#as if we are just the faces of American horror and fascism out of nowhere when you’re real enemy is white supremacy 🗿 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bigskydreaming · 6 years ago

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Given how much Hugh Jackman’s been more than happy to soak up the adulation of LGBTQ+ audiences and proclaim himself an ally, this is a fucking slap in the face.

Though Jackman had less to say about the upcoming elections than his American castmates, he made it clear that his friendship with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner is not a reflection of his values. Jackman’s recent birthday party made headlines because Trump and Kushner were among the guests. “I’ve known those guys for 15 years,” he said, “and we don’t talk politics at birthday parties.”

Let me be perfectly, 100% clear on this, for any straight ‘allies’ out there. If you agree with this take in any way, shape, or form, you are not an ally to LGBTQ+ people.

I don’t care what you think you believe and support in your own head. If outside your head you’re perfectly willing to party with literal fucking fascists who are at the highest levels of the administration actively working to strip away the rights and protections of LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people?

THIS IS ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY A REFLECTION OF YOUR VALUES.

THIS IS YOU SAYING THAT YOUR VALUES DON’T INCLUDE TELLING ‘FRIENDS’ THAT THEIR VERY REAL ACTIONS AGAINST MARGINALIZED PEOPLE ARE A DEALBREAKER FOR YOU.

And that 100% is a dealbreaker for me.

I honestly can’t imagine anyone’s still following me who finds my stance here surprising, but if there is, and if you’re even slightly tempted to defend Jackman for this point of view, you can show your ass the door. It’s over there, under the sign that reads FASCISTS AND FASCIST ENABLERS NOT WELCOME.

Because you may not believe you’re a fascist, but if you’re not actively opposed to their inclusion in your circles of social interaction, you are absolutely complicit in enabling them. And people need to say that until you either grow a fucking spine or show your true colors and pick a goddamn side.

THERE IS NO CENTER POINT BETWEEN FASCISM AND ITS OPPOSITION. Yes, I believe in a world with nuance and shades of gray and all that, but as I’ve said before, the fact that those things exist does not mean there are not also areas in which it is all or nothing. People who want everyone not like them to be either wiped out or thoroughly subjugated, and people who don’t want them to succeed in these goals whether because they’re among those targeted or because they wish to be allies to those that are - are absofuckinglutely a binary goddamn equation.

PICK.

SIDE.

And be totally aware that if you’re not DAMN FUCKING CLEAR to the people you interact with what side you’re actually on, people are going to make their own assumptions about which side that is. And most people tend to assume that side is the same side they’re on. The side they believe is innately right and thus the obvious choice for anyone they consider worth interacting with, as well.

And just to be further clear, if you THINK you’re on the side of marginalized people oppressed under the current regime and its supporters, but you don’t do or say shit to make that clear? Any marginalized person who makes the mistake of thinking you’re on their side - and an actual ally - runs the risk of paying for that mistake in very real ways, should there ever come an occasion when they NEED an ally’s help. And the only one around is you, but turns out you can’t be counted on to actually do SHIT to stand up for them. Your empty claims of being an ally might be what gave that person the courage to stand up to an oppressor, taking strength from the support they THOUGHT they had from you, from your presence there at their back. And guess what happens when that oppressor presses their abuse or harassment and that marginalized ‘friend’ of yours turns around to ask for your help....and you’re nowhere to be seen, having run for cover the second shit got real?

While meanwhile, any actual fucking fascist oppressor shitstain is going to see your silence for agreement, and not count you as a potential obstacle to get in their way when targeting a marginalized person with less societal power than them, and thus ‘weaker’ in their eyes. Meaning they’re that much more likely TO act against such a person, without fear of consequence, reprisal or opposition from someone they see as a societal equal. Because they see you there, but they don’t see you being there as you being IN THEIR WAY. But guess what happens if that oppressor sees you there, alongside your marginalized friend, and its clear to them where you stand? That you stand IN THEIR WAY? That they have to first find a way around or through you to get at their real target, that you’re gonna make them WORK for it first? Sometimes, not always, but enough times if you consider every single instance of an oppressor abusing or harassing a marginalized person to be worth defending against....sometimes, that coward fuck is going to back down rather than risk taking on a fight they can’t be sure they’ll win, with too many people standing against them or in their way.

(And white LGBTQ+ people, just because we’re white, don’t fucking think for a second that this doesn’t apply to us standing by and for and in front of any people of color, LGBTQ+ OR straight - wherever they want you to stand to know they have your support - when one of these assholes targets them. We don’t get to feel betrayed by shit like this if we’re gonna turn around and pull a Jackman the second its a person of color under fire).

