The United States’ Perpetual War in Afghanistan

Why Long Wars No Longer Generate a Backlash at Home

By Tanisha M. Fazal and Sarah Kreps
Foreign Affairs 

Aug 20, 2018 - In October, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan will turn 17 (now 18, --ed). The human and material costs of what has become the United States’ longest-ever war are colossal. More than 2,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed and over 20,000 have been injured. The UN estimates that nearly 20,000 Afghan civilians have been killed and another 50,000 injured since 2009 alone. The United States has spent some $877 billion on the war. The Trump administration’s recent initiative to seek direct peace talks with the Taliban—a first since the start of the war in 2001—highlights that Washington is actively looking for new ways to wind down its involvement in the conflict. But why has the U.S. intervention lasted so long in the first place?

Part of the answer is that Afghanistan’s toxic mix of “state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be simply beyond outside resolution,” as Max Fisher and Amanda Taub summarized in a New York Times post. But their diagnosis does not speak to a critical dimension of the conflict: namely, how the relative indifference of the U.S. public has allowed the war to drag on.

In theory, leaders in a democracy have incentives to heed public preferences or risk being voted out of office, which means that public opposition to a war makes its continuation untenable. Yet when it comes to Afghanistan, the U.S. public has favored the status quo at best and expressed deep ambivalence at worst. 

Why the Pentagon Says It Needs Low-Yield Nukes

The W76-2 warhead is a new, low-yield nuclear weapon. The Pentagon believes other countries—especially Russia—could use low-yield nukes early in a conflict, so it needs its own.The W76-2 has an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, or 10,000 tons of TNT, or less.

From the Dept of Very Bad Ideas: The military thinks a smaller bomb is essential for deterring—and fighting—adversaries.

By Kyle Mizokami
Popular Mechanics

Dec 5, 2019 - The Pentagon reaffirmed its determination to field a new nuclear weapon designed to allow the U.S. to match Russian and Chinese nukes on the battlefield. In an interview with Seapower magazine, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood stated that the nukes are necessary to counter Russian plans to use low-yield nuclear weapons early in a conflict, frightening its enemies into a ceasefire. According to Seapower:

“Rood said the need for the new low-yield weapons came from intelligence reports of Russian emphasis on the use of nuclear weapons earlier in a conflict, “and the mistaken belief that they have the ability to use a low-yield nuclear weapon earlier in the conflict in a way to deter response.” He cited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public statements advocating the early use of low-yield nuclear weapons “as a way of deterring an adversary.”

What kind of scenario is Rood thinking about? Imagine Russia launched a blitzkrieg-style attack on Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania. Russia quickly conquers all four countries before NATO can effectively muster a response. While NATO assembles a reaction force, Russia explodes a small, low-yield nuclear weapon at the Polish border. The detonation would serve warning that Russia was now prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend its conquest, forcing NATO to choose between standing down or using nukes of its own.

The Pentagon thinks that having small, low-yield nuclear missiles like the W-76-2 would allow NATO to match Russia’s first use of a low-yield device, meeting Moscow small nuke for small nuke. The current lack of a smaller, missile-launched nuclear weapon means that the alliance would be forced to consider using a larger nuke to retaliate, escalating the crisis.

With Turkey’s Invasion, Trump Helped Create Humanitarian Catastrophe

Syrian refugees fleeing the Turkish incursion in Rojava receive bedding materials as they arrive at the Badarash IDPs camp on October 17, 2019, in Dohuk, Iraq.BYRON SMITH / GETTY IMAGES

By Daniel Falcone 
Truthout

Nov 2, 2019 - In this interview, professor of politics and international studies Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco argues that the U.S. and Turkey are indeed responsible for the Kurds’ slaughter. He points out the deleterious results of the current administration’s foreign policy and how President Trump has dramatically increased the number of U.S. combat troops in the Middle East. Zunes argues that when Trump gave the green light to Turkey’s invasion by lifting U.S. sanctions, he created a humanitarian catastrophe. Trump, according to Zunes, has both bolstered his relationship with Turkey in line with his business pursuits and shows no signs of bringing U.S. troops home.

Zunes also argues it’s important for the progressive left to consider how to conceptualize a foreign policy that stands with the Kurds, while resisting the idea that armed force is the best way to protect human rights. Lastly, he points out the importance of a sound oppositional foreign policy in the upcoming Democratic primaries that could have lasting impacts on the world.

