Creator of Bracing Views. Contributor to TomDispatch, Truthout, HNN, Alternet, Huffington Post, Antiwar, and other sites. Retired AF lieutenant colonel and professor of history. Senior fellow, Eisenhower Media Network
With an ongoing genocide in Gaza and a dangerous war between Russia and Ukraine, who has the time to look to Africa? As we said when I was still in the military, I need to get smart on this.
Coverage of America’s military adventurism/fiascos in Africa is difficult to come by. Fortunately, there’s Nick Turse at The Intercept, whose latest article is entitled:
PENTAGON: U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM EFFORTS HAVE FAILED AFRICANS
A new Pentagon report sheds light on AFRICOM’s disastrous counterterrorism campaigns.
I know Nick Turse from his days at TomDispatch, so I sent him this note in response to his article:
Bombing worked so well to win the war in Indochina — so why not bomb in Africa?
It seems like the goal is permanent war — you throw gasoline on it with all the weapons exports and drone strikes. And they work — war continues.
I guess that’s my obvious take — pay no attention to their words, watch instead what they do. It’s just war and more war. Given that AFRICOM is a military command, should we be surprised that the “solutions” are always violent ones?
That seems to be the U.S. “strategy” in Africa: bomb the “terrorists” while exporting more weapons related to military “assistance” (the building of indigenous African forces ostensibly allied to the U.S.). Again, it’s a strategy that worked so well in Indochina in the early 1960s …
Unfortunately for Somalia, it occupies a strategic position in the Horn of Africa. The U.S. has a major military base in Djibouti.
Besides the perpetuation of war there, I don’t know what the U.S. government is up to in Africa. The mainstream media rarely discusses it. I assume control of scarce resources is a major goal. Also, the military-first AFRICOM approach to the area ensures higher profits for and more power to the military-industrial complex. Geographically, the Horn of Africa is vital to the control of sea and trade routes. Proximity to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the Red Sea is obvious.
In short, I’m exposing my own ignorance as a way of encouraging all of us to get a bit smarter about what our government is up to in Africa. According to the Pentagon’s own sponsored report, it’s not going well. Here’s the kicker from Turse’s article:
“Africa has experienced roughly 155,000 militant Islamist group-linked deaths over the past decade,” reads a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “Somalia and the Sahel have now experienced more militant Islamist-related fatalities over the past decade (each over 49,000) than any other region.”
“What many people don’t know is that the United States’ post-9/11 counterterrorism operations actually contributed to and intensified the present-day crisis and surge of violent deaths in the Sahel and Somalia,” Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, told The Intercept, referencing the frequent targeting of minority ethnic groups by U.S. partners during counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. provided tens of millions of dollars in weapons and training to the governments of countries like Burkina Faso and Niger, which are experiencing the worst spikes in violent deaths today, she said. “In those critical early years, those governments used the infusion of U.S. military funding, weapons, and training to target marginalized groups within their own borders, intensifying the cycle of violence we now see wreaking such a devastating human toll.”
Terrorist groups are also gaining ground at an exponential rate. “The past year has also seen militant Islamists [sic] groups in the Sahel and Somalia expand their hold on territory,” according to the Africa Center. “Across Africa, an estimated 950,000 square kilometers (367,000 square miles) of populated territories are outside government control due to militant Islamist insurgencies. This is equivalent to the size of Tanzania.” And as militant groups have expanded their reach, Africans have paid a grave price: a 60 percent increase in fatalities since 2023, compared with deaths from 2020 to 2022, according to the report.
As Turse notes, U.S. special forces deployed to Somalia soon after 9/11 as part of the global war on terror (or, if you prefer, the global war of terror). More than two decades of U.S. military strikes (and strife) in the area have only made matters worse. Can we as a nation stand for more of this “success”?
I think the U.S. strategy in Africa is to continue on the same course while suppressing the news of our failures there. Our influence in the region, such as it is, is military-driven, i.e. various African leaders want our weapons and money but little else (because we have little else to offer).