It’s long past time to put your money where your mouth is, wherever that may be. Own your fucking convictions. Don’t just THINK ‘this is wrong.’ FUCKING SAY IT. Don’t just THINK ‘I don’t agree with what that person said.’ FUCKING TELL THEM. Don’t just THINK ‘that person does not deserve the abuse or harassment being heaped on them.’ FUCKING STAND BY THEM.

But make no mistake....if ANY of us are still here twenty, thirty, forty years from now, and somehow society by and large has made it through this and gained a measure of stability and things are improved enough for marginalized people that we as a society are able to look back on current events and seem united in our horror at how fucked up it all was.....

Before you picture yourself telling younger generations about how awful and horrific and scary a time it was, the way we’ve all heard older generations speak of past atrocities...

Know that any marginalized people who were around now and are still around then, will ABSOLUTELY remember your silence, your lack of visible horror and opposition to the atrocities happening now, while it really matters. Your ‘true’ feelings kept safely hidden until one side had proved victorious and you could feel comfortable agreeing with whatever version of history had been written by whomever had proven the victors.

And I promise you, WE will not be shy about calling you the cowardly fucking hypocrites you were, are, and always will be.

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covid19updater · 3 years ago

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COVID19 Updates: 09/08/2021

RUMINT (US): A friend of mine posted tonight on social media about a friend of hers who had died. The woman was very young, and no cause of death was listed, so my first thought was that it was some sort of tragic accident. I went to the Go Fund Me that was linked, and it turned out she died of Covid. The woman was young (under 30, I think), wore masks, and was fully vaxxed. She left behind two young kids. She was a fit, healthy-looking young woman. I don't know anything about whether there were underlying conditions or not, but her family and friends all seemed quite shocked by her passing. The Go Fund Me was to provide something for her children. Every time I listen to someone like Chris Martenson, or others like him, who say that Delta is actually not as bad as the media makes it sound, I almost become convinced ... until I hear something like this, and it reminds me that this variant is infecting and sometimes killing young, cautious, vaxxed people.

World: Study: Mu variant is more vaccine evading "Mu variant is highly resistant to sera from..[Pfizer]-vaccinated individuals. Direct comparison of different spike proteins revealed that Mu spike is more resistant ..than all other currently recognized variants LINK

World: Op/Ed: Remember: the desensitization to death and suffering that the 1918 flu brought paved the way for fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.

Europe: Notices of Liability for COVID-19 Vaccine Harms and Deaths Served on All Members of the European Parliament LINK

India: New "Pandemic Potential" Brain-Destroying-Virus With 75% Death Rate Spreading In India LINK

US: U.S. COVID update: Many states reporting holiday weekend backlogs - New cases: 303,843 - Average: 154,645 (+19,837) - In hospital: 100,700 (+434) - In ICU: 26,094 (+84) - New deaths: 2,265

Australia: #Australia's 1,721 new #Covid19 cases is the second worst ever total, almost 500 up on last Weds. 1,480 infections in #NSW, 221 in #Victoria while #ACT has the other 20. Today was also 2nd highest daily death toll for 364 days as another 10 fall victim to #Coronavirus

World: Some people have 'superhuman' ability to fight off COVID-19, study finds LINK

Germany: TOP GERMAN PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIAL SAYS IF WE DO NOT VACCINATE MORE PEOPLE, THE FOURTH WAVE OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC COULD HAVE A MASSIVE MOMENTUM THIS FALL

Japan: THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT IS SOLIDIFYING ITS PLANS TO PROLONG THE STATE OF EMERGENCY IN MOST PLACES UNTIL THE END OF SEPTEMBER - NHK

Czech Republic: The Czech Republic on Wednesday recorded 588 new cases of COVID-19, the highest daily tally since May 25, as government officials predict a continued rise in cases;

Europe: EMA: ASTRAZENECA COVID-19 VACCINE PRODUCT INFORMATION WILL BE UPDATED WITH GUILLAIN-BARRÉ SYNDROME (GBS) AS A SIDE EFFECT

Germany: The head of Germany’s CDC, Lothar Wieler, warned of a drastic 4th coronavirus wave this fall as the number of Covid ICU patients, many of them younger, has nearly doubled in the past two weeks. Wieler, who leads the Robert Koch-Institute, urged Germans to get vaccinated.

