Here are some macro ideas and thoughts about America’s latest war of choice with Iran:
1. It’s a war so call it that. It’s not “strikes” or “major combat operations.”
2. It’s an unconstitutional, illegal, immoral, and potentially escalatory war.
3. The war has no clear objective other than decapitation of the Iranian leadership (achieved?) and installation of a new regime that will play ball with USA/Israel. That latter outcome is extremely unlikely.
4. It’s a war for Israel to advance its regional hegemony.
5. In the main, the war is neither supported nor understood by the American people. That fact doesn’t seem to matter to the Trump administration.
6. For all those involved, the war will prove increasingly expensive in blood and treasure.
7. Recklessly begun, the war is utterly unpredictable in its final outcomes.
8. The war does not serve the national defense interests of the U.S., as Iran posed no imminent threat to U.S. national security.
9. With no clear Congressional mandate, the war lacks the critical support of the American people. Again, the Trump administration remains unconcerned here.
10. For these reasons, among others, there should be an immediate ceasefire followed by negotiations, leading to discussion of war reparations to be paid by the aggressors. (This scenario, I realize, is unlikely in the extreme.)
Yesterday, I went on “Judging Freedom” with Judge Andrew Napolitano to discuss the Iran War.
As I said to the Judge, I am still confused about America’s true rationale, its intent, and its goals, and I have no clear idea of how this war is going to proceed, let alone end. War is inherently unpredictable, much like fire. Trying to predict its path of destruction, what it will burn and what it will leave behind, and when it will end, is nearly impossible. We must work to contain and extinguish this new fire in the Middle East before it becomes an inferno that engulfs even wider areas, leading to yet more innocents dead.
I woke to the news that Israel/USA is launching attacks (New York Times) and strikes (NBC News) against Iran. The BBC used “joint attack” for the Israeli/U.S. war plan. Three sources, and all three avoiding that useful descriptive word, war.
I suppose Mr. Trump doesn’t have to ask Congress for a declaration of war since it’s not a war—it’s just attacks or strikes or “major combat operations,” as Trump said today.
“All I want is freedom for the [Iranian] people,” Trump also said. Once again, “freedom” is synonymous with war and death.
So perhaps Orwell had it wrong. It’s not war is peace; it’s war is freedom.
It’s funny: I’m listening to ABC News and they keep using the words “strike” or “joint strike” or “preemptive strike.” Or even “larger-scale strike.” Trump sees it as a “noble mission,” but not apparently a Nobel Peace Prize one.
So many lies, so much dishonesty, so much illegality.
Grim times.
If you can stand it, here’s Trump talking about Iran’s terror. Iran has “soaked the earth with blood and guts,” so he claims. I’m glad the USA is innocent of death and violence. No blood and guts from our military “strikes.”
It’s not a war. It’s just “strikes” or “attacks” or something
So remember America: Don’t speak of war. You have no say anyway. Just sit back and watch the strikes and attacks ordered by two paragons of virtue, Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump.
Update (2/28, Noonish)
The words of James Madison resonate here:
Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare …
Allegedly, we’re bombing for freedom in Iran, even as freedom in America vanishes. Is it time to drop “freedom” bombs on ourselves?
Ask Americans (or any other people) being bombed if they think it’s conducive to greater freedom.
My fellow Americans, it’s nice to think we have a semblance of a constitutional republic, but that warship has sailed. This time, to Iran.
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This AM, I read an interesting story on the Supreme Court’s repeal of Trump’s tariffs. Justice Neil Gorsuch made the point that his fellow justices’ interpretation of the law often changes based on whether the president is a Republican or Democrat. This, to state the obvious, is not how the law is supposed to work.
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Years ago, I spied a bumper sticker that read: “I’m already against the next war.” It’s on my mind again.
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I’ll support a war when Hollywood celebrities and sports stars willingly enlist. And when the sons and daughters of presidents and senators and CEOs happily join them in the ranks.
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Do you think it’s a coincidence that Bibi Netanyahu keeps visiting the White House even as the Trump administration prepares for yet another war in the Middle East?
