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Tuesday, November 28, 2017

What If? An Alternative Strategy for Sept.12, 2001















The attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001. "Just about every Bush-era policy that followed 9/11 was an unqualified disaster," writes Sjursen. What should we have done instead? (Photo: Getty)


A generation born after 9/11 will vote in the next presidential election.  They’ve never known peace.  Will they even bother to demand it?


By Danny Sjursen
Tom Dispatch

“Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.” -- Thucydides

Nov 17, 2017 - You’ve heard the platitude that hindsight is 20/20. It’s true enough and, though I’ve been a regular skeptic about what policymakers used to call the Global War on Terror, it’s always easier to poke holes in the past than to say what you would have done. My conservative father was the first to ask me what exactly I would have suggested on September 12, 2001, and he’s pressed me to write this article for years. The supposed rub is this: under the pressure of that attack and the burden of presidential responsibility, even “liberals” -- like me, I guess -- would have made much the same decisions as George W. Bush and company.

Many readers may cringe at the thought, but former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has to be taken seriously when she suggests that anyone in the White House on 9/11 would inevitably have seen the world through the lens of the Bush administration.  I’ve long argued that just about every Bush-era policy that followed 9/11 was an unqualified disaster.  Nevertheless, it remains important to ponder the weight piled upon a president in the wake of unprecedented terror attacks.  What would you have done?  What follows is my best crack at that thorny question, 16 years after the fact, and with the accumulated experiences of combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Taking It Personally

9/11 was an intimate affront to me.  It hit home hard.  I watched those towers in my hometown burn on televisions I could glimpse from my plebe (freshman) boxing class at West Point.  My father worked across Church Street from Manhattan’s World Trade Center.  Only hours later did I learn that he’d safely escaped on the last ferryboat to Staten Island.  Two uncles -- both New York City firemen -- hopelessly dug for comrades in the rubble for weeks.  Stephen, the elder of the two, identified the body of his best friend, Captain Marty Egan, just days after the attacks. 

In blue-collar Staten Island neighborhoods like mine, everyone seemed to work for the city: cops, firemen, corrections officers, garbage men, transit workers.  I knew several of each.  My mother spent months attending wakes and funerals.  Suddenly, tons of streets on the Island were being renamed for dead police and firefighters, some of whom I knew personally.  Me, I continued to plod along through the typically trying life of a new cadet at West Point.

It’s embarrassing now to look back at my own immaturity.  I listened in as senior cadets broke the news of war to girlfriends and fiancĂ©es, enviously hanging on every word.  If only I, too, could live out the war drama I’d always longed for.  Less than two years later, I found myself drunk with another uncle -- and firefighter -- in a New York pub on St. Patrick’s Day.  This was back when an Army T-shirt or a fireman’s uniform meant a night of free drinks in that post-9/11 city.  I watched the television screen covetously as President Bush delivered a final, 48-hour ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.  I inhaled, wished for a long war, and gazed at the young, attractive lead singer of the band performing in that pub.  She was wearing a patron’s tied-up New York Fire Department uniform blouse with a matching cap cocked to the side.  It was meant to be sexy and oh-so-paramilitary.  It might seem unbelievable now, but that was still my -- and largely our -- world on March 17, 2003.

By the time I got my “chance” to join America’s war on terror, in October 2006, Baghdad was collapsing into chaos as civil war raged and U.S. deaths were topping 100 per month.  This second lieutenant still hoped for glory, even as the war’s purpose was already slipping ever further away.  I never found it (glory, that is).  Not in Iraq or, years later, in Afghanistan.  Sixteen years and two months on from 9/11, I’m a changed man, inhabiting a forever altered reality.  Two wars, two marriages, and so many experiences later, the tragedy and the mistakes seem so obvious.  Perhaps we should have known all along.  But most didn’t.

How to Lose A War (Hint: Fight It!)

From the beginning, the rhetoric, at least, was over the top.  Three days after those towers tumbled, President George W. Bush framed the incredible scope of what he’d instantly taken to calling a “war.”  As he told the crowd at a Washington national prayer service, “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”  From the first, it seemed evident to the president: America’s target wasn’t anything as modest as the al-Qaeda terrorist network, but rather evil itself.  Looking back, this was undoubtedly the original sin.  Call something -- in this case, the response to the acts of a small jihadist group -- a “war” and sooner or later everyone begins acting like warriors. 