Ukraine: Ukraine could tighten lockdown restrictions as COVID-19 picture worsens LINK

Idaho: Idaho hospitals begin rationing health care amid COVID-19 surge LINK

Missouri: St. Louis children's hospitals near capacity, and not just from COVID LINK

South Korea: S.Korea planning to live 'more normally' with COVID-19 after October LINK

California: California’s Central Valley overwhelmed by COVID-19 Delta surge LINK

US: Just Say It: The Health Care System Has Collapsed LINK

World: Bad news on #MuVariant—Japanese scientists: "Mu variant is highly resistant to sera from convalescent & [Pfizer]-vaccinated people. Direct comparison of different spike proteins revealed that Mu spike is more resistant…than all other current variants”

Canada: Alberta nurses say government is scaling back its pay cut proposal amid fourth wave of COVID-19 LINK

Kansas: Kansas data doesn’t reflect reality as COVID-19 rips through schools LINK

Vermont: FBI opens criminal probe into 3 troopers over fake Covid-19 vaccination cards LINK

Texas: Texas Hospital Reports 50 Mu COVID Cases As Delta's Dominance Continues LINK

Indiana: Union Hospital emergency rooms are filling up with patients LINK

Mississippi: Nurse walkouts possible statewide as COVID-19 takes a toll on healthcare professionals LINK

US: From Alaska To Idaho And Beyond, Covid Surges Stress Hospital Systems LINK

Hawaii: DOH, HAH COVID efforts give hospitals a couple weeks before reaching “crisis point” DOH Director Elizabeth Char, MD, and HAH President and CEO Hilton Raethel shared a joint presentation to the Committee, noting that Hawaii exceeded its ICU bed capacity as of Friday. LINK

US: COVID Now Leading Cause of Death Among Law Enforcement LINK

Wisconsin: Wisconsin reports more than 1,000 COVID-19 hospital patients for the first time since January LINK

Colorado: Nursing homes face staffing shortages, financial problems as they serve growing need LINK

West Virginia: No ICU beds available: PCH at capacity with COVID-19 patients LINK

Florida: At West Boca Medical Center, 32 Kids Admitted Over Seven Days For COVID LINK

US: 252,000 children test positive for COVID-19 in past week as classes resume LINK

Washington: A Washington county has approved an emergency declaration to bring in a refrigeration trailer for the bodies of COVID-19 victims that have overwhelmed the morgue LINK

World: Why are we seeing more COVID cases in fully vaccinated people? LINK

World: Is Covid here to stay? A survey of more than 100 scientists found a vast majority expect the coronavirus will become endemic LINK

Jamaica: GRIEF, HORROR AND DEATH “They say we are low on oxygen, I am telling you, we are running out of medication too. What we have to be doing is writing prescriptions and giving it to the family to fill because there is this great demand for these products” LINK

RUMINT (US): OK. So now a first for me. TBH, previously I've known no one directly who has died either of the covid19 or the trial vaccination. Now that has changed. 26 year old mum, has child of 9 months, died three days after trial vaccination. Foremost it's a tradgedy for her & close ones.

World: COVID-19 created lots of supply chain problems — and they're nowhere close to being solved LINK

US: Supply chain issues impacting ports in Pacific Northwest LINK

World: Op/Ed: The only thing I seem to recall re. Mu, is all the same people playing that down played Delta down for quite a while too. Perhaps Mu won't succeed. But, it seems very sensible to have the attitude, one will soon.

US: NEW: White House signals new COVID-19 measures coming for unvaccinated Americans LINK

Canada: 814 new cases of #COVID19 announced in B.C., as the rolling average rises slightly as we continue to be in this bumpy short-term plateau. Active cases rise to 5,550, hospitalizations rise to 261, but no new deaths.

Iowa: Iowa DPH confirms 18 cases of COVID-19 mu variant LINK

Macedonia: 15 people have reportedly been killed and more than 20 others injured in a fire at a Covid hospital in North Macedonia - #Covid #hospital #Fire

UK:�� More than 50 cases of the Mu variant have been detected in the UK LINK

World: Ivermectin causes sterilization in 85 percent of men, study finds LINK

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megacircuit9universe · 5 years ago

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Uprising

SAT JUN 06 2020

Since I last wrote, the George Floyd protests that began in Minneapolis, and spread to other major US cities over many nights, has now turned into nothing less than a new civil rights movement, in 2020 going under the banner of, “Black Lives Matter,” which began as a hashtag in 2013 after the shooting of Trayvon Martin... and which was subsequently shouted down by two counter movements, “all lives matter,” and “blue lives matter.”

BLM had inspired some demonstrations in the 20-teens, but remained mostly a social media movement, occasionally getting some mainstream press.

At the time of my last entry, as I said, the protests were about George Floyd, and holding the four officers responsible for his death accountable. And there was progress when all four officers were not only fired, but arrested and charged, with varying degrees of murder or manslaughter.

But because these charges took so long to materialize, the anger of the crowds did not immediately evaporate. Protests continued, and continued to filter down to the smaller towns in every state... even as they grew bigger in Washington DC outside the White House.

Trump actually holed up in the bunker beneath the white house for a night or two, with all the lights off above decks, while men outside worked day and night to build a wall around the compound.

But, he was criticized for this massive act of cowardice in the media, and was given the nick name, “Bunker Boy,” which enraged him.