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A great book for this moment is “Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq” (2024) by Dennis Fritz. Fritz, a retired AF command chief master sergeant, was in the halls of power when the Bush/Cheney administration decided to invade Iraq in 2003. He identifies three main reasons for the Iraq War fiasco: U.S. leaders’ concerns about “credibility” and the perpetual fear of being perceived as “weak”; serving the security needs of Israel, especially by weakening Hamas and Hezbollah together with Iraq; and neocon fever dreams of imperial dominance in the Middle East connected to the control of oil.
In his conclusion, Fritz is scathingly blunt:
More than 4,500 [U.S. troops] made the ultimate sacrifice, and 100,000 have been wounded for life. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein posed no threat to our national security. The Iraq War wasn’t an honest mistake. It was a calculated lie—a deadly betrayal. Our service members were used as pawns by the government to fulfill an imperialist ideology. Their sacrifice had no basis in national defense. All Americans should be outraged, and we should never let this happen again. The troops didn’t even know why they were going to war.
It saddens me to think that Fritz may soon need to write “Deadly Betrayal II” about the forthcoming war with Iran.
In Israel, the two defense officials said that significant preparations were underway for the possibility of a joint strike with the United States, even though no decision has been made about whether to carry out such an attack. They said the planning envisions delivering a severe blow over a number of days with the goal of forcing Iran into concessions at the negotiating table that it has so far been unwilling to make.
The U.S. buildup suggests an array of possible Iranian targets, including short and medium range missiles, missile storage depots, nuclear sites and other military targets, such as headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The ultimate decision on scope of targets is largely up to Mr. Trump, U.S. officials said.
Strangely, nowhere in this article is it mentioned that U.S. military attacks on Iran legally require a Congressional declaration of war. Apparently, it’s all up to Mr. Trump and Israel whether Iran gets hammered soon.
We the people have absolutely no say. The U.S. Constitution simply doesn’t matter.
Iran poses no direct threat to U.S. national security. There is no clear and present danger; no defensible reason to launch yet another attack on Iran. Yet it seems those attacks will soon be coming, as long as Israel has something to say about this (and that country most certainly does).
Why war with Iran? Apparently for “regime change,” apparently for the oil, and apparently for Israel.
A diplomatic settlement appears to be a long shot here. Perhaps more like a “Hail Mary” pass.
No matter how unconstitutional, no matter how unnecessary to national defense, war always seems to find a way. I sure hope I’m wrong here.
Who the hell wants to talk about genocide and man’s inhumanity to man?
I taught courses on the Holocaust, where I came across a two-volume encyclopedia of genocide (see list of references at the end). We humans have a remarkable record of killing each other (usually couched as killing the “other,” the “bad” people). That a two-volume encyclopedia of genocide exists says something truly horrendous about the human condition.
Far too often, a chosen people, a “master race,” decides to eliminate barbarians, inferiors, primitives, race enemies, whatever words are used to demonize other humans. Often, it’s said we must kill them before they kill us, so mass murder is defined and defended in terms of safety and security. The “bad” people force us to kill them. We don’t want to do it—they make us! And we hate them all the more for making us kill.
At the same time, mass murder is often quite profitable for the killers. In the Holocaust, the Nazis systematically stole everything from the Jews they were killing. They stole their houses and apartments, their businesses, their furniture, their jewelry, their clothing: everything they could get their greedy murderous hands on. In Gaza today and on the West Bank, we see Israel stealing land and most everything else from murdered and displaced Palestinians. The Israeli government justifies mass theft and mass death as a defensive war against barbaric terrorists, just as the Nazis saw themselves as being at war with inferior Jews and other racial undesirables like the gypsies.
The Nazis claimed the Jews were an existential threat to the “master race,” thus all Jews had to be killed, even women, children, and babies. The Israeli government claims Hamas is an existential threat to Jews and that all Palestinians are, more or less, members or supporters of Hamas and therefore must be eliminated (murdered or expelled). Women, children, babies: they’re all Hamas.
America has its own history of genocide. Various Native American peoples were murdered, shunted aside onto reservations, sent to “civilizing” schools that denied them their history and identity, most of their land stolen from them. This had to be done, the white man claimed, because the Indians were brutal savages, demonically so.
Today, there is great resistance (certainly among U.S. politicians) to the idea that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza. Most U.S. politicians prefer to think of it as a morally justifiable war against Hamas, and even if they don’t completely buy that, they give Israel everything it wants, weapons and money, to facilitate that genocide. Like Pontius Pilate, they wash their hands of blood shed in Gaza, blaming Hamas (or, perhaps for a few, quietly blaming Israel without daring to say it).
