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rolandfontana · 6 years ago

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Americans and Guns: Are the Politics Changing?

Igor Volsky. Photo by Peter Dohan

Igor Volsky learned to tell the difference between what politicians say and what they do when he was growing up in the former Soviet Union. The lesson came back to him forcefully as a teenager exposed to the debates and controversy about gun control in the U.S.

After the mass shootings in San Bernardino, Ca., (2015) and Orlando, Fl., (2016), annoyed by what he called the “risk-averse” approaches taken by politicians, he decided to form Guns Down America, a nonprofit organization aimed at harnessing the national consensus that more regulation can help reduce gun violence. He turned his policy ideas into a forthcoming book as well: Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future with Fewer Guns.

In a conversation with The Crime Report’s Julia Pagnamenta, Volsky explains why he thinks the chances for meaningful gun control have improved, why firearms manufacturers are vulnerable to a concerted campaign, and what he thinks the Founding Fathers might have made of the current debates over the Second Amendment.

The Crime Report: How did you get started in gun control and reduction advocacy?

IGOR VOLSKY: My entrance into the gun movement really started with a Tweet storm after the San Bernardino shooting [December 2015]. That came after a deep frustration that we have lawmakers who say the right thing after a shooting, or at the very least express their “thoughts and prayers” after a shooting, but do not actually do anything to reduce gun deaths. And so when I sat down on the computer the day of the San Bernardino shootings, I saw all of the lawmakers who voted against background checks in the aftermath of the [Sandy Hook school shootings in December 2012], now Tweeting their thoughts and prayers as if they cared about actually doing something to reduce gun deaths, that just made me really angry.

Probably because I came from a background where the gaps between what a politician actually said and what a politician actually does is really wide, and I found that to be the case on this issue.

So [gaining a platform] really brought me into the movement in a real way, and when I got to the table I recognized that there were lots of great organizations that were working on this issue, but they had a scope that was relatively narrow. Their scope was what can we get done in this Congress? What is politically possible in this moment? What incremental change can we secure? And I realized from my work on other issues that there existed a space for an organization that talked about long-term goals, that talked about where do we want to be in 10, 15, 20 years? And for me that point was a future with fewer guns and making guns harder to get. I got to that point by looking at all of the research. I looked at countries around the world and there is unanimity on the point of where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths.

The book is really an effort to reset the conversation. After the [February 2018 Parkland school shooting] there is so much new energy in this movement. There are folks who are coming into the issue, and into politics, fresh, and we as a movement need to meet them where they are. The American public is way ahead of politicians on this issue, and I view it as my role as an advocate to help close the gap between the kinds of incremental reform that politicians are still putting forward and where I think most Americans are.

TCR: Is there a large discrepancy between where politicians stand on gun control and what the American public believes?

VOLSKY: Politicians are naturally risk averse. Whether it is guns, or whatever issue, they use talking points, framing, and messaging that is safe. You saw that same dynamic in marriage equality. In 2007, 2008, the country was clearly in a place where the country was ready to move towards marriage equality, and yet you had a bunch of Democrats running for office, or for the presidency in 2008, who would only go as far domestic or civil unions. They were just afraid that a mythical number of voters would drop out. The reason why I think Obama didn’t do it in 2008, didn’t do it in 2009, was because he was risk averse. The established and conventional wisdom was, you can’t go that far, you will alienate voters.

And we saw in 2012 once the president [Obama] embraced marriage equality, or first Joe Biden, nothing happened. Nobody cared because the public was already there. And I think the same thing is true on the gun issue.

‘Frankly, I think the gun movement [is] where we were on marriage equality in 2007 and 2008.’

[California Senator] Kamala Harris just held a town hall where she talked about background checks; where she talked about banning assault weapons. Those are all good things, we support all of those things, but it is time for lawmakers, for candidates, to meet Americans where they are; to go bolder on this issue because we really as a country have evolved on this issue. Frankly, I think the gun movement [is] where we were on marriage equality in 2007 and 2008; where Americans were in a bolder place than politicians. The purpose of the book and the organization [Guns Down America] is to move our conversation towards that bolder place.

TCR: How did your personal background influence your decision to enter gun reduction advocacy work?