Daniel Falcone: Can you comment on Trump’s foreign policy in regard to Syria and how it is unfolding at the present time? What do you expect to be the immediate and long-term outcomes?

Stephen Zunes: Giving the green light to Turkey’s invasion and completely lifting the U.S.’s half-hearted sanctions once Turkish occupation forces had consolidated their control and ethnically cleansed … thousands of Kurds from their homeland in northern Syria has indeed been as bad a humanitarian catastrophe as reported, if not worse.

The bombing of civilian targets and the extrajudicial killings by the allied Syrian Arab militia (including elements of the Free Syrian Army now allied with Turkey) against progressive, secular civilian leaders underscore the severity of these U.S.-backed war crimes. Thanks to U.S. support, it appears that the Turks have established a “security zone” or “buffer zone” — a euphemism for military occupation along a 30 kilometer-wide strip on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, comparable to what Israel established in southern Lebanon for 22 years (1978-2000), which resulted in the rise of Hezbollah. Despite 10 United Nations Security Council resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw unconditionally, the U.S. blocked enforcement of these resolutions, with former President Bill Clinton having his ambassador to Israel press the Israelis to continue the occupation in the face of overwhelming opposition from the Israeli public.

This time, regarding Turkey, the United States has prevented the UN Security Council from passing any resolution, and it’s doubtful that Turkey will feel any real pressure to end the occupation, unless global civil society effectively mobilizes against it and forces their governments to place major sanctions against the Recep Tayyip Erdogan regime.

Trump is vilified by the mainstream media and establishment liberals for failing to show U.S. “resolve” and a strong show of force. Can you talk about how Trump is actually escalating global conflicts?

For reasons I’ve outlined earlier, U.S. forces should indeed withdraw from Syria. However, it should have been done in an orderly and thoughtful manner after consultations with military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, as well as the Kurds themselves. From all accounts, Trump’s decision was an impulsive one following a phone call with the right-wing autocratic Turkish president, with whom Trump has developed a close relationship, in part because of his business ties to that country.

Gun Culture: Why Michael Moore's 'Bowling for Columbine' Matters Now More Than Ever

Great satirical films hold up over time. Their messages keep resonating because the flaws they diagnose persist

By Sophia A. McClennan
Salon.com

OCT 19, 2019 - On Saturday, October 19 at 9 p.m. ET, MSNBC aired a special screening of Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” followed by a live interview between Moore and Ari Melber, host of “The Beat.” 

Originally released in 2002, one year after the 9/11 attacks, the film explores the circumstances leading up to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and the violent culture that fostered it.

The film is worth watching (or re-watching) for the simple fact that it drives home the painful reality that our nation has failed to act to reduce gun violence. As Moore explained in an interview preceding the special screening, “The day the Columbine shooting happened, that afternoon, my crew and I decided we have to do something about this. We have to make a documentary about this and we have to make sure that there is not another — I remember saying this that day — that there is never another school shooting. Sadly, now we are some 17 years later and there was more than one Columbine.”

At the time, the focus of the film was the gun culture that spawned the Columbine shootings. As the film opens, it sets the scene for the Columbine shootings by describing it as a “typical day.” The message is clear: Columbine was not an anomaly; it was a predictable consequence in a society that glorifies guns more than human life.

In scene after scene, from a bank that hands out guns to a mom who thinks the only way to protect her kids is by being armed, the film digs into the disturbing ways that gun culture has been not just justified, but normalized in the United States. Moore conducts a series of interviews with a wide range of gun owners — militia members, suburban housewives, farmers and more — all of whom are happy explain that they only feel safe if they have weapons.

In Moore’s artful style of satire, he often lets his interviewee reveal the flaws in their own logic. After a Lockheed Martin executive explains that he thinks the problem at Columbine was anger management, Moore asks, “You don’t think our kids think to themselves, well gee, dad goes off to the factory every day and he builds missiles, these were weapons of mass destruction. What’s the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?” When the executive responds that he doesn’t see the connection, he makes Moore’s ironic point for him. At other times, he gently asks a reasonable question that underscores irrational, illogical, or incomprehensible actions: After he gets a gun from a Michigan bank handing them out to new customers, he asks, “Do you think it’s a little dangerous handing out guns in a bank?”

Great films hold up over time. They are worth watching for the art of their style, for their messages, and for the ways that they remind us of their context. Satirical films also help us think through moments when society was caught up in habits and behaviors that were profoundly irrational, destructive or delusional. Their messages continue to resonate because the flaws they diagnose persist. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove, Or How I l Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” for example, continues to offer poignant commentary on toxic military masculinity.