So, all our military leaders can boast of in the region is colossal air strikes. Did you know we used 60 tons of bombs to kill 14 militants in Somalia last February? Victory indeed will soon be ours … if you define “victory” as rising profits for the bomb-makers.
Readers, help me out. If any of you are following America’s war in Africa, I welcome your insights.
Hello Everyone: Here’s my latest article at TomDispatch.com. Whereas my articles for BV are usually 400-600 words, my articles for TomDispatch are usually just over 2000 words, which allows me to develop my points further, supported by plenty of links. Oh, and my wife and I really do use the expression, “But Bibi needs bombs,” whenever the government says it can’t fund something for the American people. It’s funny but I’ve never heard anyone in Congress ask: Bombs for Bibi—how are you going to pay for that? America’s bipartisan warmongers always find plenty of money for weapons and war, even as money for health care and other needs evaporates. It’s almost as if America has a powerful military-industrial complex combined with pushy lobbying groups like AIPAC.
*****
As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws — not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.
Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago — most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.
A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.
That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval — the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America — assuming it ever existed — may now be gone forever.
FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins
My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.
Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for — spreading peace?
My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like health care. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967 — yes, that’s almost 60 years ago! — Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.
Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.
The Mediocrity of Our Generals
In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.
One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals — Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges” — have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.
Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).
Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe — this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).
A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.
Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly
War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not de-escalation and rapprochement.
While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.
And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.
The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.
With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!
Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As President Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
What Is To Be Done
I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Senator Tom Cotton, and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.
All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists/foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”
And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?
After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.
The real enemy of America isn’t Russia or China or Iran or any other country. It’s America’s own pursuit of persistent, pernicious, perpetual, and more or less permanent war or preparations for the same.
It’s undeniable. America’s war and weapons budget is a trillion dollars a year. And rising. There are no plans in the foreseeable future to reduce spending on wars and weapons. Predictably, Americans are told this colossal spending on wars and weapons is for “defense” and “national security.” This is a lie. This spending enriches the few at the expense of the many. It sustains imperialism at the expense of democracy. It serves the desires of Wall Street while ignoring the real needs of Main Street USA. And it is supported by a bipartisan majority in Congress as well as the Trump administration (and the Biden administration before it).
War and weapons are making the American people poorer and less free. Sure, some people are getting rich selling murderous weaponry around the globe, yet America itself is being hollowed out. The warmongers in charge tell us that we can’t have nice things because America, or Israel, or Ukraine, or all three need more weapons (never mind the price tag). Yet it’s our money—it’s our taxpayer dollars.
Ike knew the score
We can’t say we weren’t warned about this. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 told us that pursuing war and weapons would lead to our crucifixion on a “cross of iron.” Eight years later, Ike warned that a military-industrial complex already existed that was undermining American democracy and that we urgently needed to act to curb its power.
Sadly, what gives the military-industrial complex its unity is, among other things, greed and power. Congress is more than happy to serve it. So are America’s presidents. The last U.S. president to speak sincerely and powerfully about peace, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated just over six decades ago. There hasn’t been a peace president since then.
Meanwhile, since 9/11/2001, if not before then, the U.S. military has enthusiastically embraced a warrior ethos, abandoning its own citizen-soldier tradition. America, of course, is supposed to be a constitutional republic, not Sparta or Prussia. But instead of a nation of justice and the rule of law, we have an empire and culture in which wars and warriors rule.
War is not peace. Warriors don’t seek peace. War is war, and perpetual war will destroy both the U.S. empire and the kernel of democracy that remains (however weak or shrinking) at its core.
The choice is clear. We must seek peace. We must cut war and weapons spending dramatically—I’d suggest by 50%—and reinvest that money in Main Street USA. We can have nice things again, if we’re willing to stop empowering the warmongers among us.
This month marks the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, the first explosion of an atomic device in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Next month, of course, marks the grim anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of August 6 and 9, 1945. The atomic nightmares of those two cities have morphed into the thermonuclear nightmare of far more powerful nuclear weapons that continues to haunt us still. The U.S. and Russia combined have roughly 11,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various types, most of them far more powerful than those used against Japan 80 years ago.