Within 24 hours of the attacks, the potential target list was already expanding beyond Osama bin Laden and his modest set of followers.  On September 12th, President Bush commanded his national counterterror coordinator, Richard Clarke, to “see if Saddam did this... look into Iraq, Saddam.”  That night, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the president and the entire cabinet, “You know, we’ve got to do Iraq... There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan... We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong...” 

Nonetheless, Afghanistan -- and its Taliban rulers -- became the first military target.  Bombs were dropped and commandos infiltrated. CIA spooks distributed briefcases of cash to allied warlords and eventually city after city fell.  Sure, Osama bin Laden escaped and many of the Taliban’s foot soldiers simply faded away, but it was still one hell of a lightning campaign.  Expected to be brief, it was given the bold name Operation Enduring Freedom and, to listen to the rhetoric of the day, it revolutionized warfare.  Only it didn’t, of course.  Instead, the focus was soon lost, other priorities (Iraq!) sucked the resources away, venal warlords reigned, an insurgency developed, and... and 16 years later, American troop levels are once again increasing there.

Monday, November 20, 2017

The Trump Doctrine: Making Nuclear Weapons Usable Again

















By Michael T. Klare
TomDispatch

Nov 19, 2017 - Maybe you thought America’s nuclear arsenal, with its thousands of city-busting, potentially civilization-destroying thermonuclear warheads, was plenty big enough to deter any imaginable adversary from attacking the U.S. with nukes of their own. Well, it turns out you were wrong.

The Pentagon has been fretting that the arsenal is insufficiently intimidating.  After all -- so the argument goes -- it’s filled with old (possibly unreliable) weapons of such catastrophically destructive power that maybe, just maybe, even President Trump might be reluctant to use them if an enemy employed smaller, less catastrophic nukes on some future battlefield.  Accordingly, U.S. war planners and weapons manufacturers have set out to make that arsenal more “usable” in order to give the president additional nuclear “options” on any future battlefield.  (If you’re not already feeling a little tingle of anxiety at this point, you should be.)  While it’s claimed that this will make such assaults less likely, it’s all too easy to imagine how such new armaments and launch plans could actually increase the risk of an early resort to nuclear weaponry in a moment of conflict, followed by calamitous escalation.

That President Trump would be all-in on making the American nuclear arsenal more usable should come as no surprise, given his obvious infatuation [1] with displays of overwhelming military strength.  (He was thrilled [2] when, last April, one of his generals ordered, for the first time, the most powerful nonnuclear weapon the U.S. possesses dropped [3] in Afghanistan.)  Under existing nuclear doctrine, as imagined by the Obama administration back in 2010, this country was to use nuclear weapons [4] only “in extreme circumstances” to defend the vital interests of the country or of its allies.  Prohibited was the possibility of using them as a political instrument to bludgeon weaker countries into line.  However, for Donald Trump, a man who has already threatened [5] to unleash on North Korea “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” such an approach is proving far too restrictive. He and his advisers, it seems, want nukes that can be employed at any potential level of great-power conflict or brandished as the apocalyptic equivalent of a giant club to intimidate lesser rivals.

Making the U.S. arsenal more usable requires two kinds of changes in nuclear policy: altering existing doctrine to eliminate conceptional restraints on how such weapons may be deployed in wartime and authorizing the development and production of new generations of nuclear munitions capable, among other things, of tactical battlefield strikes.  All of this is expected to be incorporated into the administration’s first nuclear posture review (NPR), to be released by the end of this year or early in 2018.

Its exact contents won’t be known until then -- and even then, the American public will only gain access to the most limited version of a largely classified document.  Still, some of the NPR’s features are already obvious from comments made by the president and his top generals.  And one thing is clear: restraints on the use of such weaponry in the face of a possible weapon of mass destruction of any sort, no matter its level of destructiveness, will be eliminated and the planet’s most powerful nuclear arsenal will be made ever more so. 

Altering the Nuclear Mindset

The strategic guidance provided by the administration’s new NPR is likely to have far-reaching consequences.  As John Wolfsthal, former National Security Council director for arms control and nonproliferation, put it [6] in a recent issue of Arms Control Today, the document will affect “how the United States, its president, and its nuclear capabilities are seen by allies and adversaries alike.  More importantly, the review establishes a guide for decisions that underpin the management, maintenance, and modernization of the nuclear arsenal and influences how Congress views and funds the nuclear forces.”

With this in mind, consider the guidance [7] provided by that Obama-era nuclear posture review.  Released at a moment when the White House was eager to restore America’s global prestige in the wake of George W. Bush’s widely condemned invasion of Iraq and just six months after the president had won [8] the Nobel Prize for his stated determination to abolish such weaponry, it made nonproliferation the top priority.  In the process, it downplayed the utility of nuclear weapons under just about any circumstances on just about any imaginable battlefield.  Its principal objective, it claimed, was to reduce “the role of U.S. nuclear weapons in U.S. national security.”