“Bowling for Columbine” is worth screening today for all of those reasons.

But now, 17 years later, the film has another message. Watching the film today it becomes abundantly clear that our problem isn’t gun culture; the problem is that we have failed to do anything about it. Every message and every argument about the problems of U.S. gun culture appear in the film. They are all there.

A Vet in a World of Never-Ending Wars and IEDs

Afghan security personnel conduct an inquiry at the scene of a suicide car bombing near the police headquarters in Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 22, 2017. (AP)

By Maj. Danny Sjursen
TomDispatch

Recently, on a beautiful Kansas Saturday, I fell asleep early, exhausted by the excitement and ultimate disappointment of the Army football team’s double overtime loss to highly favored Michigan. 

Having turned against America’s forever wars and the U.S. military as an institution while I was still in it, West Point football, I’m almost ashamed to admit, is my last guilty martial pleasure. Still, having graduated from the Academy, taught history there, and spent 18 long years in the Army, I find something faintly hopeful about a team of undersized, overmatched, non-National Football League prospects facing off against one of the biggest schools in college football.

I awoke, though, early the next morning to the distressing — if hardly surprising — news that President Trump had spiked months of seemingly promising peace talks with the Taliban, blocking any near-term hope for an end to America’s longest, most hopeless war of all. My by-now-uncomfortably-familiar response was to go even deeper into a funk, based on a vague, if overwhelming, sense that the world only manages to get worse on a near-daily basis. For this longtime skeptic of U.S. foreign policy, once also a secret dreamer and idealist, that reality drives me toward political nihilism, a feeling that nothing any of us can do will halt the spread of an increasingly self-destructive empire and the collapse of democracy at home.

Looking back, I can trace my long journey from burgeoning neoconservative believer to Iraq War opponent to war-on-terror dissenter to disenfranchised veteran nonbeliever. Thinking about this in the wake of Army’s loss and those cancelled Afghan peace talks, during a typically morose conversation with Tom, of TomDispatch, I realized that I could tell a story of escalating military heresy and disappointment simply from the three years of articles I’d written for his website. It mattered little that, at the time, I imagined them as anything but the stuff of autobiography.

If all this sounds gloomy, writing itself has been cathartic for me and may have saved me on this strange journey of mine. So, join me on a little autobiographical fast march through a world increasingly filled with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, as seen through the eyes of one apostate military veteran. Maybe some of you will even recognize aspects of your own life journeys in what follows.

'Hope and Change' in Iraq

In October 2006, when Second Lieutenant Sjursen arrived in Iraq, Baghdad was still, at least figuratively, aflame. It took only a few months of repetitious, useless “presence patrols,” a dozen IED strikes on my scout platoon, the deaths of three of my troopers and the maiming of others, as well as ubiquitous civilian deaths in marketplace bombings, to free me from a sense that the war in Iraq served any purpose whatsoever. 

Hearing again and again, even from long oppressed Shia Iraqis, that life under Sunni autocrat Saddam Hussein had been better, it became increasingly apparent that the U.S. invasion, launched by the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on thoroughly bogus grounds in the spring of 2003, had shattered their nation and perhaps destabilized a region as well.

Just 23 years old (and, by my own estimation, immature at that), I — and a surprising number of my junior officer peers — started cautiously acting out. I grew my hair longer than regulations allowed and posted World War I-era antiwar poems by British veterans like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen on my locker. I eventually even began “phoning in” my patrols, while attempting to avoid dicey, ambush-prone neighborhoods whenever possible.

And yet, despite a growing sense of darkness, I’d yet to lose all hope. At home, the Democrats (many of whom had once voted for the Iraq War) won back Congress in November 2006, largely thanks to a sudden burst of antiwar, anti-Bush rhetoric. In 2007, I began using my limited Internet time to ingest transcripts of every speech by or article about an upstart young African American Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama. Unlike anointed frontrunner Hillary Clinton, he seemed inspirational, an outsider, and — as an Illinois state senator — an early opponent of the very invasion that had landed me in my macabre predicament. I quickly decided he was my man, buying into his “hope and change” rhetoric, while dreaming of the day he’d end my war, saving countless lives, including possibly my own.