VOLSKY: The reason I work in progressive politics at all is because I grew up in the Soviet Union, where you were told every single day that lawmakers were working for you, and they are making things better for you, and you are all equal/ The reality, the reason why we literally had to flee, first to Israel, and then to America was that being Jewish in the Soviet Union at that time—and I suspect is also to some degree true today in Russia—was very difficult. You were locked out of opportunities, you couldn’t go to colleges, you couldn’t get good jobs just because you were Jewish.

From a very early age [I was exposed to] the gap between what lawmakers actually say and what they do in reality. And this issue followed me to America, and so when I sat down on Dec. 2, 2015 [San Bernardino shooting] and saw the hypocrisy of “thoughts and prayers,” I [realized] I had honestly seen it before, and in that moment it really sparked an anger inside of me that I think goes back to those roots.

TCR: You write in the book that the Founding Fathers would have embraced Guns Down’s policies. Can you put this debate into historical perspective?

VOLSKY: The history here is really important. The fact that during the drafting of the Constitution and the drafting of the [Second] Amendment there was no argument about an absolute right to own a firearm, and to the extent that it was discussed, their understanding of what it meant to own a firearm really extended to the militia, not to the individual. And this notion of an individual right to own a firearm, which the Supreme Court would then find many years later in 2008 in the Heller case [District of Columbia v. Heller], that wasn’t something that we birthed in the beginning of our nation.

That is really something that came out following the revolt within the National Rifle Association (NRA) leadership in 1977, and it came out of a multi-million dollar propaganda campaign on behalf of the NRA and the really successful work they were able to do in the legal profession through the states to build and create a new understanding of what the Second Amendment meant.

The argument that I make is that the Founding Fathers would be shocked to learn that the Second Amendment actually extended individual rights to own and have a firearm. That is certainly not the way they talked about it; that’s not the way they wrote about it; that wasn’t the debate at the time. It really evolved into that understanding as a result of a very powerful gun lobby and that of course has created a standstill in our politics and has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

TCR: You cite research showing that Americans make up five percent of the global population, yet they make-up approximately half of the world’s civilian gun owners. Are these striking figures part of an historical continuum or did a specific event or political era trigger mass gun ownership?

VOLSKY: Americans have long had a place in their culture for guns. This didn’t make it into the final book, but it certainly started as America began to expand West. Guns were used for all kinds of purposes, to clear the land of indigenous people. That was also the case during colonial days when guns were used to enslave people and exert a degree of power. That’s just the history of guns in America. And you certainly move into what was happening during the time of the Martin Luther King assassination [April 1968], and the John F. Kennedy assassination [November 1963], and the rise of urban unrest, and how certain parts of the population responded to that with gun ownership.

What I find more interesting is the change in the National Rifle Association (NRA) that really occurred in the latter end of the 1970s. There was new leadership at the time, and with it came this notion that any kind of gun control violates the Second Amendment. That the right within the Second Amendment is far broader than past NRA leaders, than the Supreme Court, had argued, and that’s really in many ways the starting point of gun fundamentalism that said you cannot regulate my ability to have a gun. That my freedom to have a gun for all intent of purposes is absolute. That’s an idea that the NRA birthed in the late 1970s, and that’s an idea they spent millions of dollars propagating.

So, whereas before Americans had guns, [they] also understood that those guns could be controlled for the interest of public safety. You actually saw that in the Wild West days, where many of those towns actually had very strict gun control. You saw that in the way the NRA publicly thought about guns in the early part of the 1900s; that all changed in the 1970s. So part of the argument I make is that the modern notion from gun enthusiasts that the Second Amendment is absolute, and that their right to own any kind of gun could bear almost no restriction, that’s a pure invention.

The NRA invented that for two reasons: one is to sell memberships, and two is to help the gun industry sell more guns.

TCR: You write that the NRA is powerful not only because it shapes gun policy, but also because it has built a social community and identity.

VOLSKY: The social construct piece, the social identity of the gun owner was probably the most interesting part for me as I began researching and writing the book. It was important for me to understand: why is it that gun owners are so much more likely to call their members of Congress? [Why] are [they] so much more likely to be plugged into the advocacy on their side of the issue? The NRA doesn’t make arguments around facts and figures, they make arguments around what it means for an individual to own a firearm and what kind of individual that is.

