Category: US Foreign Relations

Peace Dividends? Not in Our Lifetimes

W.J. Astore

War is America’s Growth Stock

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, America heard something about “peace dividends” and “a new world order.” With the Soviet Union gone, the Cold War over, America could take all the hundreds of billions it had been spending on weapons and wars and spend it instead on America. We could, in theory, embrace peace, reinvest in America, and save our children from a world of incessant wars and preparations for the same.

It was not to be.

The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with Desert Shield/Storm, when America allegedly kicked its “Vietnam Syndrome” once and for all, according to then-President George H.W. Bush. This “syndrome” was allegedly inhibiting America’s pursuit of righteous victory through military means, and the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait was allegedly proof that America was back and that military force had powerful efficacy for good.

Out went the idea of peace dividends. This was America’s moment to dominate, a Pax Americana achieved through military force or threats of the same. U.S. dominance of the Middle East contributed to the decision by Al Qaeda to launch attacks against the USA, but any U.S. culpability for 9/11 was swept away by another President Bush, George W., who explained that Al Qaeda had no rationale for 9/11 other than their hatred of American freedoms.

The aftermath of 9/11 was an orgy of American violence directed against “evildoers” everywhere. It was a two-decade global war on terror, GWOT as jihad, leading to wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. Even as these wars proved disastrous, those who advocated for them saluted themselves as being right but (perhaps) for the wrong reason, the “wrong” reason being some version of having loved America too much, whereas those who’d opposed these wars were “wrong” even though events had proven them to be right (they were wrong apparently because they didn’t love America enough, especially its domineering government).

It’s been a long time, more than three decades, since I’ve heard anyone mention peace dividends. Even when President Biden ended the Afghan War in 2021, military spending soared upwards, and this was before the Russia-Ukraine War. With the Hamas attacks on Israel and the impending invasion and destruction of Gaza by the IDF, America will likely embrace war and increase military spending with even more fervor.

War is America’s growth stock. Our politicians brag that military aid to countries like Ukraine and Israel serves to create jobs in America. Rarely is any mention made of Russian dead, of Palestinian dead, or for that matter of any dead, as America dominates the global trade in weaponry. The idea of “the merchants of death,” the opposition by the U.S. Senate in the 1930s to making profits by killing people, seems like ancient history, seems absurd, given America’s tight embrace of militarism. If we’re not fighting wars we’re arming others to fight wars. And we console ourselves that we’re only providing “good guys” with guns, for, as the NRA taught us, the only way to stop bad guys with guns is to give good guys even more guns.

Perhaps that’s the essence of U.S. foreign policy today. We give “good guys” like Ukrainians and Israelis all the guns they want to go kill “bad guys” like Russians and Palestinians while congratulating ourselves for “investing” in America’s arms manufactures. Indeed, members of Congress have said that providing older weapons from U.S. stockpiles of the same to countries like Ukraine is positively wonderful, since it forces the U.S. military to buy new weapons for itself, helping to create more jobs among the makers of guns, ammo, and bombs. What a win-win!

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about President Lyndon Johnson and how his “Great Society” and fight against poverty was done in by the calamitous Vietnam War in the 1960s. What’s tragic today in America is that we no longer have a vision of a great society, a better society, a fairer, more just, and more equitable society. Endless war and wildly excessive military expenditures is our only vision.

We put it on our stamps. And that’s where it remains.

The result is that “peace” has become a word rarely heard in America, a Pollyanna-like concept, easily dismissed as pie-in-the-sky. In fact, the last U.S. president to speak sincerely and powerfully for peace was John F. Kennedy, and that was sixty years ago. No president since JFK has stood before us to advance a vision of eventual world peace rather than of endless war and expensive preparations for the same.

We are told and taught today that peace is impossible and war is inevitable. Those who promote peace are dismissed as dreamers and weaklings as the “warriors” and hawks are promoted for their alleged realism and toughness.

Constant wars and preparations for the same destroy democracy and lead to spiritual death, to cite the words of James Madison and Martin Luther King Jr. Those are the true dividends of war, not jobs in American factories producing bullets and bombs. The true dividends of peace are a restoration of democracy and spiritual renewal in America.

Which dividends as a people do we truly want?

What, Exactly, Is “Repugnant” About Efforts to Stop Mass Killing?