So... on Monday, June 1st, after giving a blood curdling speech about how all the protesters were basically terrorists, and how, if governors did not dominate them, he’d send in the military to do so for them... he unleashed a small army of law enforcement and paramilitary goons on Lafayette square, in the middle of the afternoon (broad daylight once again), hours before curfew, to brutalize and drive back the crowds so that he could walk across the square to Saint John’s Church for an unplanned and pointless photo op, in which he held up a Bible, weirdly, saying nothing.

Amazingly, that Bible did not burst into flames in his hand... which speaks to Yaweh’s restraint... though word is he did strike two national guardsmen with lightning just tonight.

The peaceful, law abiding protesters were gassed, pepper sprayed, beaten back by officers with shields and batons, and further intimidated not only by a cavalry of officers on horseback, but also by and extremely low hovering army helicopter, which could easily have crashed and burned at such a low elevation with so many obstacles like trees and power lines nearby.

Last entry, I had said that Trump and his junta were too shy to go full dictator, but this act, last Monday, demonstrated to the nation and the world, that, in his mind at least, full dictator is not off the table.

This move, on Trump’s part, was met with shock and horror on all sides, and lead to General Mattis, his former National Security Secretary, who resigned late last year, to publish a scathing op-ed, in which he not only called Trump a threat to the constitution and democracy, but reminded the US military they... need to not be taking unconstitutional orders from this ass hole.

His words were praised and echoed by many on the right, and many more on the left who normally don’t like to agree with Mad Dog Mattis.

Joe Biden’s numbers rose in the election polls, in all swing states, and turned a few solidly red states into swing states... just as Allan Lichtman’s keys would seem to have predicted.

And lastly, Trump’s dictatorial stunt, crystallized the protest movement into the full blown, new civil rights movement that it’s become today. The Black Lives Matter movement is now stronger, more organized, and more determined than ever to fight for systemic change.

It’s more than just George Floyd and four guilty officers now. This is about systemic racism, police brutality, and anti-fascism.

(It’s also secondarily about the wealth gap and the total failure of those in power to keep us all comfortable enough not to bother taking to the streets.)

Rather than backing down, people all over the country are going out in greater numbers... better prepared for the attacks of the police. And armed with their smart phones, videotaping events live, and streaming them to the cloud for the world to see in real time.

They are exposing the fact that most of the fires and property damage, such as broken storefront windows, are being done by the cops themselves... as helped along by white nationalist citizens trying to blend into the crowd to cause mayhem (shades of kristallnacht, but for two weeks and counting).

Much of the looting too, is being done by opportunists who are traveling long distances to exploit the mayhem in local municipalities they’ve never visited before in their lives, much less reside in.

Peaceful protesters are getting much more savvy, not only about exposing these bad players on video, but sussing them out before they can strike. And they’re getting more savvy about protecting themselves, with padded motorcycle jackets, goggles and other measures to mitigate teargas and pepper spray, bluetooth devices, scouts and lookouts to maintain situational awareness.

It’s definitely worth noting here that all the 2nd Amendment nuts, who for decades have justified their right to bear arms citing exactly the scenario we are now seeing, in which the government becomes tyrannical... are nowhere to be found in this confrontation. They, in fact, are siding with the fascists in power... because... racism.

Back to the BLM movement...

BLM has now (thanks to Trump) passed the tipping point at which it can be put down by force. Too many people are involved, and they have too much support, both at home and abroad (78% support domestically, as gauged yesterday).

To put it another way... the effort now required by those in power to quash this movement, is too drastic to be practical.

Why? Well, they are desperately clinging to a stock market bubble right now... which is being inflated by optimistic speculation in the face of all that’s beset the nation... that everything will get back to normal in a year.

Killing protesters, or disappearing them is out of the question... it will only bring more unrest. Confiscating smart phones, in order to quash the videos of police wrongdoing... out of the question, because smart phones are economic tools used to make purchases, view ads, pay bills, etc.

Internet black outs... out of the question, for the same reason.

Anything that threatens to pop that delicate stock market bubble is instant death for Trump and his junta.

And even if they don’t pop that bubble... every day the BLM movement gains more steam... with people out of work, out of money, stuck at home because no progress has been made with virus testing and contact tracing... the junta still moves ever closer to the end of their reign.

Talk now is not only that Biden’s numbers are climbing... but that Republican control of the Senate is also on the chopping block this November.

People have not forgotten who impeached this guy last November... warning us about the danger he posed... and who blocked his removal from office back then, just before Covid19 reared it’s ugly head in China.

Who voted to acquit Trump?.. the same ones who oppose stimulus checks now, and who continue to enable all of the needless suffering and hardship we, as a nation are enduring together in this moment.

Even if these Senators break from Trump... which most are yet unwilling to do... we still remember how they failed us at that critical juncture, when he could have been removed in advance of the national crisis.