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Explained: Alt-right, Alt-light and US Militias

 














A white supremacist wearing symbols of the Traditionalist Worker Party bangs marches in Charlottesville on August 12 [File: Joshua Roberts/Reuters]

By Al-Jazeera News

Oct 13, 2017 -With the rising prominence of groups such as the alt-right throughout US President Donald Trump's campaign and election, differentiating between the various currents that comprise the American far right has become challenging.


Media outlets and political commentators have struggled to define the parameters, often inaccurately labelling high-profile far-right figures as part of the alt-right.

Al Jazeera has broken down some of the factions of the American far right, explaining their similarities and differences. 


Alt-right


The alt-right is a loosely knit coalition of far-right groups that includes populists, white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis. Many alt-rightists promote various forms of white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

The term "alt-right" was first coined by US white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2008 to provide an alternative to the neoconservative politics that dominated the Republican Party establishment in recent decades.

Shortly after Trump's November 2016 victory in the presidential elections, the movement became a household name in the US when Spencer led an audience in chants as they performed Nazi-like salutes. Spencer roared: "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!"
Richard Spencer's appearance at Texas A&M University in December prompted counter-protests.


The movement promotes what it calls "white identitarianism", a worldview that advocates European racial and cultural hegemony. Alt-rightists often cite racial science as vindication for their views.

Researchers and experts note that sexism is as integral to the alt-right as racism, pointing out that there are few females among the cadres of the movement. One exception is Brittany Pettibone, a contributor at AltRight.com and Red Ice, a Sweden-based white nationalist video and podcast platform.

Among the groups involved in the movement are: Spencer's think tank, the National Policy Institute; the National Socialist Movement; the neo-Confederate League of the South; Identity Evropa, the white supremacist group and, among others, the neo-Nazi organisation Vanguard America.

Online organising made the alt-right's success possible.

The key websites are: AltRight.com; the Occidental Dissent blog; the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website; Radix Journal; the Counter-Currents website and the Right Stuff blog, among others.

The alt-right has many connections to groups in Europe, many of which predate the movement.

Some prominent figures within the alt-right are: Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin; the Right Stuff's Mike Peinovich; Identity Evropa's Nathan Damigo; former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; Traditional Worker Party's Matthew Heimbach and Swedish businessman Daniel

The alt-light is a term used to describe a comparably moderate group of far-right figures, organisations and websites.

Unlike the alt-right's call for a white ethnostate, the alt-light promotes a hardline version of American nationalism and often eschews the openly racist and white supremacist politics advocated by the alt-right. Much of the alt-light's positions are predicated on support for President Trump.

The most prominent website on the alt-light is Breitbart News, a far-right blog headed by Steve Bannon, who briefly served as Trump's top strategist. Another increasingly important alt-light publication is Rebel Media, a Canada-based website founded by right-wing media figure Ezra Levant.

Some of the most important personalities within the alt-light include: provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos; media personality Gavin McInnes; journalist and activist Lauren Southern; social media figure Mike Cernovich; media personality Alex Jones and conspiracy theorist Jack Prosobiec.

Yiannopoulous used to be the technology editor at Breitbart News, but he was fired after public uproar over comments he made defending pedophilia. Recently, he has hosted anti-Muslim rallies and "free speech" events. He often verbally attacks immigrants, trans people and feminists.

McInnes co-founded Vice Media and later left the company in 2008. Most recently, he hosted a Rebel Media online programme. He also founded the Proud Boys, a far-right group that describes itself as "Western chauvinist" and opposes feminism. The Proud Boys often brag about seeking out physical confrontations with anti-fascists, known as Antifa.

There are also several conspiracy theory websites that fall within the sphere of the alt-light. The most well-known is InfoWars, hosted by Alex Jones. In 2015, Trump, who was a presidential candidate at the time, appeared on InfoWars and was interviewed by Jones.

Many alt-light groups argue against the alt-right, while others have participated in the same rallies and events as alt-rightists.


Militia groups

Most militia organisations describe themselves as "patriot" groups. The largest and most active of the militia groups are the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. Member of these groups often attend rallies armed with assault rifles and wearing bullet proof vests.

While it is difficult to know the exact number of people involved in these organisations, the Oath Keepers claims to have tens of thousands of members nationwide.