W.J. Astore

The Biden Administration Embraces War and Israel

Remarkably, the press secretary of the Biden administration stated that calls for deescalation of conflict in Gaza, calls for restraint, calls for a ceasefire, are “disgraceful” and “repugnant.” There are not two sides to the conflict, the press secretary said. There’s only the Israeli side of righteousness. And Israel must be given a blank check, as well as plenty of U.S. weaponry, to strike back. And so Israel has, dropping 6000 bombs in six days. Obviously, Israel had a prepared list of targets; you don’t drop one thousand bombs a day on Gaza in “precision” strikes without being long prepared to do so.

Sure looks “precise” to me. Jabalia, Gaza Strip, 10/11/23 (Hatem Moussa/AP) 

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden said he had seen photos of Hamas attackers beheading Israeli babies. No such photos exist. Indeed, the initial claim of Hamas beheading babies was false, a frontline rumor that was debunked by the reporter who put it out there.

By recklessly repeating an unsubstantiated battlefield rumor of heinous atrocities and inventing “photos” to support it, President Biden demonstrated his complete lack of fitness to serve as president.

Think about it. In what world is it acceptable for America’s president to claim he’d seen actual photos of beheadings of babies when no such photos exist? How could the president be so recklessly confused, assuming it was simply confusion?

As far as I know, the only candidate for the presidency in 2024 who’s acquitted himself with dignity is Cornel West. West actually accepts that Palestinian babies and children are just as precious and worthy of life as their Israeli counterparts. Every other “name” candidate, e.g. Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well as all the Republicans, are at pains to support Israel without reservation or qualification.

Indeed, far more debate is allowed in Israel about the actions of the government there than is allowed in the U.S. mainstream media and in Congress. Congress is far more obedient to Netanyahu than the Knesset. Perhaps he should be nominated as the new House Speaker? He’d win in a landslide.

Of course, I deplore the Hamas attacks and the deaths of innocent Israelis, just as I deplore the deaths of innocent Palestinians caught in the reprisal bombings. It’s horrible when innocent people die. Isn’t this how any normal and sane human being would feel? Shouldn’t we all unite in calling for a ceasefire, an end to the killing, and some kind of way forward that doesn’t end in mass death and the total destruction of Gaza?

What is so “repugnant” about that?

6000 Bombs in Six Days

W.J. Astore

The Israeli Air War on Gaza

I read today that Israel has already dropped 6000 bombs on Gaza in six days. Here’s the report from the Wall Street Journal:

The Israeli Air Force said it has dropped about 6,000 bombs targeted at Hamas in Gaza since the war began, adding that it will continue the campaign as long as necessary. The airstrikes killed hundreds of Hamas militants and damaged the group’s military infrastructure, the Israeli Air Force said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The Israeli airstrikes caused extensive damage in several neighborhoods in Gaza, killing more than 1,500 Palestinians, nearly half of whom were women and children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. More than 1,300 Israelis have died since the Hamas assault began.

In 2019, I wrote an article for TomDispatch on the dark side of airpower. Included within were ten cautionary tenets about the use of airpower, with its illusion of “surgical” and “precision” strikes and the way video footage of the same obscures the deaths of innocents. Below are those tenets, unchanged from 2019.

More bombs will be dropped on Gaza in the coming days and weeks. I’m sure Israel will claim, just as U.S. military officials typically have in other wars, that those bombs mainly killed terrorists and other evildoers and that “collateral damage” (all those dead women and children and other innocents), though regrettable, has been limited. And so it goes.

Bomb crater in the Gaza Strip. We see damage to buildings and infrastructure but rarely do we see dead bodies. (Naaman Omar/Zuma Press)

Ten Cautionary Tenets About Air Power (2019)

1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn’t mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results.

2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. American air power pulverized both North Korea and Vietnam (not to speak of neighboring Laos and Cambodia), yet the Korean War ended in a stalemate and the Vietnam War in defeat. (It tells you the world about such thinking that air power enthusiasts, reconsidering the Vietnam debacle, tend to argue the U.S. should have bombed even more — lots more.) Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year. 

3. No matter how much it’s advertised as “precise,” “discriminate,” and “measured,” bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to end.

Consider, for instance, the “decapitation” strikes launched against Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and his top officials in the opening moments of the Bush administration’s invasion of 2003. Despite the hype about that being the beginning of the most precise air campaign in all of history, 50 of those attacks, supposedly based on the best intelligence around, failed to take out Saddam or a single one of his targeted officials. They did, however, cause “dozens” of civilian deaths. Think of it as a monstrous repeat of the precision air attacks launched on Belgrade in 1999 against Slobodan Milosevic and his regime that hit the Chinese embassy instead, killing three journalists. 