We still remember how they brushed aside warnings about how history would remember them... at best, not giving a shit about history... but often with mockery, that such a warning had any teeth at all.

We still remember...

We...

...not just the political junkies who always pay attention... but now the ones who, at the time, had better things to focus on.

The Millennials, who though they’d finally recovered the ground they lost in the Bush years, and were about to try and settle down to own homes and start families.

The Zoomers (or GenZ) just graduating high school, and just starting college, thinking the economic nightmare suffered by their predecessors could not befall them too.

Together, these two youngest generations of voters, who had been the most apathetic, but have now become the most activist... outnumber, by percentage of population, the boomers in their own activist hayday of the 1960s.

And unlike the young boomers of old, who were at odds with some of the Silents, and all of the Greatests... Gens Y and Z have nearly full support of X, and growing support from the aging boomers, who, as of late, have been asked to sacrifice their lives for the economy.

This is a moment in American history like few before it, in which revolution is now pregnant.

But at the time of writing tonight, I still believe it will be a mostly peaceful revolution... sweeping Trump and his junta out of power this November, and establishing some meaningful and lasting reforms in the aftermath of the nightmare they visited upon us, these past four years.

That’s all I have to say about things for a Saturday night.

It’s time for bed.

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nothingman · 8 years ago

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By Danny Sjursen | (Tomdispatch.com) | – –

The United States has already lost — its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there?

At this point, it’s at least reasonable to look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course. Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the kid gloves. Maybe there just weren’t ever enough troops. (Bring back the draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of thousands of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about lots more of them, maybe even a nuke?)

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on — and on and on.

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?

Here our nation stands, 15-plus years after 9/11, engaged militarily in half a dozen countries across the Greater Middle East, with no end in sight. Perhaps a more critical, factual reading of our recent past would illuminate the futility of America’s tragic, ongoing project to somehow “destroy” terrorism in the Muslim world.

The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism. It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace. Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists” shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor. Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us? Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new “medieval” enemies on their own turf. It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have? Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn.

What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East.

Let’s reconsider just two key years for the United States in that region: 1979 and 2003. America’s leadership learned all the wrong “lessons” from those pivotal moments and has intervened there ever since on the basis of some perverse version of them with results that have been little short of disastrous. A more honest narrative of those moments would lead to a far more modest, minimalist approach to a messy and tragic region. The problem is that there seems to be something inherently un-American about entertaining such thoughts.

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and — to make matters worse — Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

The alarmist conventional narrative of these events went like this: the radical mullahs running Iran were irrational zealots with an inexplicable loathing for the American way of life. As if in a preview of 9/11, hearing those chants against “the Great Satan,” Americans promptly began asking with true puzzlement: Why do they hate us? The hostage crisis challenged world peace. Carter had to do something. Worse yet, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented blatant conquest and spotlighted the possibility of Red Army hordes pushing through to Iran en route to the Persian Gulf’s vast oil reserves. It might prove the opening act of the long awaited Soviet scheme for world domination or a possible path to World War III.

Misinformed by such a tale that they repeatedly told themselves, Washington officials then made terrible choices in the Middle East. Let’s start with Iran. They mistook a nationalist revolution and subsequent civil war within Islam for a singular attack on the U.S.A. With little consideration of genuine Iranian gripes about the brutal U.S.-backed dynasty of the Shah or the slightest appreciation for the complexity of that country’s internal dynamics, they created a simple-minded but convenient narrative in which the Iranians posed an existential threat to this country. Little has changed in almost four decades.

Then, though few Americans could locate Afghanistan on a map, most accepted that it was indeed a country of vital strategic interest. Of course, with the opening of their archives, it’s clear enough now that the Soviets never sought the worldwide empire we imagined for them, especially not by 1979. The Soviet leadership was, in fact, divided over the Afghan affair and intervened in Kabul in a spirit more defensive than aggressive. Their desire or even ability to drive towards the Persian Gulf was, at best, a fanciful American notion.

Nonetheless, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were combined into a tale of horror that would lead to the permanent militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Remembered today as a dove-in-chief, in his 1980 State of the Union address President Carter announced a decidedly hawkish new doctrine that would come to bear his name. From then on, he said, the U.S. would consider any threat to Persian Gulf oil supplies a direct threat to this country and American troops would, if necessary, unilaterally intervene to secure the region.

The results will seem painfully familiar today: almost immediately, Washington policymakers began to seek military solutions to virtually every problem in the Middle East. Within a year, the administration of President Ronald Reagan would, for instance, support Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s ruthless invasion of Iran, ignoring his more vicious antics and his proclivity for gassing his own people.