Anyhow, these musings came to me as I contemplated a short encyclopedia article I wrote on genocide about 25 years ago. What follows is that article.
GENOCIDE: Legal term coined in 1944 initially to define and condemn Nazi efforts to destroy, deliberately and systematically, Jews as well as Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) in the Holocaust. The term encompasses not only ethnic- and racially-motivated extermination but also cultural, national, and political. Although the term is fairly recent, genocidal practices are nearly as old as recorded history. Witness the Roman annihilation of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War. Yet genocide as a category is usually applied to events of more recent history, with the Turkish persecution of Armenians during World War I providing a paradigm of ruthless and wholesale murder to extirpate an entire people. Accusing Armenians of being pro-Russian and envying their domination of eastern Anatolia, Turkish officials forced them to emigrate east across mountains in winter. Hundreds of thousands died of exposure, starvation, or in massacres; perhaps 1.5 million died in total from 1915 to 1923.
Josef Stalin’s persecution of Ukrainians in the 1930s also constituted genocide, as Stalin distrusted their political loyalty. By confiscating crops and seed grain and preventing emigration, Stalin consigned five million Ukrainians to early graves. Nazi extermination policies were more racially oriented, as Adolf Hitler considered Jews and Gypsies to be irredeemable biological menaces to the purity of Aryan blood. The machinery of death employed by Nazis—railroads and cattle cars, gas chambers and ovens—and the systematic pillaging and gleeful humiliation of victims set a despicably new standard for human barbarity. Six million Jews and half a million Gypsies died at the hands of this evil regime. The post-war Nuremberg Trials prosecuted a few of the more prominent architects of the so-called Final Solution, but many others escaped judgment.
Although the United Nations’ Genocide Convention (1951) made genocide a crime under international law, lack of military forces and international criminal courts to enforce the convention has crippled efforts to deter or punish perpetrators. Acts of genocide continued, whether by the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian “killing fields” in the 1970s, where one million perished, or by Hutu extremists in 1994, who massacred 800,000 Tutsis in a matter of months as the international community wrung its hands. Events closer to Europe that endangered Western stability drew greater scrutiny. Thus in 1993 the UN created a War Crimes Tribunal to prosecute practitioners of “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. Despite a handful of convictions, prosecution and prevention of genocidal crimes remain serious challenges facing the international community in the twenty-first century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartov, Omer. Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, Oxford, 2000.
Charny, Israel W. Encyclopedia of Genocide, 2 vols, Santa Barbara, CA, 1999.
Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, New York, 2002.
Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed. Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, Boulder, CO, 1998.
I was reading an article by James Baldwin today from July 11, 1966 about the “Harlem Six” and his thoughts on policing. His words resonated as I thought of recent events in Minneapolis and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
James Baldwin
Here’s what Baldwin had to say in 1966:
This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect. [Emphasis added.]
Yes, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, indeed all Americans expect the law to be our servant. We don’t expect the law to be our murderer.
President Trump is now saying Good and Pretti’s deaths shouldn’t have happened even as he’s also said they were no angels (hinting that maybe their murders were justified, or that they somehow were responsible for their own executions).
Of course, Trump and members of his administration have said far worse, reflexively denouncing Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists” while suggesting the people who’ve suffered the most have been the ICE agents who shot and killed them!
Claims such as these are an insidious form of authoritarian madness.
ICE agents, like all elements of law enforcement, are supposed to be public servants, upholders of the law, not a law unto themselves. When the law becomes a torturer and a murderer, it becomes a moral obscenity, as Baldwin noted.
If we are to make any progress in America, we need equal justice for all; we need to stop blaming the victims; and we must stop kowtowing to murderous authority.
Hi Everyone: Here’s my latest post for TomDispatch.com. It was inspired by President Trump’s notion of a “dream military,” a dream that consists of throwing another $500 billion at the Pentagon while building a “golden dome,” more nuclear weapons, and a new class of naval battleship named after—you guessed it—Donald Trump.
Once upon a time, in the aftermath of a devastating civil war, Americans recognized that “war is all hell.” Do we need the antidote of another calamitous war to move us to rethink our imperial march and global warmongering? If that war should go nuclear, it will be far too late to rethink anything as humanity (what’s left of it) struggles to survive a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
What does not kill us does not necessarily make us stronger.