Here, then, is the question of the day: Why is it that, despite all the “precision” talk about it, air power so regularly proves at best a blunt instrument of destruction? As a start, intelligence is often faulty. Then bombs and missiles, even “smart” ones, do go astray. And even when U.S. forces actually kill high-value targets (HVTs), there are always more HVTs out there. A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror: the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh insurgents to strike.

4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), a graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn’t, convince the North Vietnamese to give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders — us — from South Vietnam. Fast-forward to our era and consider recent signals sent to North Korea and Iran by the Trump administration via B-52 bomber deployments, among other military “messages.” There’s no evidence that either country modified its behavior significantly in the face of the menace of those baby-boomer-era airplanes.

5. Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. Similarly, in the present moment, making operational and then maintaining Lockheed Martin’s boondoggle of a jet fighter, the F-35, is expected to cost at least $1.45 trillion over its lifetime. The new B-21 stealth bomber will cost more than $100 billion simply to buy. Naval air wings on aircraft carriers cost billions each year to maintain and operate. These days, when the sky’s the limit for the Pentagon budget, such costs may be (barely) tolerable. When the money finally begins to run out, however, the military will likely suffer a serious hangover from its wildly extravagant spending on air power.

6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like “total situational awareness.” It can instead prove to be a kind of delusion, while war practiced in its spirit often becomes little more than an exercise in destruction. You simply can’t negotiate a truce or take prisoners or foster other options when you’re high above a potential battlefield and your main recourse is blowing up people and things.

7. Air power is inherently offensive. That means it’s more consistent with imperial power projection than with national defense. As such, it fuels imperial ventures, while fostering the kind of “global reach, global power” thinking that has in these years had Air Force generals in its grip.

8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them. Consider Vietnam again. In the early 1960s, the Air Force argued that it alone could resolve that conflict at the lowest cost (mainly in American bodies). With enough bombs, napalm, and defoliants, victory was a sure thing and U.S. ground troops a kind of afterthought. (Initially, they were sent in mainly to protect the airfields from which those planes took off.) But bombing solved nothing and then the Army and the Marines decided that, if the Air Force couldn’t win, they sure as hell could. The result was escalation and disaster that left in the dust the original vision of a war won quickly and on the cheap due to American air supremacy.

9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures — both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those being bombed become more resilient and resolute. 

10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war. 

The Road to Perdition

If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.

For this reason, precision warfare is truly an oxymoron. War isn’t precise. It’s nasty, bloody, and murderous. War’s inherent nature — its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals — isn’t changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington’s enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf.

Who doesn’t know the old riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Here’s a twenty-first-century air power variant on it: If foreign children die from American bombs but no U.S. media outlets report their deaths, will anyone grieve? Far too often, the answer here in the U.S. is no and so our wars go on into an endless future of global destruction.

In reality, this country might do better to simply ground its many fighter planes, bombers, and drones. Paradoxically, instead of gaining the high ground, they are keeping us on a low road to perdition.

What War Does to Us

W.J. Astore

It Makes Us Hate; It Leads Us to Slaughter

From the Gaza Strip, the Hamas offensive against Israel has been murderously effective. The vaunted and much-celebrated Israeli military was caught by surprise and is responding to the Hamas attacks with its own version of murder, as captured in this announcement:

Israel Defense Minister: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” [emphasis added]

Actually, we have laws against allowing animals to starve. Think of the SPCA, the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Furthermore, comparing humans to animals is most often an insult to animals. Animals’ thirst for blood is sated quickly compared to humans and our thirst.

Let’s be clear: Hamas and the Palestinian people are not “human animals.” They are not lesser humans or beasts. Are the Jewish people forgetting the way that the Nazis reduced them to lesser humans or beasts to be exterminated during the Holocaust?

The Gaza Strip has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Announcing a siege against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (no food, no power, mostly unsafe water) is the equivalent of launching a holocaust in slow motion. How is this in any way a proportionate and defensible response to the attacks by Hamas?

Meanwhile, as usual the U.S. government, showing its inherent unity and conformity, is 100% behind Israel, sending an aircraft carrier and issuing blank checks of unequivocal support. The mainstream media once again is telling Americans which side to hate. Think of the Palestinians as a gaggle of little Putins and you’ll be applauded for your right-think.