Sadly, if predictably, despite the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and monthly U.S. military fatalities that regularly hit triple digits, nothing could stop the Bush administration from continuing to escalate the war. I remember the moment in April 2007 when I heard that, thanks to President Bush’s announced troop “surge” in Iraq, my squadron was designated to stay three months past our scheduled year-long deployment. It felt like a gut punch. Steve, my fellow lieutenant, and I chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes in silence, while leaning against the brick wall of our Baghdad barracks. Then we faced the music and broke the news to our distraught soldiers.

In that bloodiest year of the war, my squadron would lose another half-dozen men in combat, while nearly 1,000 U.S. servicemen and women would die. Yet that famed, widely hailed surge would, of course, ultimately fail. Not that most policymakers thought so at the time. The Bush-anointed, media-savvy new commander in Iraq, Army General David Petraeus, sold a temporary drop in violence to a fawning Congress, including most of those Democrats, as a profound success. It scarcely mattered that the announced purpose of the surge — to create space and time for a political reconciliation between Iraqi sects and ethnicities — failed from the start. My long-shot dream that an “antiwar” Congress would cut off funds for the conflict remained just that.

'We Must Learn to Live Together as Brothers or Perish as Fools'

As we face endless wars and the climate emergency with dwindling resources available to humanity, and while famines and lack of water become paramount as facts of life in ways we are not prepared for, those of us who hold to an ideal of a common humanity will have to confront these greatest of challenges. (Photo: Steve Eason/Flickr/cc)

By uniting as a common humanity, we can ultimately address the enormous challenges facing us.

By Mary Hladky and Thea Paneth
Common Dreams

Sept 10, 2019 - We are living in a profoundly dangerous moment. 

We write as members of the coordinating committee of United for Peace and Justice, a national network of peace groups.  We are long time activists and mothers of grown children.  We worry that violence in America is spinning out of control.  There are a multitude of alarming crises facing our country and the world which can overwhelm and paralyze us, preventing us from taking action. But there are things we can do.  We want to address some of these issues and suggest positive actions we can take.   

Across the U.S., hate speech emanating from a resurgent white nationalist movement is further dividing our country and erupting in violence.  

There is tremendous inequality in our country; 40% of Americans struggle every day to make ends meet and have legitimate fears about their future. The white nationalist movement capitalizes on these fears and emotions with rhetoric that demonizes “others.”  This movement spreads the idea that these undeserving “others” are working the system and depriving “real” Americans, when, in fact, the economic struggles people face are due to the rigged system that overwhelmingly showers financial benefits on the ultra-rich and corporations. 

Too many people are falling prey to this language and its powerful but misguided message.  FBI Director Wray recently told lawmakers that the majority of domestic terrorism involved some sort of white supremacist ideology.  

After so many mass shootings people are nervous about shopping, going to the movies, attending religious services, night clubs or large outdoor events.  And many are terrified to send their children to school.   The epidemic of mass shootings puts at risk the lives of anyone living in or visiting the United States.  

At political rallies and on Twitter our President uses “us versus them language” stoking fear, resentment, and anger to rile up his base.  It also has emboldened the white nationalist movement.  

Unfortunately, the President’s language, and the quiet acquiescence it receives from Republican leadership, provides the movement with a veneer of respectability, persuading many of its validity.   

Demeaning and dehumanizing language is the first step in creating a justification that some people are “sub-human” and may be legitimately mistreated, attacked or killed.  This language has a long history and deep roots in America.  It is difficult to acknowledge this uncomfortable reality, but it is something we must face and then dismantle. 

'Unprecedented, Wasteful, and Obscene': House Approves $1.48 Trillion Pentagon Budget

"Wanna know how broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon and the corruption of our nation's 'defense' budget? Well, look no further than the soon to be enacted budget 'deal.'"

By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams

July 26, 2019 - In a bipartisan deal that one anti-war critic said demonstrates how thoroughly "broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon," 219 House Democrats and 65 Republicans on Thursday voted to approve a budget agreement that includes $1.48 trillion in military spending over the next two years.

Just 16 Democrats—including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—voted against the two-year, $2.7 trillion budget agreement. Largely due to expressed concerns about the deficit, 132 Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) also voted no.

The final vote was 284-149. (See the full roll call.)

"For the love of god, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon."
—Stephen Miles, Win Without War
The House passage of the budget deal, which President Donald Trump quickly applauded on Twitter as a victory for the military, comes after the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened in April to tank the measure in opposition to its out-of-control Pentagon outlays.

But most of the Progressive Caucus voted for the agreement on Thursday, pointing to increases in domestic spending.