In their construct, when you own a gun, you are a great patriot, you are somebody who is living the spirit and the ideals of our Founding Fathers, and the very core of what it means to be an American. That’s how they structure all of their arguments. If you, as a gun owner, are the quintessential American who has all the values for freedom and democracy, then the opposition is the exact opposite of that.

They are building a set of values that goes into social issues. So you are more likely to have certain views on abortion, certain views of LGBTQ rights, certain economic views. It really is an entryway for you to construct an entire worldview that everyone in your community shares. That’s really the power they were able to tap into.

The gun control movement in contrast argues in a very different way. It argues through facts and figures, and through logic. As a result, it doesn’t have the same kind of emotional resonance as the other side.

TCR: You describe how common and routine it has become for schools to engage in active shooter training. How have these shootings transformed education in this country, and the training’s psychological effects on students?

VOLSKY: I am 33. I have never undergone a lock-down drill in school. The first shooting I vividly remember is the Columbine shooting on April 20th, 1999. I was in homeroom, we heard about it, we talked about it. [But] there wasn’t any suggestion that now we are going to change all the policies, that we’re going to do active shooting drills. As I point out in the book, at that point when I was in school, the percentage of public schools that had locked down drills was relatively low. That really changed after the Newtown shooting.

It changed after [Sandy Hook] because we had so many more mass shootings, because the industry had more time to advertise their military style weapons to young people, and they do that deliberately because they want an in into that market. As a result, young people are really on the front lines of our broken gun laws, and the fact is that we, as a country, have made a decision to basically let the gun industry do whatever it wants.

When I went to the March for Our Lives [March 2018] here in D.C., I talked to a lot of students and a lot of teachers about what it meant to be in a lock-down drill. It really fell into two different camps. One camp was that it was a really traumatic experience. It’s really scary, but what’s increasingly been happening—and this is both in the anecdotes I heard, but it’s also chronicled in David and Laura Hogg’s book [#NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line], and also in the movie, The Eighth Grade—is that it’s become so ubiquitous that it is now treated as a joke. This is just another thing. Even in the Parkland shooting, Laura and David Hogg talk about how in the actual shooting, when it was actually happening, a whole bunch of kids thought it was just a joke.

‘We’re more concerned about stuff coming out of guns, rather than making sure guns don’t get into the schools.’

On top of that, you have different companies that are trying to profit from it. Having all sorts of backpacks that are bullet-proof, different vests that are bullet-proof. And so we’re in this place where we are putting our kids in danger, and we’re somehow more concerned about how to protect them from the stuff that is coming out of the guns, rather than making sure that guns don’t get into the schools, and into the movie theaters, and into the malls in the first place.

TCR: What role does American media coverage have in shaping the conversation around gun violence?

VOLSKY: What I think is important to recognize is when I started writing the book in August 2016, the movement itself was different, and the way Americans themselves related to the issue was different. Before Parkland you would walk into rooms with movement leaders, or you would walk into just general conversation, and there was a great divide between the way people would talk about mass shootings and the way people talked about everyday gun violence that plagues a lot of our urban communities. Mass shootings were always seen as a big problem that we have to solve, while everyday gun violence was barely mentioned.

As a result of the Parkland movement, and the very smart way that the leaders of that movement weaved in and connected every day gun violence to mass shootings, I think both the movement and Americans at large see the two as intertwined. As a result, I think the media is really catching up, and in many ways, closing the gap. Certainly more work still needs to be done.

In the book, I discuss to some degree about the great community-based violence intervention programs that are running in cities across the country, like Cease Fire, and Cure Violence, and others that really changed community norms to make sure that people don’t pick up the guns in the first place. And there really is a greater recognition of that both within the general public and our elected leaders. I think we were able to make significant progress on that front.

TCR: What do you think of sociologist Zeynep Tufekci’s warning in a 2012 piece in the Atlantic in which she cautions newspapers and the media against printing “detailed information about the killer and his methods” because it possibly generates a copy-cat effect?

VOLSKY: In all of my work, and certainly in the book, with the exception of the Australian chapter, I don’t talk about the perpetrators. I don’t even frankly know their names because I don’t want to glorify the perpetrators and the killers.