What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments? Questions like those are rarely addressed in honest ways these days in America. Instead, the Trump administration favors preparations for war and more war, fueled by potentially enormous increases in military spending that are dishonestly framed as “recapitalizations” of America’s security and safety.
Such framing makes Pete Hegseth, America’s self-styled “secretary of war,” seem almost refreshing in his embrace of a warrior ethos. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is another “warrior” who cheers for conflict, whether with Venezuela, Iran, or even — yes! — Russia. Such macho men revel in what they believe is this country’s divine mission to dominate the world. Tragically, at the moment, unapologetic warmongers like Hegseth and Graham are winning the political and cultural battle here in America.
Of course, U.S. warmongering is anything but new, as is a belief in global dominance through high military spending. Way back in 1983, as a college student, I worked on a project that critiqued President Ronald Reagan’s “defense” buildup and his embrace of pie-in-the-sky concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as “Star Wars.” Never did I imagine that, more than 40 years later, another Republican president would again come to embrace SDI (freshly rebranded as “Golden Dome”) and ever-more massive military spending, especially since the Soviet Union, America’s superpower rival in Reagan’s time, ceased to exist 35 years ago. Amazingly, Trump even wants to bring back naval battleships, as Reagan briefly did (though he didn’t have the temerity to call for a new class of ships to be named after himself). It’ll be a “golden fleet,” says Trump. What gives?
For much of my life, I’ve tried to answer that very question. Soon after retiring from the U.S. Air Force, I started writing for TomDispatch, penning my first article there in 2007, asking Americans to save the military from itself and especially from its “surge” illusions in the Iraq War. Tom Engelhardt and I, as well as Andrew Bacevich, Michael Klare, and Bill Hartung, among others, have spilled much ink (symbolically speaking in this online era) at TomDispatch urging that America’s military-industrial complex be reined in and reformed. Trump’s recent advocacy of a “dream military” with a proposed budget of $1.5 trillion in 2027 (half a trillion dollars larger than the present Pentagon budget) was backed by places like the editorial board of the Washington Post, which just shows how frustratingly ineffectual our efforts have been. How discouraging, and again, what gives?
Sometimes (probably too often), I seek sanctuary from the hell we’re living through in glib phrases that mask my despair. So, I’ll write something like: America isn’t a shining city on a hill, it’s a bristling fortress in a valley of death; or, At the Pentagon, nothing succeeds like failure, a reference to eight failed audits in a row (part of a 30-year patternof financial finagling) that accompanied disastrous wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Such phrases, no matter how clever I thought they were, made absolutely no impression when it came to slowing the growth of militarism in America. In essence, I’ve been bringing the online equivalent of a fountain pen to a gun fight, which has proved to be anything but a recipe for success.
In America, nothing — and I mean nothing! — seems capable of reversing massive military spending and incessant warfare. President Ronald Reagan, readers of a certain (advanced) age may recall, was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because scandals just didn’t seem to stick to him (at least until the Iran-Contra affair proved tough to shed). Yet history’s best candidate for Teflon “no-stick” status was never Reagan or any other president. It was and remains the U.S. warfare state, headquartered on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. And give the sclerotic bureaucracy of that warfare state full credit. Even as the Pentagon has moved from failure to failure in warfighting, its war budgets have continued to soar and then soar some more.
Forgive the repetition, but what gives? When is our long, national nightmare of embracing war and (wildly overpriced) weaponry going to end? Obviously, not anytime soon. Even the Democrats, supposedly the “resistance” to President Trump, boast openly of their support for what passes for military lethality (or at least overpriced weaponry), while Democratic members of Congress line up for their share of war-driven pork. To cite a cri de coeur from the 1950s, have they no sense of decency?
The Shameless Embrace of Forever War and Its Spoils
I’m just an aging, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Who cares what I think? But America should still care about the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, also known as Ike, the victorious five-star general of D-Day in 1944 and beyond, and this country’s president from 1953 to 1961. Ike was famously the first significant figure to warn Americans about the then-developing military-industrial complex (MIC) in his farewell address to the nation. Yet, even then, his words were largely ignored. Recently, I reread Ike’s warning, perhaps for the 100th time and was struck yet again by the way he highlighted the spiritual dimension of the challenge that is, all too sadly, still facing us.