Soon after, in 1983, the military created the United States Central Command (headquarters: Tampa, Florida) with specific responsibility for the Greater Middle East. Its early war plans demonstrated just how wildly out of touch with reality American planners already were by then. Operational blueprints, for instance, focused on defeating Soviet armies in Iran before they could reach the Persian Gulf. Planners imagined U.S. Army divisions crossing Iran, itself in the midst of a major war with Iraq, to face off against a Soviet armored juggernaut (just like the one that was always expected to burst through Europe’s Fulda Gap). That such an assault was never coming, or that the fiercely proud Iranians might object to the militaries of either superpower crossing their territories, figured little in such early plans that were monuments to American arrogance and naïveté.

From there, it was but a few short steps to the permanent “defensive” basing of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or later the stationing of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack. Few asked how such forces in the heart of the Middle East would play on the Arab street or corroborate Islamist narratives of “crusader” imperialism.

Worse yet, in those same years the CIA armed and financed a grab bag of Afghan insurgent groups, most of them extreme Islamists. Eager to turn Afghanistan into a Soviet “Vietnam,” no one in Washington bothered to ask whether such guerrilla outfits conformed to our purported principles or what the rebels would do if they won. Of course, the victorious guerrillas contained foreign fighters and various Arab supporters, including one Osama bin Laden. Eventually, the excesses of the well-armed but morally bankrupt insurgents and warlords in Afghanistan triggered the formation and ascension of the Taliban there, and from one of those guerrilla outfits came a new organization that called itself al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history, and thanks to Chalmers Johnson’s appropriation of a classic CIA term of spy craft, we now know it as blowback.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region. In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few — if any — American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East. Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

Who wouldn’t agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq signified a major turning point both in the history of the Greater Middle East and in our own? Nonetheless, its legacy remains highly contested. The standard narrative goes like this: as the sole remaining superpower on the planet after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, our invincible military organized a swift and convincing defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the first Gulf War. After 9/11, that same military launched an inventive, swift, and triumphant campaign in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden escaped, of course, but his al-Qaeda network was shattered and the Taliban all but destroyed.

Naturally, the threat of Islamic terror was never limited to the Hindu Kush, so Washington “had” to take its fight against terror global. Admittedly, the subsequent conquest of Iraq didn’t exactly turn out as planned and perhaps the Arabs weren’t quite ready for American-style democracy anyway. Still, the U.S. was committed, had shed blood, and had to stay the course, rather than cede momentum to the terrorists. Anything less would have dishonored the venerated dead. Luckily, President George W. Bush found an enlightened new commander, General David Petraeus, who, with his famed “surge,” snatched victory, or at least stability, from the jaws of defeat in Iraq. He had the insurgency all but whipped. Then, just a few years later, “spineless” Barack Obama prematurely pulled American forces out of that country, an act of weakness that led directly to the rise of ISIS and the current nightmare in the region. Only a strong, assertive successor to Obama could right such gross errors.

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the first Gulf War — to George H.W. Bush’s credit — involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991 — conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment — could the U.S. expect such success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

The same faulty assumptions flowed from Afghanistan in 2001. Information technology, Special Forces, CIA dollars (to Afghan warlords), and smart bombs triggered victory with few conventional foot soldiers needed. It seemed a forever formula and influenced both the hasty decision to invade Iraq, and the irresponsibly undersized force structure deployed (not to speak of the complete lack of serious preparation for actually occupying that country). So powerful was the optimism and jingoism of invasion proponents that skeptics were painted as unpatriotic turncoats.

Then things turned ugly fast. This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd — began to battle for power. The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces — Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority — long accustomed to power — into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Furthermore, the invasion played directly into Osama bin Laden’s hands, fueling his narrative of an American “war on Islam.” In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq’s neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.

That David Petraeus’s surge “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth of all. It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington. By then, the Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the capacity for carnage.

That post-surge “calm” was, however, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war. No fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a coherent national whole. Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior to the invasion), never would be eradicated. Its leadership, further radicalized in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an opportunity to win back Sunni fealty.

Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S. military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on peaceful Sunni protests. He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to death in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances. Maliki’s ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.

Islamists, including AQI, also took advantage of events in Syria. Autocrat Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the opening they needed. Of course, the revolt there might never have occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region. In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some of Saddam’s cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned to the newly established “Islamic State” (ISIS) for protection.

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It’s hardly controversial these days to point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos. Toppling Saddam’s brutal regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a century. However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that burned down the old order.

As it turned out, no matter the efforts of the globe’s greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to Iraq. It rarely does. Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing to accept such realities. Think of that as the twenty-first-century American Achilles’ heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S. power. Policy in these years might best be summarized as: “we” have to do something, and military force is the best — perhaps the only — feasible option.