More broadly, there is research, you are citing some of it, into the notion that the perpetrators of mass shootings are not necessarily copying other shooters. Some of them certainly are, and some of them have admitted to it. But the other factor here is that they have a fantasy of being in a shoot-out with police, of attracting the kind of attention that these acts generate, and that’s part of the calculus of committing the crime. I have no interest in feeding into that.

TCR: In certain European countries, such as Great Britain, the vast majority of law enforcement personnel don’t carry guns. Do you think that weaponizing our law enforcement contributes to perpetuating violence in our society?

VOLSKY: Research on this shows we have over 393 million guns in circulation and that in the states with higher rates of gun ownership, the police are three times more likely to die than in states with lower gun ownership. It’s also true the opposite way. You are more likely to die at the hands of police if you live in an area with higher rates of gun ownership. That suggests our rate of gun ownership in the United States puts both us and law enforcement officials at risk. It’s also a fact that law enforcement is not immune from this shoot-first, ask-questions-second culture that the NRA perpetuates. All of these are factors that contribute to the problem.

Can we move to a place where law enforcement officials don’t carry firearms? I’ll just say that in a country with 393 million guns that’s a challenge, a great challenge. I think the policing aspect and police brutality is something that the gun control movement hasn’t really grappled with. But it is something that they are stepping into and recognizing that they are part of the same general problem that we are all trying to solve. I fully recognize that it is incredibly complex, but that our ubiquity of firearms is certainly a contributing factor.

TCR: Please describe Guns Down proposals, such as the New Second Amendment Compact.

VOLSKY: The New Second Amendment Compact is [intended to] balance our unbalanced approach to firearms, and to propose a series of proposals that will help get us to a long-term goal of building a future with fewer guns. It’s basically divided into three different buckets.

The first bucket is cracking down on the gun industry. That’s significant because the industry is highly unregulated, and made a business decision in the late 1980s, early 1990s to make firearms of increased lethality, so we’re in a situation where people are dying from gunshot wounds that they would otherwise be surviving because the industry needs to market a new, more powerful weapon. That’s a huge problem and we really need to regulate the industry in a serious way. I propose in the book that the Consumer Safety Board regulate these firearms. We really have to start with the big fish and that’s the industry.

Bucket two is making it significantly harder to get [guns]. I write in the book about all of the latest science that shows that background checks only work in the context of a larger licensing system where it takes a lot longer between when you want the gun and when you actually get a gun. When the checks you have to go through, and the hoops you have to jump through, are far more extensive, we know that works in reducing gun deaths, both suicide and gun crimes. Both domestically and internationally.

The final bucket is an effort to deal with and reduce deaths in urban environments. That’s really about funding community based programs that we know work in changing behaviors and ensuring that people deal with offenses or fights or disagreements in a way that does not include firearms.

TCR: Let’s go back to your first bucket. In the debate around gun violence reduction and control the focus is on gun owners, but in your view transformation hinges on a top-down approach that holds big industries, such as gun manufacturers, accountable.

VOLSKY: Yeah, the top down approach is incredibly important. Part of the reason why we’re in this cycle is because the industry and the lobbies changed the conversation around the Second Amendment, around guns, and these industries pumped much more powerful weapons into our communities and they have not been held accountable.

So the group I run, Guns Down America, is really focused on weakening the industry. The other reason why going after the industry and the lobby is so important is because a lot of times the solutions we talk about are focused on criminalizing the gun owner. I spend some time in the book talking about whatever our solution is we can’t go down the route of criminalizing the gun owner, which historically has disproportionately impacted communities of color, while at the same time giving the industry and the lobby a pass. We can’t stand for that, we can’t make the same mistakes we’ve made in the past. That’s part of the reason why I’ve been emphasizing the industry over the user end.

See also, National Police Foundation report: “Does a Code of Silence Among Students, Parents Abet School Shootings?”

Julia Pagnamenta is a contributing writer to The Crime Report. Readers’ comments are welcome.