In case you’ve forgotten them (or never read them), here are Ike’s words from that televised address in January 1961, when he put the phrase “the military-industrial complex” in our language:
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Those were the prescient words of the most senior military man of his era, a true citizen-soldier and president, and more than six decades later, we should and must act on them if we have any hope left of preserving “our liberties and democratic processes.”
Again, wise words, yet our leaders have seldom heeded them. Since 1961, the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” when it comes to the MIC has infected our culture, our economy, even — to steal a term from the era of the disastrous American war in Vietnam — our hearts and minds. Indeed, despite the way the MIC failed so spectacularly to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, and other embattled peoples across the globe in various misbegotten and mendacious wars, it did succeed spectacularly over the years in winning the hearts and minds of those who make the final decisions in the U.S. government.
In an astonishing paradox, a spendthrift military establishment that almost never wins anything, while consistently evading accountability for its losses, has by now captured almost untrammeled authority within our land. It defies logic, but logic never was this country’s strong suit. In fact, only recently, we reached a point of almost ultimate illogic when America’s bully-boy commander-in-chief insisted that a Pentagon budget already bloated with cash needs an extra $500 billion. That, of course, would bring it to about $1.5 trillion annually. Apologies to my Navy friends but even drunken sailors would be challenged to spend that mountain of money.
In short, no matter what it does, the Pentagon, America’s prodigal son, never gets punished. It simply gets more.
More, More, More!
Not only is such colossal military spending bad for this country, but it’s also bad for the military itself, which, after all, didn’t ask for Trump’s proposed $500 billion raise. America’s prodigal son was relatively content with a trillion dollars in yearly spending. In fact, the president’s suggested increase in the Pentagon budget isn’t just reckless; it may well wreck not just what’s left of our democracy, but the military, too.
Like any massive institution, the Pentagon always wants more: more troops, more weapons, more power, invariably justified by inflating (or simply creating) threats to this country. Yet, clarity of thought, not to speak of creativity, rarely derives from excess. Lean times make for better thinking, fat times make for little thought at all.
Not long ago, Trump occasionally talked sense by railing on the campaign trail against the military-industrial complex and its endless wars. Certainly, more than a few Americans voted for him in 2024 because they believed he truly did want to focus on domestic health and strength rather than pursue yet more conflicts globally (and the weapons systems that went with them). Tragically, Trump has morphed into a warlord, greedily siphoning oil from Venezuela, posturing for the annexation of Greenland and all its resources, while not hesitating to bomb Iran, Nigeria, or most any other country. Meanwhile, China and Russia lurk in the wings as scary “near-peer” rivals and threats.
Although Trump’s supporters may indeed have been conned into imagining him as a prince of peace, this country’s militarism and imperialism clearly transcend him. Generally speaking, warfare and military boosterism have been distinctly bipartisan pursuits in America, making reform of any sort that much more difficult. Replacing Trump in 2028 won’t magically erase deep-rooted militarism, megalomaniacal imperial designs, or even the possibility of a $1.5 trillion military budget. Clearly, more, more, more is the bipartisan war song being sung inside the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House these days.
Taking on the MICIMATTSHG, or Blob
Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern coined a useful acronym from the classic military-industrial complex, or MIC. He came up with MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex) to highlight its blob-like growth. And it’s true that Congress and the rest are all deeply implicated in the blob. To which I’d add an “S” for the sporting world, an “H” for Hollywood, and a “G” for the gaming sector, all of which are implicated in, influenced by (as well as influencing), and often subservient to Ike’s old MIC. So, what we now have is the MICIMATTSHG. Recall that Ike warned us about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” if we failed to challenge it back in 1961. Recall that he also warned us that the MIC could change the very structure of our society, making America far less democratic and also far less free. And most subtly, he warned us that it might also weaken America spiritually.
What did he mean by that? To reference a speech Ike made in 1953, he warned then that we could end up hanging ourselves from a cross of iron. He warned that we could become captives of militarism and war, avid believers in spending the sweat of our laborers, the genius of our scientists, and the blood of our youth, pursuing military dominance globally, while losing our democratic beliefs and liberties at home in the process. And that, it seems to me, is exactly what did indeed happen. We the people were seduced, silenced, or sidelined via slogans like “support our troops” or with over-the-top patriotic displays like military parades, no matter that they represented something distinctly less than triumphant in their moment.