The short clip of the Trinity test above is all the more haunting because it’s silent and in black and white.
I’ve walked the Trinity test site and co-taught a course at the Air Force Academy on the making and use of the atomic bomb. Walking the site was an eerie experience. I did it in 1992. Once was enough.
So much pressure was applied to get the atomic “gadget” to work that the scientists and government were reckless. Shrouding it all in secrecy didn’t help. The “downwinders” — those who lived in the path of radioactive fallout from the test —they weren’t given much consideration, if any. Certainly, the effects of radiation and fallout weren’t fully known and were likely underestimated. That said, the government should have taken far more care here. Check out the documentary Trinity released earlier this year, which focuses on these “downwinders” and how they suffered from the blast. As one of the interviewees suggests, the government’s attitude may have been that only a few Indians and Mexicans lived in the area, an attitude summed up by “collateral damage,” a common if unseemly euphemism used all too frequently today.
Historians will forever debate whether the atomic bombings were necessary or if they served to shorten the war. The documentary “The Day After Trinity” by Jon Else is just superb here. My reading of the events is that there was never any doubt the atomic bomb would be used. Luckily for the Germans, VE Day came before Trinity. But the Japanese were still resisting, so they became the new target.
The only man who could have stopped the bombing was President Harry Truman–and he wasn’t about to stop it. A new president, not even elected, who didn’t even know about the bomb until FDR died: Truman used the bomb because it was the easiest path to take. All pressure was on ending the war as quickly as possible, so why not use the bomb? After all, the U.S. continued its firebombing raids on Japanese cities well after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is the inexorable logic of near-total war. The only consolation is that nuclear weapons haven’t been dropped on a city since 1945. That is one valuable legacy from Hiroshima/Nagasaki: some recognition of the horror unleashed there. Nevertheless, U.S. presidents from Obama to Trump to Biden and Trump again are forging ahead with new nuclear weapons—always in the stated cause of “deterrence,” naturally.
It’s staggering the money dedicated to total destruction in the cause of preventing total destruction. It’s a powerful reason to remember what Trinity unleashed 80 years ago, and the price the Japanese paid at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unless we wise up as a species, it absolutely can happen again at levels of destruction that are simply unfathomable.
Nuclear disarmament, not rearmament, is the only sensible policy here.
Roughly three and a half years have passed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the war shows little sign of ending. President Trump has gone from boasting he could end the war in a day to following the policy of the Biden administration in providing weapons and aid to Ukraine. To most Americans, the war has become background noise, barely perceptible. Most Ukrainian flags have been put away or deleted from Facebook and similar social media sites.
If you’re looking for a primer on the war that’s both critical and balanced, check out Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies’ book, “War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict,” now available in a revised and expanded second edition. ($20 paperback; $10 ebook, from OR Books.)
Benjamin and Davies recognize the war didn’t erupt out of nowhere in February 2022 nor was it completely “unprovoked.” As much as they deplore and denounce Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade, they recognize Putin had his reasons. Putin is more rational actor than a power-hungry dictator, and he’s arguably driven more by securing Russia’s position (and regional dominance) than recreating a Tsarist Russian or Soviet empire. Unlike most American commentators, Benjamin and Davies favor a diplomatic solution that would end mass killing on both sides. Not surprisingly, their views have gained little traction in the pro-war, anti-Putin mainstream media.
Speaking of the U.S. mainstream media, NBC News posted an article yesterday citing Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. An unrepentant neocon, Rice is happy that Trump is sending more weapons to Ukraine while threatening more sanctions as well. In short, Trump is following a traditional neocon script while also keeping weapons factories in the U.S. going full blast. Rice approves!
What I found most staggering from Rice was this claim cited by NBC:
Rice also criticized the Biden administration for, in her view, having taken its time to get desperately needed weapons to Ukraine from the outset. “If you had given them everything at the beginning of the war,” she said, when “the Russians were on their back foot, [Ukraine] could’ve won this war outright.”