Americans and Guns: Are the Politics Changing? syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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newstfionline · 8 years ago

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The Honeymoon of the Generals

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, April 23, 2017

MOAB sounds more like an incestuous, war-torn biblical kingdom than the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, aka “the mother of all bombs.” Still, give Donald Trump credit. Only the really, really big bombs, whether North Korean nukes or those 21,600 pounds of MOAB, truly get his attention. He wasn’t even involved in the decision to drop the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal for the first time in war, but his generals--“we have the best military people on Earth”--already know the man they work for, and the bigger, flashier, more explosive, and winninger, the better.

It was undoubtedly the awesome look of that first MOAB going off in grainy black and white on Fox News, rather than in Afghanistan, that appealed to the president. Just as he was visibly thrilled by all those picturesque Tomahawk cruise missiles, the equivalent of nearly three MOABS, whooshing from the decks of U.S. destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean and heading, like so many fabulous fireworks, toward a Syrian airfield--or was it actually an Iraqi one? “We’ve just fired 59 missiles,” he said, “all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable, from, you know, hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing… It’s so incredible. It’s brilliant. It’s genius. Our technology, our equipment, is better than anybody by a factor of five.”

Call it thrilling. Call it a blast. Call it escalation. Or just call it the age of Trump. (“If you look at what’s happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what’s happened over the past eight years, you’ll see there’s a tremendous difference, tremendous difference,” he commented, adding about MOAB, “This was another very, very successful mission.”)

Anyway, here we are and, as so many of his critics have pointed out, the plaudits have been pouring in from all the usual media and political suspects for a president with big enough… well, hands, to make war impressively. In our world, this is what now passes for “presidential.” Consider that praise the media version of so many Tomahawk missiles pointing us toward what the escalation of America’s never-ending wars will mean to Trump’s presidency.

These days, from Syria to Afghanistan, the Koreas to Somalia, Yemen to Iraq, it’s easy enough to see Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump as something new under the sun. (It has a different ring to it when the commander in chief says, “You’re fired!”) That missile strike in Syria was a first (Obama didn’t dare); the MOAB in Afghanistan was a breakthrough; the drone strikes in Yemen soon after he took office were an absolute record! As for those regular Army troops heading for Somalia, that hasn’t happened in 24 years! Civilian casualties in the region: rising impressively!

Call it mission creep on steroids. At the very least, it seems like evidence that the man who, as a presidential candidate, swore he’d “bomb the s--t” out of ISIS and let the U.S. military win again is doing just that. (As he also said on the campaign trail with appropriately placed air punches, “You gotta knock the hell out of them! Boom! Boom! Boom!”)

He’s appointed generals to crucial posts in his administration, lifted restraints on how his commanders in the field can act (hence those soaring civilian casualty figures), let them send more military personnel into Iraq, Syria, and the region generally, taken the constraints off the CIA’s drone assassination campaigns, and dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group somewhat indirectly to the waters off the Koreas (with a strike force of tweets and threats accompanying it).

And there’s obviously more to come: potentially many more troops, even an army of them, for Syria; a possible mini-surge of troops into Afghanistan (that MOAB strike may have been a canny signal from a U.S. commander “seeking to showcase Afghanistan’s myriad threats” to a president paying no attention); a heightened air campaign in Somalia; and that’s just to start what will surely be a far longer list in a presidency in which, whether or not infrastructure is ever successfully rebuilt in America, the infrastructure of the military-industrial complex will continue to expand.

Above all, President Trump did one thing decisively. He empowered a set of generals or retired generals--James “Mad Dog” Mattis as secretary of defense, H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security--men already deeply implicated in America’s failing wars across the Greater Middle East. Not being a details guy himself, he’s then left them to do their damnedest. “What I do is I authorize my military,” he told reporters recently. “We have given them total authorization and that’s what they’re doing and, frankly, that’s why they’ve been so successful lately.”

As the 100-day mark of his presidency approaches, there’s been no serious reassessment of America’s endless wars or how to fight them (no less end them). Instead, there’s been a recommitment to doing more of the familiar, more of what hasn’t worked over the last decade and a half. No one should be surprised by this, given the cast of characters--men who held command posts in those unsuccessful wars and are clearly incapable of thinking about them in other terms than the ones that have been indelibly engrained in the brains of the U.S. military high command since soon after 9/11.