And it never ends, does it? Americans in various polls today indicate that they don’t want a war against either Venezuela or Iran, but our opinions simply aren’t heeded. Increasingly, we live in a “might makes right” country, even as military might has so regularly made for wrong since 1945.
And what in the world is to be done? Many things, but most fundamentally it’s time as a society to perform an “about-face,” followed by a march in double-time away from permanent war and toward peace. And that, in turn, must lead to major reductions in Pentagon spending. The best and only way to tackle the inexorable growth of the blob is to stop feeding it money — and stop worshipping it as well. Instead of a $500 billion increase, Congress should insist on a $500 billion decrease in Pentagon spending. Our task should be to force the military-industrial complex to think, improvise, become leaner, and focus on how most effectively to protect and defend America and our ideals, rather than fostering the imperial dreams of the wannabe warlords among us.
Trump’s current approach of further engorging the imperial blob is the stuff of national nightmares, not faintly a recipe for American greatness. It is, in fact, a sure guarantee of further decline and eventual collapse, not only economically and politically but spiritually as well, exactly as Ike warned in 1961. More wars and weapons simply will not make America great (again). How could they when, as Civil War General William T. Sherman so famously observed, war is “all hell”?
Americans, we must act to cut the war budget, shrink the empire, embrace diplomacy, and work for peace. Sadly, however, the blob has seemingly become our master, a well-nigh unstoppable force. Aren’t you tired yet of being its slave?
On the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, which was predicated on resistance to empire and military rule, it should be considered deeply tragic that this country has met the enemy — and he is indeed us. Here the words of Ike provide another teachable moment. Only Americans can truly hurt America, he once said. To which I’d add this corollary: Only Americans can truly save America.
As we celebrate our nation’s birthday this July 4th, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could save this deeply disturbed country by putting war and empire firmly in the rearview mirror? A tall task for sure, but so, too, was declaring independence from the mighty British Empire in 1776.
Two headlines caught my eye this AM in my email media stream.
From the New York Times: “How the Trump Administration Rushed to Judgment in Minneapolis Shooting”
There was no “judgment” displayed in the execution of Alex Pretti. The Trump administration blatantly, maliciously, and viciously lied about what happened. Video evidence incontrovertibly shows that the Trump administration lied. Period.
Trump officials simply didn’t and don’t care about the truth. About justice. About the life of a U.S. citizen. They only care about their own petty lives and violent narratives. Anyone who gets in their way is a potential “domestic terrorist.” They’re sending a loud message clearly: resist us and you’ll end up bloodied in the streets—and maybe dead.
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone famously reminded us. But rarely can I remember lies of such obvious viciousness about regular people whose only real crime is exercising their right to dissent in democracy.
The other headline was this one from the Boston Globe: “Maine and Minnesota: A tricky tale of ICE surges in two states.”
What had been a careful, rhetorical balancing act has begun turning to increasing anger after the shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs nurse, in Minneapolis
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There’s that word again: Surge. Remember the U.S. military “surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan? Remember how those “surges” in troops and violence were supposed to win those wars for America? How did that work out for us?
We know how. Both surges failed, but they did succeed in producing a lot of dead Iraqis and Afghans (“foreign terrorists”) along with U.S. troops killed and wounded in action.
“Surges” are not how you win wars, whether overseas or here at home. In fact, surges in Iraq and Afghanistan were admissions of a sort that the wars were already lost; their main purpose was to show resolve and to provide political cover for dishonest leaders like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama.
But government officials have an amazing capacity not to learn. Their “solution” is always to show resolve through military and/or police action. Nothing is “won,” nothing is achieved, and the main product is more blood in the streets.
Isn’t it nice to know that your government reflexively views you as a “domestic terrorist” if you exercise your right to assemble and protest? Especially if you inconveniently get shot and killed by an ICE agent?
Last January, I published “My Father’s Journal,” which recounts my dad’s experience surviving the Great Depression, serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Oregon fighting forest fires, military service in the Army during World War II, and bringing up five children during the “Baby Boom” years of the 1950s and 1960s while serving as a city firefighter. If you’re interested, it’s available at Amazon for $10 for the paperback and $5 for the Kindle version. Follow this link, and thanks!