Excuse me, but WTF? What does giving Ukraine “everything” at the beginning of the war in 2022 mean? Fighter jets, main battle tanks, long-range missiles, nuclear weapons? Ukraine wasn’t even an ally of the U.S., nor was it ever a part of NATO. And would Ukraine really have won the war against Russia with “everything”? What about the risk that Russia would have escalated as well, perhaps calling on its arsenal of 6000 or so nuclear weapons?
Rice’s call for more smoking guns to have been sent to Ukraine early in 2022 almost certainly would have ended in a mushroom cloud or two. But I suppose that’s OK with her as long as the mushroom clouds were limited to Ukraine.
Remember 2023 and the failure of the much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive? I do. Remember all the hype about U.S., German, and British wonder weapons like Abrams, Leopard, and Challenger tanks? I do.
Let’s hope that Trump’s gambit to push Putin to some kind of compromise settlement bears fruit. No war should go on forever. Haven’t enough people died on both sides?
Chris Hedges has a superb show on the case of Jeffrey Epstein:
Donald Trump, along with other “luminaries” like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, is deeply implicated in the pedophilia ring run by Jeffrey Epstein. Naturally, there will be no accountability for their actions. Epstein, of course, was most likely executed in his prison cell (the cameras mysteriously didn’t work; the guards mysteriously disappeared).
Trump promised accountability through his attorney general, Pam Bondi. Now, Trump is saying there’s nothing to see here, folks. That attitude has produced dissent within the MAGA ranks, even as Trump says he doesn’t need the dissenters while blaming the Democrats (!) for the Epstein coverup.
As Nick Bryant says in the interview above, Kompromat is nothing new in DC politics. It goes back to the founders and Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, if not before then. Compromised people, of course, are easily controlled through blackmail. Rumor has it the Mossad may be involved, but who knows?
Interestingly, Democrats have been largely silent on Trump’s problems here. The reason is obvious: pedophilia is bipartisan in DC, as are coverups.
As one person quipped on YouTube, there are more than 1000 victims here (mainly underage girls/teens), two pimps, and zero clients. Epstein’s pedophilia ring lasted more than 25 years, but the only people punished were Epstein himself (executed in prison) and Ghislaine Maxwell (20-year prison term, mainly for child sex trafficking). It’s likely she was told to keep her mouth shut for preferential treatment (e.g. she lives in a dormitory rather than being confined to a prison cell).
As Nick Bryant notes in the interview, if the victims seek compensation, they have to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) stating they can’t name names of their clients. Evidence suggests as well that some victims were as young as ten, if not younger.
Whether Trump and Bondi can continue to suppress this case remains to be seen. One thing is certain: Trump has not come to drain the swamp—he is the swamp.
In an ever-changing world, the one constant in Universe USA is rising Pentagon budgets. For President Trump, a trillion-dollar war budget is something to crow about. Of course, it’s sold as “peace through strength.” For what is more peaceful than more weaponry, especially nuclear-tipped ICBMs and SLBMs?
America is always arming, uparming, rearming for war allegedly to prevent war. The problem is arming for war usually leads to yet more war. You don’t “invest” in weaponry to keep it on a shelf, rusting away in armories.
Excuse my language, but Vietnam vets and war protesters put it well: Fighting (or bombing) for peace is like fucking for virginity.
Vintage 1969. Makes sense, right?
More telling, however, is the constant state of war preparations that infect and influence our minds. Our “leaders” talk about “all options being on the table” when the only option they consider is military force. We are what we “invest” in. And weapons ‘r’ us.
In U.S. politics, strong and wrong is seen as far better than “weak” and right. And just about every politician inside the DC Beltway appeases the military-industrial complex, Israel, or both. That’s how you end up with disastrous wars of choice in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, together with full-throated support for genocide in Gaza.
Who cares about right and wrong when might always makes right?