This is why I hate war. It turns us into killers. It leads us to hate those we kill. And hate kills our minds and makes us even more willing killers.

I applaud and support neither Hamas nor Israel. I applaud and support those who fight for a peaceful future in which we don’t see each other as “human animals” to be slaughtered with impunity.

The War Party Rules Washington

W.J. Astore

Guess What’s a High Priority for Democrats in Congress?

Here’s a reminder of a stark reality: When President Joe Biden finally ended the disastrous Afghan War in 2021, the Pentagon war budget went up by roughly $50 billion.

The Afghan War was costing America almost $50 billion a year until the war party in DC (both Democrats and Republicans) decided enough was enough. So how could ending a war result in a substantial increase in military spending?

That’s easily answered. The bipartisan war party pivoted from the lucrative but frustrating war on terror to the much more lucrative “new cold war” with Russia and China. And of course Vladimir Putin’s provoked invasion of Ukraine early in 2022 sealed the deal. Putin’s illegal invasion, provoked as it was, as NATO itself admits, was a massive boon to the military-industrial-congressional complex. Pentagon war budgets have continued to soar since 2021 (and indeed since 2001 and the original launch of the war on terror), with no end in sight other than perhaps nuclear Armageddon. (Not an end I’m looking forward to, but there’s no fate but that which we make.)

A few in Congress, mostly Republicans, are finally growing tired of massive military aid to Ukraine, though these same Republicans are generally in favor of even more massive military budgets to “deter” China. Yet Democrats are fighting against reductions in military weaponry to Ukraine with the kind of energy you’d think would be devoted to helping Americans deal with poverty and inflation.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (left) carrying water for Zelensky of Ukraine. More war, please! 

So, for example, House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has stated that a high priority for Democrats in the ongoing struggle over electing a new House Speaker is that the new Speaker must support higher funding—for Ukraine! (Jeffries also wants the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden to end.)

Higher military spending for Ukraine is a top priority for Democrats, even as Americans struggle with higher bills for food, housing, health care, and other essentials of life. Think about that for a moment.

Of course, Congress was prepared to continue paying for Ukraine’s war effort even if the federal government had shut down, so Jeffries is nothing but consistent here. Waging a wildly expensive and dangerous proxy war against Russia is more important to Congress than helping Americans who are struggling across our land with food and gas bills.

Small wonder that the largest political party in America is composed of “independents.”

Whether it’s RFK Jr., Cornel West, or someone else, we need to get behind independent candidates and reject the Democratic-Republican war party. Vote the war pigs out!

War as an “Investment”

W.J. Astore

The Bizarre Business-Speak of Mass Killing

Did you know the Russia-Ukraine War is a great “investment” for the United States? A terrific opportunity to kill lots of Russians and to destroy lots of their military equipment at a relatively cheap cost to us? (Just don’t mention the price paid by Ukraine.) It gives new meaning to the expression “making a killing” on the “market.”

To Gordon Gekko’s infamous “greed is good” speech we must now add “war is good.” That war is “right.” That it “works”—at least for America, allegedly. 

War as an “investment” truly symbolizes the moral bankruptcy of conventional discourse in the U.S. political mainstream. Instead of war being a calamity, a catastrophe, a realm of death and destruction, dare I say even a mortal sin of grievous evil, we’re told that instead it’s an investment that’s paying dividends, especially in that growth stock known as Ukraine.

We can’t let MAGA Republicans stop the Ukraine “investment,” can we? Not when it’s paying such great dividends

Even body counts and truck counts from the Vietnam War era are being brought back to show what a great “investment” the Ukraine War has been for the U.S. In her latest, Caitlin Johnstone cites war-lover Max Boot for his advocacy of the Russia-Ukraine War as a continuing investment opportunity for the U.S., including the use of body and truck counts as a measure of progress:

“Russia has lost an estimated 120,000 soldiers and 170,000 to 180,000 have been injured,” [Max] Boot writes [in a Washington Post op-ed]. “Russia has also lost an estimated 2,329 tanks, 2,817 infantry fighting vehicles, 2,868 trucks and jeeps, 354 armored personnel carriers, 538 self-propelled artillery vehicles, 310 towed artillery pieces, 92 fixed-wing aircraft and 106 helicopters.”

“The Russian armed forces have been devastated, thereby reducing the risk to front-line NATO states such as Poland and the Baltic republics that the United States is treaty-bound to protect,” Boot continues. “And all of that has been accomplished without having to put a single U.S. soldier at risk on the front lines.”