Has it worked? Is anybody, including Americans, safer? Few in power even bother to ask such questions. But the data is there. The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 compared with 11,774 attacks in 2015. That’s right: at best, America’s 15-year “war on terror” failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its actions helped make matters 30 times worse.

Recall the Hippocratic oath: “First do no harm.” And remember Osama bin Laden’s stated goal on 9/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the heart of the Middle East. Mission accomplished!

In today’s world of “alternative facts,” it’s proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data and so avoid thorny questions. Recent events and contemporary political discourse even suggest that the country’s political elites now inhabit a post-factual environment; in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term — “isolationism” — masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they — and their troops — have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

A realistic look at America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest two unsatisfying but vital conclusions. First, false lessons and misbegotten collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today’s regional mess. As a result, it’s long past time to reassess recent history and challenge long-held suppositions. Second, policymakers badly overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires. In all of this, the agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept aside.

So what now? It should be obvious (but probably isn’t in Washington) that it’s well past time for the U.S. to bring its incessant urge to respond militarily to the crisis of the moment under some kind of control. Policymakers should accept realistic limitations on their ability to shape the world to America’s desired image of it.

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion. The result: tragedy — including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention. Result: tragedy — upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees.

So will tough talk and escalated military action finally work this time around as the Trump administration faces off against ISIS? Consider what happens even if the U.S achieves a significant rollback of ISIS. Even if, in conjunction with allied Kurdish or Syrian rebel forces, ISIS’s “capital,” Raqqa, is taken and the so-called caliphate destroyed, the ideology isn’t going away. Many of its fighters are likely to transition back to an insurgency and there will be no end to international terror in ISIS’s name. In the meantime, none of this will have solved the underlying problems of artificial states now at the edge of collapse or beyond, divided ethno-religious groups, and anti-Western nationalist and religious sentiments. All of it begs the question: What if Americans are incapable of helping (at least in a military sense)?

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise — to “Make America Great Again” — conjuring up a mythical era that never was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

In the new Trump era, neither major party seems capable of escaping a shared commitment to the legends rather than the facts of America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East. Both sides remain eerily confident that the answers to contemporary foreign policy woes lie in a mythical version of that past, whether Trump’s imaginary 1950s paradise or Clinton’s fleeting mid-1990s “unipolar moment.”

Both ages are long gone, if they ever really existed at all. Needed is some fresh thinking about our militarized version of foreign policy and just maybe an urge, after all these years, to do so much less. Patriotic fables certainly feel good, but they achieve little. My advice: dare to be discomfited.

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

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brianvan · 7 years ago

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The 2017 Ho Ho Ho / Humbug Index

Spoiler alert: Format change this year mostly.

Trigger warning: grief, complaining

The givens: Carolyn my beloved (+1,000,000) and Zena the cat (+90 - 10 points off for pooping in the tub here an there) and another year of professional busybodiness (+500)

Let’s also get this out of the way: My job took a dark turn in the 4th quarter of the year (-300) but it’s mostly inconvenient, [LONG DELETED STORY HERE] I am sure my bosses mean well & that my follow-ups and escalations will resolve all issues better than sitting-and-waiting politely.

::deep breath::

Sooooo

I don’t want to tell you why this year sucked. At times it didn’t suck, but life is definitely sucking in new and aggressively awful ways lately.

Usually the format of this thing is to go through a bunch of things that I personally witnessed in terms of cultural interaction. Putting aside the fact that all of us have slowed way the fuck down on Tumblr lately, I consider these elements to all take a back seat. Culture moves slower lately anyway, slower because I’m old and everything that’s disposable is definitely not mine anymore, but Get Out (+5) and The Last Jedi (+10) and Bodak Yellow (+5) are all pretty awesome.

The front row of 2017 is occupied by things like disastrously-run democracy, the mass uncloaking of institutional abuse, and the rampant murder of US citizens on both sides of the criminal justice divide. And it’s sad/frustrating that I can’t really tell you that anything that happens abroad really matters to the American psyche, but we all know that to be the case - tragedies in Myanmar, Syria, and wherever else you can dig them up on the news ticker hardly register here because many of us are in a desperate panic at home. I definitely think we should pay more attention to human tragedies abroad, and we should think hard about how we can use our influence & take lessons we’ve learned to help address the problems that cause global trauma. But we’re nowhere near that right now.

We have learned, pretty conclusively, that there is a generation in this country that grew up in the wake of fascist genocidal horror & all they learned from it is that fascism seems like a great cure to the issue that minorities and women and homosexuals are no longer living in the shadows of power. So they’re racist AND authoritarian.

All polls indicate that conservative fascist control of the American republic is… not popular among the young. (Right wing support isn’t non-existent among the young, but everyone Gen-X and younger is pretty demographically left of society’s median.)

The old people don’t care and are not here to debate.