An anecdote: I have a friend who works in the belly of the beast (the DoD). He told me his job makes him think of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984.” The Pentagon under Pete Hegseth has become an exercise in eliminating DEI bad speak and replacing it with doubleplusgood warrior-ethos speak. Lots of time is wasted sending “bad” terms and names down the memory hole.
Even as the DoD’s language is purged of bad speak about DEI, the Pentagon’s embrace of a permanent war economy is tightened. The very idea of a “peace dividend,” floated by Republican President George H.W. Bush in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, is seemingly ancient history, an idea never to be considered again, not in Trump and Hegseth’s warrior-USA.
Preparing constantly for war is a powerful way to ensure more war. Overspending on esoteric and genocidal weaponry is a powerful way to hollow out one’s country while establishing the conditions for global mass death.
Perhaps our “leaders” need to recall that Orwell’s “1984” was meant to be a warning of what to avoid, not a how-to guide for authoritarian rule and perpetual war.
I sent this somewhat despairing note to a friend this morning:
It remains unclear to me whether the U.S. government kowtows to Israel (for all the reasons we know, like AIPAC), or whether Israel is a sort of cat’s paw for U.S. imperial and corporate interests. Maybe it’s not about nations and borders, as the famous speech from “Network” put it, but rather resources and profit, whether oil, water, weapons, and the like. The people of Gaza are simply in the way and entirely expendable to these larger interests. Naturally, propaganda is skillfully used to portray just about every Palestinian as a Hamas terrorist. Then, as you noted, there’s a media blackout on Gaza in most U.S. mainstream media sources.
Short of revolution, I don’t see any changes coming. The Democrats, of course, are just as happy to serve Israel and corporate interests.
This is the famous scene from “Network” featuring a brilliant performance by Ned Beatty:
If the world is a “college of corporations” (heck, even Harvard is a corporation) and if business and money is the universal lubricant, the Palestinians in Gaza are both good and bad for business. They are “good” in the sense that money can be made from killing them, concentrating them, monitoring them, expelling them, and so on. Speaking and documenting this horrendous truth got Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, sanctioned by the U.S. government, as Lisa Savage noted here.
They are “bad” for business with respect to the gas fields off Gaza. Those marine gas reserves are likely worth $5 billion or more, money that would have done much to alleviate poverty in Gaza. Of course, Israel wasn’t about to allow Palestinians in Gaza to share in this bounty. Getting rid of Palestinians is a means to the end of completely dominating future trade in gas and other commodities in the Levant Basin.
I’ve been wondering why Great Britain is at great pains to help the Netanyahu government—then I noted that British Petroleum is one of the giant corporations that Israel granted a license to for future gas exploration. Coincidence?
Now, unlike Ned Beatty above, I’m not saying everything is explained by money and currency flows as “the primal forces of nature.” But it’s always a good idea to follow the money. It’s a ghastly business indeed when genocide makes money, but there you have it. A large part of the Holocaust in World War II was Germans and their fellow travelers taking everything from the Jews before they killed them. Profit from death factories—a grim truth I care not to contemplate, but it happened. Mass death can be a huge money-maker, and those pulling the strings couldn’t care less about body counts. Quarterly profits—now those they care about.
This suggests a strategy for activism—except efforts at BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) are heavily resisted by the powers that be. Surprise! You can find out more about the BDS movement here.
When protests are bad for business, that’s when the powerful pay attention. Powerful people already know the truth—they do everything in their power to determine what is “true”—so they’re not interested in right or wrong. What’s “right” is what makes money and what’s wrong, very wrong, loses money. You can’t appeal to their collective conscience (Good luck with that!), but you can possibly appeal to or cut into their collective profits.
I didn’t know I was a “Jew-hater” until I suggested in a comment that giving Bibi Netanyahu everything he wants (and then some) might not be the same as serving the national interests and security needs of the United States. Well, there, I said it. Maybe Bibi shouldn’t get all the bombs and weapons and support he wants, whenever he wants and whatever Israel does with them.
And for that, I became a “Jew-hater.” I guess because I wasn’t 100% subservient to Bibi.