“That’s an incredible investment,” gloats Boot.

At no time in his masturbatory gushing about how many Russians this war has helped kill does Boot make any mention of the immense toll this deliberately provoked and completely unnecessary war has taken on Ukrainian lives. Their deaths and dismemberments and displacement are the largest price being paid into this “investment” by far, but Boot doesn’t deem them worthy of even a footnote.

We’ve been seeing this “investment” line being promoted with increasing frequency by US empire managers and their apologists. In an article published in the Connecticut Post last month, Senator Richard Blumenthal assured Americans that “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment.” A few days prior to that Senator Mitt Romney had described the proxy war as “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done,” because “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money… a weakened Russia is a good thing.” In December Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that funding the proxy war is “a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies and contest our core interests.” Last November the imperial war machine-funded think tank Center for European Policy Analysis published a report arguing that “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment.”

Imagine the vacuity, the bankruptcy, the venality, the sinfulness of writing about war and killing as “an absolutely incredible investment.” And what is our ROI, our return on investment? A lot of dead and wounded Russians and Ukrainians, a devastated and poisoned landscape, millions of war refugees, and an increasing likelihood of a wider war that could possibly go nuclear. ROI, indeed.

War is many things, but it is not an “investment.” People who talk and write like this have no moral center. They are soulless. They are automatons of war.

Everything that’s wrong with America in one sentence

W.J. Astore

Guess who’s exempt from a potential government shutdown?

I saw this today at CNN.

The Pentagon has also determined that the training and support of Ukrainian forces is exempt from a potential government shutdown, and will continue even in the increasingly likely event that Congress fails to pass a spending bill in the coming days.

Isn’t it nice to know that even if the U.S. federal government shuts down, Ukraine will still get all the weapons and related military aid they need to continue to fight and kill Russians? Americans may be furloughed from their jobs or have to work for no pay, but Ukraine will get paid.

That one sentence shows you the priorities for “your” government. Guess what? You’re not a priority, but war overseas is. You’re not exempt from a government shutdown, but Ukrainian military forces are.

So, if you want to get paid, America, or enter a federal facility that may be closed due to a shutdown, just wave a blue-and-yellow flag and tell the government it’s all for the war effort in Ukraine.

Bring this flag with you and tell the government you’re exempt from the looming government shutdown

RFK Faces the Nation and Questions Its Conscience

W.J. Astore

The Moral Question of America’s Wars

It was November 1967. The Vietnam War was at its height. His brother, the President, had been shot and killed in Dallas four years earlier. He himself would die of an assassin’s bullet within the next year. It was time for Robert F. Kennedy Sr. to “Face the Nation.”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jkbW5yJanzc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

TV was more serious back then, and very few politicians today, certainly not Donald Trump and Joe Biden, could speak with RFK’s clarity and eloquence.

It’s worth listening to Bobby Kennedy’s interview from 1967, but especially the last six minutes (beginning at the 18-minute mark) as he attempts to explicate his moral reservations and objections to America’s war against Vietnam. Such moral objections to war are rarely if ever heard today from Democrats and Republicans in DC. Bobby Kennedy wasn’t just saying the Vietnam War was dumb, that the U.S. military was employing bad strategy, that the war was too expensive, that it was a distraction from pressing domestic concerns, and so on.

Near the end of this interview, Bobby Kennedy called for serious and deep moral reflection on the use of U.S. military power overseas.  He asked Americans to examine their consciences and cited the tens of thousands of civilians killed and wounded (not just U.S. troops).  He said America was losing its moral position in the world due to the war. He was right.  

RFK wasn’t anti-war. He recognized war was occasionally unavoidable. Yet he was willing to articulate war’s horrors. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent women and children from wanton American firepower and especially napalm. The creation of millions of war refugees. The harsh realities of war should trouble Americans, Kennedy said, especially when its awful costs are justified on dubious grounds. Was it truly the case, Kennedy asked, that America had to fight communism over there so that we didn’t have to fight it over here? Did the U.S. have the moral right to wage a ghastly war against North Vietnam on the off-chance that a communist victory there might eventually pose a threat to America?

What I heard here from Bobby Kennedy was a dramatic appeal to conscience.  An appeal to Americans to look within themselves and to stop needless violence, not only in Vietnam but also here at home in America’s streets.