"It's not a perfect deal by any means," Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement ahead of the vote. "This deal does not address the bloated Pentagon budget, but it does begin to close the gap in funding for families, by allocating more new non-defense spending than defense spending for the first time in many years."

Russian Blast Points to Danger of New Nuclear Arms Race

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By JEREMY KUZMAROV

Counterpunch

On Thursday August 8^th, an explosion at the Nenoksa Missile test site in northern Russia during testing of a new type of nuclear propelled cruise missile resulted in the death of at least seven people, including scientists and was followed by a spike in radiation in the atmosphere.

Analysts in Washington and Europe are of the belief that the explosion may offer a glimpse of technological weaknesses in Russia’s new arms program.

The deeper concern, however, should be of the perilous consequences of the new Cold War and arms race that is developing between the United States and Russia.

In February, the Trump administration pulled out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), an arms control treaty considered to be among the most successful in history by former U.S. ambassador to Russia John Huntsman, which banned land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers with ranges of 500–1500 kilometers.

The United States accused Russia of violating the treaty, though did not wait for this accusation to be verified by international inspectors.

Russia previously accused the United States of violating the treaty through its adoption of drone warfare, and by stationing missile launchers in Deveselu Romania.

To Understand the El Paso Massacre, Look to the Long Legacy of Anti-Mexican Violence at the Border

The El Paso shooter wasn’t a “lone wolf.” His act of white supremacist terror is part of a century of racial violence targeting fronterizo communities.

In the immediate aftermath of the El Paso shooting—the largest massacre of Latinx people in the history of the United States—politicians of all stripes stood before the cameras and gave their diagnosis of what just happened. They sounded like the proverbial blind men who touched one part of the elephant and confused the different fragments for the whole. El Paso Mayor Dee Margo, a Republican who once praised the “freedom fence” for keeping out “riff raff,” emphasized that the atrocity was committed by an outsider. Other voices blamed mental health, video games, and the lack of gun control laws.

But none of these diagnoses went deep enough, looking only at the symptoms. Before we know how to fight back effectively against white supremacist terrorism like the El Paso massacre, we have to know exactly what we’re up against. History offers an important instrument to determine the root causes of what I characterize as a deadly epidemic.

The chilling manifesto reportedly posted online by the alleged shooter tapped into entrenched narratives with deep roots in the history of the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s unlikely that the 21-year-old from Allen, Texas, knew just how utterly repetitive his words and actions were.

The shooter wrote that he was protecting whites in America from “cultural and ethnic replacement” brought on by “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” He claimed that “Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas, changing policy to better suit their needs.”

According to one witness, as the perpetrator gunned down people in each aisle, he allowed anyone who “didn’t look Mexican” to walk away unharmed. Individuals with brown skin had no such pass. It didn’t matter to the alleged killer whether his targeted victims had legal papers or on what side of the barbed-wire fence they were born. He couldn’t have cared less whether the eight Mexican nationals among the 22 people he murdered had permits to shop in the United States.

The manifesto explains why distinctions of legal status were irrelevant to him: “Even though new migrants do the dirty work, their kids typically don’t. They want to live the American Dream which is why they get college degrees and fill higher-paying skilled positions.” In other words, brown people with college degrees threaten the racial purity of white America.

During the American eugenics movement of the early 20th century, more than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in government-run programs.

I am a third-generation native of El Paso. One of the Mexican Americans killed by the assassin’s bullet was Art Benavides, a friend of mine from high school, a happy-go-lucky guy who served for 23 years in the U.S. Army and Texas National Guard. He and I had been co-captains of the Jefferson High School swim team. El Paso, population 700,000, has been described as one of the largest small towns in the United States. Here, everyone seems to be connected by only one or two degrees of separation, and a tragedy such as this one is very personal.

America’s Deadly Stealth War on the Mexico Border Is Approaching Genocide

A Democracy Now Interview with John Carlos Frey on deep roots of the crisis, its militarization, and ongoing causalities.

For a powerpoint useful for a study group on the book by Carl Davidson, go HERE. Carl is also available to do deliver the presentation, via Zoom or face-to-face.

America’s Indefensible Defense Budget

By Jessica T. Mathews
New York Review of Books 

JULY 18, 2019 ISSUE - A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. 

Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I. How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget.

When the dust cleared, funding for the bands was not cut, because the political cost entailed in reducing the number of them by, say, half would have been enormous. The resulting $250 million in annual savings, on the other hand, while a significant sum for most government agencies, would have produced the almost unnoticeable difference of three one-hundredths of one percent in the Pentagon budget.