That new ruling reality of our American world should, in turn, offer a hint about the nature of Donald Trump’s presidency. It should be a reminder that as little as he may resemble anyone we’ve ever seen in the White House before, he’s anything but an anomaly of history. Quite the opposite. Like those generals, he’s a logical endpoint to a grim process.

When it comes to war and the U.S. military, none of what’s happened would have been conceivable without the two previous presidencies. None of it would have been possible without Congress’s willingness to pump endless piles of money into the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex in the post-9/11 years; without the building up of the national security state and its 17 (yes, 17!) major intelligence outfits into an unofficial fourth branch of government; without the institutionalization of war as a permanent (yet strangely distant) feature of American life and of wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa that evidently can’t be won or lost but only carried on into eternity. None of this would have been possible without the growing militarization of this country, including of police forces increasingly equipped with weaponry off America’s distant battlefields and filled with veterans of those same wars; without a media rife with retired generals and other former commanders narrating and commenting on the acts of their successors and protégés; and without a political class of Washington pundits and politicians taught to revere that military.

In other words, however original Donald Trump may look, he’s the curious culmination of old news and a changing country. Given his bravado and braggadocio, it’s easy to forget the kinds of militarized extremity that preceded him.

After all, it wasn’t Donald Trump who had the hubris, in the wake of 9/11, to declare a “Global War on Terror” against 60 countries (the “swamp” of that moment). It wasn’t Donald Trump who manufactured false intelligence on the weapons of mass destruction Iraq’s Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed or produced bogus claims about that autocrat’s connections to al-Qaeda, and then used both to lead the United States into a war on and occupation of that country. It wasn’t Donald Trump who invaded Iraq (whether he was for or against that invasion at the time). It wasn’t Donald Trump who donned a flight suit and landed on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego to personally declare that hostilities were at an end in Iraq just as they were truly beginning, and to do so under an inane “Mission Accomplished” banner prepared by the White House.

It wasn’t Donald Trump who ordered the CIA to kidnap terror suspects (including totally innocent individuals) off the streets of global cities as well as from the backlands of the planet and transport them to foreign prisons or CIA “black sites” where they could be tortured. It wasn’t Donald Trump who caused one terror suspect to experience the sensation of drowning 83 times in a single month (even if he was inspired by such reports to claim that he would bring torture back as president).

It wasn’t Donald Trump who spent eight years in the Oval Office presiding over a global “kill list,” running “Terror Tuesday” meetings, and personally helping choose individuals around the world for the CIA to assassinate using what, in essence, was the president’s own private drone force, while being praised (or criticized) for his “caution.”

It wasn’t Donald Trump who presided over the creation of a secret military of 70,000 elite troops cossetted inside the larger military, special-ops personnel who, in recent years, have been dispatched on missions to a large majority of the countries on the planet without the knowledge, no less the consent, of the American people. Nor was it Donald Trump who managed to lift the Pentagon budget to $600 billion and the overall national security budget to something like a trillion dollars or more, even as America’s civilian infrastructure aged and buckled.

It wasn’t Donald Trump who lost an estimated $60 billion to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan, or who decided to build highways to nowhere and a gas station in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan. It wasn’t Donald Trump who sent in the warrior corporations to squander more in that single country than was spent on the post-World War II Marshall Plan to put all of Western Europe back on its feet. Nor did he instruct the U.S. military to dump at least $25 billion into rebuilding, retraining, and rearming an Iraqi army that would collapse in 2014 in the face of a relatively small number of ISIS militants, or at least $65 billion into an Afghan army that would turn out to be filled with ghost soldiers.

In its history, the United States has engaged in quite a remarkable range of wars and conflicts. Nonetheless, in the last 15 years, forever war has been institutionalized as a feature of everyday life in Washington, which, in turn, has been transformed into a permanent war capital. When Donald Trump won the presidency and inherited those wars and that capital, there was, in a sense, no one left in the remarkably bankrupt political universe of Washington but those generals.

Here’s the problem, though. America’s forever wars have now been pursued by these generals and others like them for more than 15 years across a vast swath of the planet--from Pakistan to Libya (and ever deeper into Africa)--and the chaos of failing states, growing conflicts, and spreading terror movements has been the result. There’s no reason to believe that further military action will, a decade and a half later, produce more positive results.

#mo abudu #Trump administration #US generals #US military #US wars #military intervention

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