In November 1967, Bobby Kennedy said something truly vital. Appealing to moral conscience, he recognized we are all human.  That all lives matter, not only those of U.S. troops in Vietnam. And that far too often the decision makers in Washington had forgotten this most basic of moral facts.

I can’t say what Bobby would have achieved, killed as he was by an assassin’s bullet.  But I think he was a healer, a man who had matured much since the death of his brother, a man of compassion and conscience, a man willing to reject the notion that might makes right and that million of “others” can and should be killed, wounded, or made refugees simply because it could be justified in terms of “protecting America.”

Do we have that right? Bobby asks. Plainly, he believed we didn’t.

What a shame he didn’t live to become president.

The Dogs of War Are Winning

W.J. Astore

Like a herd of cats, antiwar activists lack unity 

Clearly, on this 22nd anniversary of 9/11, the dogs of war have won and continue to win.

It hasn’t mattered that, over the last 16 years, after a 20-year military career, I’ve written hundreds of articles critical of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) and in support of peacemaking and diplomacy rather than war making and gargantuan military expenditures. My writing hasn’t slowed America’s collective march toward nationalism, militarism, and war.

Lately, I’ve been working more closely with antiwar groups. They mean well. America needs them. But they are losing.

There are many reasons for this, the main one being the sheer size, reach, and power of the MICC. But there’s another reason that’s become apparent to me that’s perhaps best described in metaphorical terms.

The dogs of war run in packs obedient to the alphas. They know exactly what they want: power, profit, dominance. They are usually cocksure in their confidence and think of themselves as realists and patriots. They are rewarded with loads of money.

My cat. She does not back down to the dogs of war. But she’s territorial and doesn’t play well with others. She’s been known to show me who’s boss. 

Critics of war are more like cats. They tend to be territorial, prickly, and disobedient. They may be against war, but they are often at cross purposes on how best to resist it. They may be quick to take offense at perceived slights and don’t always play well together.  They also have a lot less money. They are likely to see themselves as idealists and to reject patriotism as “combustible rubbish” and “the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

America is a dog country. Cats are suspect, especially antiwar ones. Especially brave cats (Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning) are locked away in cages. Meanwhile, the alpha dogs make billions barking and growling and howling for war and yet more war.

Until we change this dynamic, the alpha dogs will continue to spread havoc in America and indeed across the globe.

Come On, Ukraine, Learn from the U.S. Military

W.J. Astore

American experts have all the answers for Ukraine

In today’s New York Times send out, I saw the following story:

Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, U.S. Officials Say

American strategists say Ukraine’s troops are too spread out and need to concentrate along the counteroffensive’s main front in the south.

Listen to the U.S. military, Ukraine! Don’t be casualty-averse! Concentrate your forces. Take the fight to the Russian enemy. Use all those cluster munitions we’ve sent you. Commit your armored reserve and punch a hole in the Russian lines. Break through, break out, and drive toward Crimea. You know: just like Americans would do in your place.

One might forgive Ukrainians if they asked, When was the last war you “experts” won for America? Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? Korea? What about ongoing military commitments to Syria and Somalia? If you’re so good at winning wars, how come the U.S. military didn’t win in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam where you had overwhelming materiel and firepower superiority?

With respect to why Ukraine has its forces “too spread out”: perhaps Ukraine needs to garrison its lines so that it can fend off Russian counterattacks? If Ukraine concentrates its strategic reserve and uses it in a big counteroffensive that stalls, what’s to stop Russia from a decisive riposte? Think of Kursk for Nazi Germany in 1943. Once that huge offensive failed for Germany, using up its strategic reserve, the Red Army seized the initiative on the eastern front and never lost it.

At Kursk in 1943, the Germans committed their reserves in a desperate gamble to seize the initiative from the Soviet Union. When the offensive failed, the Red Army counterattacked and proved unstoppable.

Headlines like the one posted above from the New York Times are intended to be exculpatory for the U.S. If the war turns worse for Ukraine, U.S. “experts” can point to articles like this, casting blame on the Ukrainians for not following sage American advice.

If “we” win in Ukraine, it will be because of generous U.S. aid and especially vaunted U.S. and NATO weaponry; but if they (the Ukrainians) lose, it’s all their fault for not following the advice of America’s master strategists. And, obviously, even if Ukraine loses, plenty of weapons manufacturers in the U.S. are winning and will continue to win. Indeed, a Russian victory could be just the thing to propel even more weapons spending by NATO countries as well as even larger and more monstrous Pentagon budgets.