These are strange days in America. Congress can’t jump to its collective feet quickly enough to applaud Bibi. Members of Congress proudly display Israeli flags outside their offices. Heck, a few members of Congress (notably Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania) aren’t happy unless they literally wrap the Israeli flag around their bodies.
Senator Fetterman (on the right) shows the proper deference to Israel
What gives? What accounts for this madness?
Oh, I know some of the reasons. AIPAC. Christian evangelicals looking to the Second Coming. All the money ($100 million and more) Miriam Adelson gave to Donald Trump. All the profits to be made from weaponry and war. The corporate media, bought and paid for by billionaires. And so on. Yet something deeper, more insidious, seems to be at work here.
We used to have the “America, love it or leave it” crowd. Now we have the “Israel, love it—or else” crowd. In America!
Of course, ad hominem attacks like “Jew-hater” are meant to distract from real issues. People call you names when they can’t think of intelligent and persuasive ways of challenging your arguments. Yet this is America, after all, where much of our discourse (such as it is) consists of name-calling and other forms of insults and slander.
Honestly, I loved the response of another commenter to the “Jew-hater” epithet. The person simply typed: YAWN.
If you’re willing to think or write critically about Israel and the actions of its government and leaders, which indeed every American (and Israeli) should be, be prepared to be attacked as a Jew-hater, an anti-Semite, or worse. It comes with the territory. Even my Jewish friends who write critically are not immune. They, of course, are dismissed as “self-hating Jews.”
Fortunately, it appears most Americans today are onto the game that’s being played here. Progress, of a sort, even as Bibi continues to get everything he wants. Now Bibi says he’ll nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
More than 100 people are already dead from catastrophic flooding in Texas. The “blame game” has started, with the Trump administration taking heat for flash flood warnings that came too late to save those in the path of surging rivers fed by thunderstorms dumping too much rain in too short a time.
Camp Mystic in Texas was especially hard hit by flooding, losing 27 children and camp counselors
The White House, naturally, says it’s not their fault. If you want to blame someone, blame God. A quick summary from NBC:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back against questions as to why flood alerts were issued “while people were likely sleeping” and what the administration is doing to ensure alerts go out earlier.
Leavitt noted that the National Weather Service issued escalating warnings Thursday regarding the weather forecasts as information came in. She said there were “timely flash flood alerts” including a flood watch in the afternoon, evening, and “timely flash flood alerts” at night.
“So people were sleeping in the middle of the night when this flood came — that was an act of God,” Leavitt said. “It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did, but there were early and consistent warnings.”
“An act of God” — Divine wrath? Judgment? What, exactly?
Why do we use this expression, “an act of God,” as if God or gods are just waiting to smite people with hurricanes, floods, locusts, tornados, and (Lord?) knows what else.
Wasn’t it really an act of nature? Too much heat, too much humidity, and wind patterns combining somewhat predictably to cause dangerous flash flooding. An act of nature we can guard against. An act of God implies caprice, violence, and forces that can neither be predicted nor prevented.
We know about acts of nature. That’s why we have science and scientists, or in this case meteorologists, radar, supercomputers, and the like. We fund a national weather service of experts so that we can predict and perhaps ameliorate some of these acts of nature.
But we know as well nature is becoming more extreme. Nature’s acts are becoming more violent as the earth slowly warms and as climate patterns become more violent and hence often less predictable—as well as more punishing.
Let’s not talk about acts of God, whether as a way to shift blame or even as a form of comfort. (Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t be comforted if someone told me God had swept my loved one away in a flash flood He sent.) Let’s talk about acts of nature, and how they’re growing more violent, and the steps we can take to understand them, predict them better, and lessen their impact.
Again, “act of God” gets us nowhere. But I know man is acting, with drill, baby, drill consistency, and man’s acts are something we do have control over.
With sympathy to all those who’ve lost loved ones in the terrifying flash flooding in Texas. Nature can be brutal—it’s why we must respect it, study it, and understand it.
Bracing Views 