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I received two interesting queries this week, one on Blitzkrieg and the other on how much the U.S. spends on weapons and war. On the first subject, I was asked about the characteristics of Blitzkrieg, when the concept was developed and seen in battle, and for post-World War II examples. I was also asked about Russia-Ukraine and the recent U.S. attack on Venezuela. Here are my answers:
1. Speed, surprise, combined arms, and disruption are the main characteristics of Blitzkrieg. “Combined arms” refers to all combat arms working synergistically, i.e. infantry, armor, artillery, supported by air forces (nowadays, drones might be involved in large numbers). Special forces like airborne units may also be involved. Deception and misdirection are also aspects of Blitzkrieg. The fundamental idea is to move and maneuver so quickly that the enemy can’t keep pace–to disrupt the enemy’s cohesion. To place them in an untenable position where they have to withdraw or perhaps even surrender.
2. Blitzkrieg, though associated with Nazi Germany in World War II, is an old concept in warfare. Perhaps the best practitioners were the Mongols in the 13th century. The Western concept has its roots in World War I and the stalemate of trench warfare. Ideas associated with what became known as Blitzkrieg were tried on various World War I battlefields. The idea was to break the stalemate of fixed lines and fortifications without getting into costly battles of attrition. These ideas came to maturity in World War II.
3. Blitzkrieg, perhaps ironically, is sometimes attached to the Israeli Defense Forces, as in their attacks in 1967 in the Six Day War. You might say the USA used Blitzkrieg against Iraq in 1991. Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2022 was not a Blitzkrieg–it was more of an uncoordinated show of force that backfired. The USA attack on Venezuela was a “snatch and grab” kidnapping, not a military campaign per se.
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The second query focused on how much the U.S. spends on weaponry and war and how we measure that as a percentage of the federal budget. Here’s my answer to that:
Yes, it’s a numbers game. If you include all federal spending (including non-discretionary spending like social security and Medicare/Medicaid), it’s a smaller percentage. Roughly 15% of the federal budget.
If you focus on discretionary spending, it’s more than 50%. It depends on how you count it. If you add Pentagon spending to Homeland Security, the VA, the DOE (nukes), and interest on the federal debt due to wars and military spending, the percentage is 60% or even higher.
When the warmongers really want to minimize war spending, they compare it to GDP.
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No matter how you measure it (or attempt to minimize it), a trillion dollars is a lot of money. Of course, the best way to think of “defense” spending is from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron” speech in 1953:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
That is the true cost of spending on weapons and war.
There are at least 30 trillion reasons why the Trump administration is waging war against Venezuela. Recall that Venezuela has proven oil reserves of 300 billion barrels. If those barrels average $100 over the decades of their extraction, that’s $30 trillion, an immense sum representing about 80% of America’s colossal national debt. Of course, most of those trillions will go to multinationals and billionaires, not to the American people—and certainly not to the Venezuelan people. But who said life is fair?
The so-called Donroe Doctrine of hemispheric dominance represents the return of unapologetic gangster capitalism. The basic policy of the Trump administration recalls Michael Corleone, the mafia don in “The Godfather” saga. When his consigliere Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall) asks Michael (played by Al Pacino) whether he has to wipe everyone out, Michael coldly replies “Just my enemies.” Anyone who defies the Corleone Family must be eliminated.
Maduro defied the Trump “family” so he had to be taken out. Cuba and Iran may be the next “enemies” to be “wiped out.”
As Trump once said in an interview, the U.S has plenty of killers. This is what the exercise of naked power looks like. Power without morality. Power without principles other than profit and the further consolidation of power.
U.S. democracy is a sham. We have shamocracy. Thugocracy. The strong do what they will; the weak suffer as they must. What matters is control, power, and profits.
Again, as Caitlin Johnstone noted, Trump has been transparent about his motives. Put bluntly, it’s the oil, stupid.
“We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago,” Trump told the press following Maduro’s abduction, saying “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump said.
“We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves, we need that for the world,” the president added.
Trump is America’s most scrutable president. He doesn’t bother to hide his motives here. This is theft, impure and very simple. We have the power to take it and we will, full stop.
Bracing Views 