The sheer size of the military establishment and the habit of equating spending on it with patriotism make both sound management and serious oversight of defense expenditures rare. As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path. For several decades, we have maintained an extraordinarily high level of defense spending with the support of both political parties and virtually all of the public. The annual debate about the next year’s military spending, underway now on Capitol Hill, no longer probes where real cuts might be made (as opposed to cuts in previously planned growth) but only asks how big the increase should be.

The political momentum that drives this annual increase, disconnected from hard thought about America’s responsibilities in a transformed world, threatens to become—or may have already become—unstoppable. The consequences are huge. At home, defense spending crowds out funds for everything else a prosperous economy and a healthy society need. Abroad, it has led us to become a country reflexively reliant on the military and one quite different from what we think ourselves to be or, I believe, wish to be.

If you have read anything about defense spending in recent years, it was probably expressed as a percentage of GDP. At roughly 3–4 percent (it was more than 40 percent in 1944, 15 percent during the Korean War, and over 10 percent in the early 1960s), it seems eminently affordable.

But this almost universally used measure is close to meaningless, except to make rough international comparisons. It makes no sense to expect that external threats will expand in parallel with a country’s economic growth. A country whose economy has grown by, for example, 30 percent has no reason to spend 30 percent more on its military. To the contrary, unless threats worsen, you would expect that, over time, defense spending as a percentage of a growing economy should decline.

Instead, the valid measure of affordability is defense spending’s share of the federal discretionary budget: that is, of all federal spending other than the mandatory allotments to entitlements and interest on the national debt. Discretionary spending is everything else the government does: pay not just for the military but for the federal judiciary and law enforcement; support infrastructure, education, and agriculture; invest in science and technology; protect the environment, wilderness, and National Parks; manage relations with the rest of the world and with international organizations overseeing everything from trade to arms control; fund the National Weather Service; police the border; explore space; develop energy resources; ensure the safety and soundness of food, drugs, communications, airline travel, consumer products, banks, the stock exchanges, and on and on.

Nuclear Weapons: Experts Alarmed by New Pentagon 'War-fighting' Doctrine

By Julian Borger
MSN.COM

June 19, 2019 - The Pentagon believes using nuclear weapons could “create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability”, according to a new nuclear doctrine adopted by the US joint chiefs of staff last week.

The document, entitled Nuclear Operations, was published on 11 June, and was the first such doctrine paper for 14 years. Arms control experts say it marks a shift in US military thinking towards the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war – which they believe is a highly dangerous mindset.

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the joint chiefs’ document says. “Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”

At the start of a chapter on nuclear planning and targeting, the document quotes a cold war theorist, Herman Kahn, as saying: “My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.”

Kahn was a controversial figure. He argued that a nuclear war could be “winnable” and is reported to have provided part of the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove.

The Nuclear Operations document was taken down from the Pentagon online site after a week, and is now only available through a restricted access electronic library. But before it was withdrawn it was downloaded by Steven Aftergood, who directs the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

A spokesman for the joint chiefs of staff said the document was removed from the publicly accessible defence department website “because it was determined that this publication, as is with other joint staff publications, should be for official use only”.

In an emailed statement the spokesman did not say why the document was on the public website for the first week after publication.

Aftergood said the new document “is very much conceived as a war-fighting doctrine – not simply a deterrence doctrine, and that’s unsettling”.

The US Cult of Bombing and Endless War

For many of the U.S.'s decision makers, air power has clearly become something of an abstraction.

By William J. Astore
TomDispatch

June 4, 2019 - From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing — and yet more bombing. 

Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. “boots on the ground” and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington’s many conflicts. 

Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of “Made in USA” bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.

Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America’s wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What’s driving this process?

For many of America’s decision-makers, air power has clearly become something of an abstraction. After all, except for the 9/11 attacks by those four hijacked commercial airliners, Americans haven’t been the target of such strikes since World War II. 

On Washington’s battlefields across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, air power is always almost literally a one-way affair. There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property of the U.S. Air Force (and allied air forces), which means that we’re no longer talking about “war” in the normal sense. No wonder Washington policymakers and military officials see it as our strong suit, our asymmetrical advantage, our way of settling scores with evildoers, real and imagined.

