he’s gone should surprise no one.

luv u,

jp