Please don’t be one of those older people who come in here and say “NOT ALL OLD PEOPLE” because 1) I know, and I’m not saying we must skip judging people by individual factors 2) WE ARE ALL TIRED OF THE “NOT ALL ____” ARGUMENTATIVE TROPE

Which points us to what might be some unifying themes of our times:

1) Aside from willful ignorance (e.g. being told that the particulars of systems and process are important & not caring), people are now widely being intellectually dishonest and triggering chaotic & harmful sequences

2) No one has confidence in leadership or authority, and I believe the support being directed toward Trump and his ilk isn’t actually inspired by real confidence but by a general disrespect for politics and the public realm, a sense that blowing everything up means it can’t get any worse than it’s been (even from the people who have been the MAIN BENEFICIARIES OF THE BROKENNESS OF SOCIETY)

3) People really just don’t care to learn how to debate, research, think, or collaborate, and the sense that everyone just has knives out for each other is starting to take over policy & legal discussion (more than it ever has been, although if you are a poor person or otherwise on the wrong end of demographic hate, you have seen these knives for decades) 4) All of society’s sentiments boil down to nostalgia and narcissism, we live in a country where few people really love others openly, there are 900 signs of this (the divorce rate, the child neglect rate, public views about healthcare funding, the mass shooting rate, the renewed power of white supremacism & segregation) but the effect is that everyone feels alone & anxious and everyone is in a downward spiral of emotions and economic stress that capitalism and nostalgia cannot solve. We are not stress-eating our way out of that.

—–

It’s been a pretty trying year for me and the wife, we went through some grief stuff this year, we tend not to talk openly about these things (not long ago it took me forever to write about one of our cats passing away), we’re healthy and fine for the moment, but, honestly, the future is somewhat bleak & we’re struggling to address it.

The parents are of little help, partly because they were never the type to really know what to do & partly because, and I know this and they can dispute it all they want but it’s 100% true, if it doesn’t directly affect them and it doesn’t put me in immediate danger of dying, they simply don’t care. They fall right back into patterns of yearly “traditions”, figurative and literal face time, and glossing over anything that is a difficult truth.

So the real truth is that I’m the adult on my side of the family, I’m not going to get the adult hand-holding support that many of us assume is going to be there if times get tough, I don’t need this to happen a dozen more times to know this. I’ve got to take care of myself (specifically my wife and I have to take care of ourselves) and we’re gonna have to do it with hostile jobs, no assets/savings, and a world that keeps flushing people I care about down the toilet.

I have a lot of hope regardless… as long as I can get out of bed and use the brain that I have (note that I won’t be joining any tackle football leagues anytime soon), I will do the best I can and weather the blows and try to deal with any setbacks as creatively as possible. And I will continue to give where I can, since community and creative service has been one of the consistent things along the way even in the bleakest moments (jail, bankruptcy, nervous breakdown, eviction, breakups, pet death, really terrible slices of pizza in Delaware)

so, -500,000 for the emotional wear during this year and 500,310 Ho Ho Hos altogether. The lesson isn’t that we need to change who controls national politics (though we do) or that we need to purge social media of Nazis (though we do) or that we need more money (I DEFINITELY do) but that we need to take care of each other so that other people’s years are happier. I hope I could make some other people’s years happier, and I give people credit for making my year happier. That, I believe, is what matters when we look back.

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therightnewsnetwork · 8 years ago

Text

How We Got Here

The United States has already lost—its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there?

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on—and on and on.

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and—to make matters worse—Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region. In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few—if any—American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East. Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the first Gulf War—to George H.W. Bush’s credit—involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans—Republicans andDemocrats alike—became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991—conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment—could the U.S. expect such success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

Then things turned ugly fast. This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—began to battle for power. The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces—Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority—long accustomed to power—into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term—“isolationism”—masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they—and their troops—have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion. The result: tragedy—including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention. Result: tragedy—upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees.

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise—to “Make America Great Again”—conjuring up a mythical era that never was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

from http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/how-we-got-here/

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patriotnewsblogger-blog · 8 years ago

Text

How We Got Here

New Post has been published on http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/how-we-got-here/

How We Got Here

The United States has already lost—its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there?

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on—and on and on.

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and—to make matters worse—Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region. In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few—if any—American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East. Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the first Gulf War—to George H.W. Bush’s credit—involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans—Republicans andDemocrats alike—became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991—conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment—could the U.S. expect such success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

Then things turned ugly fast. This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—began to battle for power. The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces—Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority—long accustomed to power—into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term—“isolationism”—masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they—and their troops—have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion. The result: tragedy—including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention. Result: tragedy—upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees.

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise—to “Make America Great Again”—conjuring up a mythical era that never was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/how-we-got-here/ %cats%

#conservative #republican

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