In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress. Using data supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS’s “capital,” the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble. Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, since Donald Trump has become president, after claiming that he would get us out of our various never-ending wars, U.S. bombing has surged, not only against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. It has driven up the civilian death toll there even as “friendly” Afghan forces are sometimes mistaken for the enemy and killed, too. Air strikes from Somalia to Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing continue to be underreported in the American media and downplayed by the Trump administration.

U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.) 

Today’s air strikes are more limited than in those past campaigns and may be more accurate, but never confuse a 500-pound bomb with a surgeon’s scalpel, even rhetorically. When “surgical” is applied to bombing in today’s age of lasers, GPS, and other precision-guidance technologies, it only obscures the very real human carnage being produced by all these American-made bombs and missiles.

This country’s propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn’t led to ultimate success. 

CODEPINK Ranks the 2020 Presidential Candidates on War, Peace and Military Spending

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies
CodePink

Forty-five years after Congress passed the War Powers Act in the wake of the Vietnam War, it has finally used it for the first time, to try to end the U.S.-Saudi war on the people of Yemen and to recover its constitutional authority over questions of war and peace. This hasn’t stopped the war yet, and President Trump has threatened to veto the bill. But its passage in Congress, and the debate it has spawned, could be an important first step on a tortuous path to a less militarized U.S. foreign policy in Yemen and beyond.

While the United States has been involved in wars throughout much of its history, since the 9/11 attacks the US military has been engaged in a series of wars that have dragged on for almost two decades. Many refer to them as “endless wars.” One of the basic lessons we have all learned from this is that it is easier to start wars than to stop them. So, even as we have come to see this state of war as a kind of “new normal,” the American public is wiser, calling for less military intervention and more congressional oversight.

The rest of the world is wiser about our wars, too. Take the case of Venezuela, where the Trump administration insists that the military option is “on the table.” While some of Venezuela’s neighbors are collaborating with US efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government, none are offering their own armed forces.

The same applies in other regional crises. Iraq is refusing to serve as a staging area for a U.S.-Israeli-Saudi war on Iran. The US’s traditional Western allies oppose Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement and want peaceful engagement, not war, with Iran. South Korea is committed to a peace process with North Korea, despite the erratic nature of Trump’s negotiations with North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jung Un.

So what hope is there that one of the parade of Democrats seeking the presidency in 2020 could be a real “peace candidate”? Could one of them bring an end to these wars and prevent new ones? Walk back the brewing Cold War and arms race with Russia and China? Downsize the US military and its all-consuming budget? Promote diplomacy and a commitment to international law?

Ever since the Bush/Cheney administration launched the present-day “Long Wars,” new presidents from both parties have dangled superficial appeals to peace during their election campaigns. But neither Obama nor Trump has seriously tried to end our “endless” wars or rein in our runaway military spending.

Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war and vague promises for a new direction were enough to win him the presidency and the Nobel Peace Prize, but not to bring us peace. In the end, he spent more on the military than Bush and dropped more bombs on more countries, including a tenfold increase in CIA drone strikes. Obama’s main innovation was a doctrine of covert and proxy wars that reduced US casualties and muted domestic opposition to war, but brought new violence and chaos to Libya, Syria and Yemen. Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan, the fabled “graveyard of empires,” turned that war into the longest US war since the US conquest of Native America (1783-1924).

Trump’s election was also boosted by false promises of peace, with recent war veterans delivering critical votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But Trump quickly surrounded himself with generals and neocons, escalated the wars in Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan, and has fully backed the Saudi-led war in Yemen. His hawkish advisers have so far ensured that any US steps toward peace in Syria, Afghanistan or Korea remain symbolic, while US efforts to destabilize Iran and Venezuela threaten the world with new wars. Trump’s complaint, “We don’t win any more,” echoes through his presidency, ominously suggesting that he’s still looking for a war he can “win.”

While we can’t guarantee that candidates will stick to their campaign promises, it is important to look at this new crop of presidential candidates and examine their views – and, when possible, voting records – on issues of war and peace. What prospects for peace might each of them bring to the White House?

Bernie Sanders

Senator Sanders has the best voting record of any candidate on war and peace issues, especially on military spending. Opposing the oversized Pentagon budget, he has only voted for 3 out of 19 military spending bills since 2013. By this measure, no other candidate comes close, including Tulsi Gabbard. In other votes on war and peace, Sanders voted as requested by Peace Action 84% of the time from 2011 to 2016, despite some hawkish votes on Iran from 2011-2013.

One major contradiction in Sanders’ opposition to out-of-control military spending has been his support for the world’s most expensive and wasteful weapon system: the trillion-dollar F-35 fighter jet. Not only did Sanders support the F-35, he pushed – despite local opposition – to get these fighter jets stationed at the Burlington airport for the Vermont National Guard.

In terms of stopping the war in Yemen, Sanders has been a hero. Over the past year, he and Senators Murphy and Lee have led a sustained effort to shepherd his historic War Powers bill on Yemen through the Senate. Congressman Ro Khanna, whom Sanders has chosen as one of his 4 campaign co-chairs, has led the parallel effort in the House.

Sanders’ 2016 campaign highlighted his popular domestic proposals for universal healthcare and social and economic justice, but was criticized as light on foreign policy. Beyond chiding Clinton for being “too much into regime change,” he seemed reluctant to debate her on foreign policy, despite her hawkish record. By contrast, during his current presidential run, he regularly includes the Military-Industrial Complex among the entrenched interests his political revolution is confronting, and his voting record backs up his rhetoric.

Sanders supports U.S. withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria and opposes US threats of war against Venezuela. But his rhetoric on foreign policy sometimes demonizes foreign leaders in ways that unwittingly lend support to the “regime change” policies he opposes – as when he joined a chorus of US politicians labeling Colonel Gaddafi of Libya a “thug and a murderer,” shortly before U.S.-backed thugs actually murdered Gaddafi.

Open Secrets shows Sanders taking in over $366,000 from the “defense industry” during his 2016 presidential campaign, but only $17,134 for his 2018 Senate reelection campaign.

So our question on Sanders is, “Which Bernie would we see in the White House?” Would it be the one who has the clarity and courage to vote “No” on 84% of military spending bills in the Senate, or the one who supports military boondoggles like the F-35 and can’t resist repeating inflammatory smears of foreign leaders? It is vital that Sanders should appoint genuinely progressive foreign policy advisors to his campaign, and then to his administration, to complement his own greater experience and interest in domestic policy.

Tulsi Gabbard

While most candidates shy away from foreign policy, Congressmember Gabbard has made foreign policy – particularly ending war – the centerpiece of her campaign....

Ex-Mossad Agents Harass US students, BDS Activists

Congress is failing to protect US citizens from espionage and threats aimed at intimidating supporters of Palestinian rights. (Joe Catron)

By Kristian Davis Bailey 
The Electronic Intifada  

March 9, 2019 - In September 2017, Palestine Legal attorneys received nearly 30 emails from students, teachers and even librarians who were justifiably concerned about an anonymous message they had received.

The emails contained threats from outlawbds.com that recipients had been “marked” and “identified as a BDS promoter” and had a “limited window of opportunity to cease and desist or face the consequences of your actions in legal proceedings.”

The origin of the attack was a mystery.

Thanks to February exposés in The New Yorker, however, we now know the origin – Psy-Group, a defunct Israeli private intelligence firm.

Additionally, we have further confirmation that former Israeli intelligence agents were paid to spy on US students and activists engaged in BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – campaigns.

The organization responsible compiled dossiers on activists and published a Canary Mission-like blacklist site, as well as defamatory sites that attempted to discredit Muslim activists, among others.

The New Yorker first published an article by Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow on Psy-Group, which used former Israeli military, intelligence and governmental advisers to influence politics around the US.

A Modest Proposal: Don’t Start a Nuclear War

By Olivia Alperstein
OurFuture.org

March 13, 2019 - In a matter of minutes, as easily as sending a tweet, a sitting U.S. president could decide to launch a nuclear attack, without anyone else’s approval or authorization. In a matter of minutes, millions of lives would be lost, and millions of futures halted permanently.

At my organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility, we believe that we must prevent what we can’t cure. And there’s no cure for a nuclear war.

No nation on earth, including the United States, would have an adequate emergency response in the event of a nuclear exchange. Most Americans don’t want us to ever engage in a nuclear war, and the vast majority of us certainly don’t want the United States to be the ones to start a nuclear war.

The United States, like every other nation, has a vested interest in avoiding a nuclear conflict.

Yet unlike other countries, we currently have no policy against starting a nuclear war — or what experts call a “No First Use” policy.

This opens the door to a possible preemptive nuclear strike. That weakens our national security, and it puts all our health and safety at risk — for a nuclear war no one (except maybe President Donald Trump and John Bolton) wants.

Luckily, some people in Congress are looking to change the reckless status quo. This year, Rep. Adam Smith and Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would establish a “No First Use” policy for nuclear weapons in the United States.