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Wars

Even The Warriors Say The Wars Make Us Less Safe

“Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of National Intelligence (in the) New York Times [49]: While “drone attacks did help reduce the Qaeda leadership in Pakistan,” he wrote, “they also increased hatred of America.” He said the drone has also damaged “our ability to work with Pakistan [in] eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure.”

History Of Major Wars Show They Can Explode Quickly And Disastrously

Despite the claims of optimists, the odds that an international conflict will snowball into a bloody war haven’t gone down significantly since the end of World War II. Trump administration officials’ confidence that the present conflict with Iran can be managed could be dangerously misplaced. Since a drone strike at Baghdad airport that killed a top Iranian general, Iranians have been protesting in the streets in massive numbers, and their country has pulled out of the 2015 deal limiting its development of nuclear weapons.

The Financial Nuclear Option Will Settle Trump’s War With Iran

On foreign soil, as a guest nation, US has assassinated a diplomatic envoy whose mission the US had requested. The bombshell facts were delivered by caretaker Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, during an extraordinary, historic parliamentary session in Baghdad on Sunday. Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani had flown into Baghdad on a normal carrier flight, carrying a diplomatic passport. He had been sent by Tehran to deliver, in person, a reply to a message from Riyadh on de-escalation across the Middle East. Those negotiations had been requested by the Trump administration.

Trump’s Deja Vu Wartime Playbook

In 1964 there was the infamous ‘Tonkin Gulf’ incident that provided then president Johnson the cover to escalate US involvement in Vietnam. Later Pentagon documents made public revealed the alleged attacks on US ships off Vietnam by North Vietnamese patrol boats was a total fabrication. 58,000 US and 2 million Vietnamese deaths later, the evidence came out that it was all a hoax.

War With Iran

The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration.

Wars, Secrecy, And Lies

This is nothing new, of course.  Perhaps the best book I read in 2019 is H. Bruce Franklin’s Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War.  Franklin, who served in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s before becoming an English professor, cultural historian, and an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, is devastating in his critique of the military-industrial complex in this memoir.  I recommend it highly to all Americans who want to wrestle with tough truths.

The US Approves Bill That May Legislate Hybrid Warfare On Venezuela

In a nutshell, we can safely say that the US government will make large amounts of US taxpayers' money available for regime change in Venezuela under the guise of “humanitarian relief” for a crisis that the US government created to start with. On December 16, both houses in the US approved the appropriation bill to be signed by President Trump. Aside from the mind-boggling amount of $1.4 trillion that was approved in total our interest was in looking at the details concerning Venezuela. A press release issued by the organization Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) is quite misleading...

The Capitalist Crisis Has Made The U.S. A Pariah State

Capitalism, even of the U.S.’ so-called “exceptional” variety, is characterized by cyclical crises that occur every ten or so years. Marxist theorists attribute the emergence of capitalist crises to the always sharpening contradiction between labor and capital. The more profit that capitalists extract from labor, the more impoverished labor becomes. Eventually, workers become so impoverished that entire sectors of capitalist production ground to a halt. This process is generally called overproduction but is better termed underconsumption.

The “Afghanistan Papers”: The Criminality And Disaster Of A War Based Upon Lies

The publication Monday by the Washington Post of interviews with senior US officials and military commanders on the nearly two-decades-old US war in Afghanistan has provided a damning indictment of both the criminality and abject failure of an imperialist intervention conducted on the basis of lies. The Post obtained the raw interviews after a three-year Freedom of Information Act court battle. While initially they were not secret, the Obama administration moved to classify the documents after the newspaper sought to obtain them.

House Compromises Away Peace, Senate Stands By War

“The Senate recedes with an amendment that would express the sense of Congress that, among other things, a sustained credible diplomatic process based on concrete measures to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea and an eventual end to the Korean War should be pursued. The amendment would also express that continued actions by North Korea that run counter to diplomatic negotiations call into question North Korea’s intentions and commitment to a diplomatic solution.”

I Knew The War In Afghanistan Was A Lie

Nightmares still haunt me. Sometimes it’s the standard stuff associated with classic post-traumatic stress disorder: flashbacks of horrible attacks and images of my mutilated troopers. More often, though, peculiar as it may sound, I dream that my sociopathic, career-obsessed colonel calls to give me another late-night order to do something unnecessary—usually dangerous, always absurd—the next day. We never got along; the man distrusted me from the start. To him, my plainly ironclad loyalty to my young soldiers was suspicious.

End The Wars, Win The Antiwar Vote

Like anyone else who was around that day, I can tell you exactly where I was on 9/11. I was a Catholic school eighth grader, fresh off my 14th birthday. The school day lurched along for a while, but eventually we dropped the pretense of carrying on. Teachers ushered us into the adjoining church for a prayer service, then sent us home early. Later on, in the car with my dad, we heard what sounded like an explosion — a sonic boom from the nearby air base. My dad pulled over alongside other panicked drivers, all of us scanning the sky.

Moral Injury And America’s Endless Conflicts

When an announcement of a "Moral Injury Symposium" turned up in my email, I was a bit startled to see that it came from the U.S. Special Operations Command. That was a surprise because many military professionals have strongly resisted the term "moral injury" and rejected the suggestion that soldiers fighting America's wars could experience moral conflict or feel morally damaged by their service. Moral injury is not a recognized psychiatric diagnosis. It's not on the Veterans Administration’s list of service-related disabilities.

American Exceptionalism Is Killing The Planet

Ever since 2007, when I first started writing for TomDispatch, I’ve been arguing against America’s forever wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere. Unfortunately, it’s no surprise that, despite my more than 60 articles, American blood is still being spilled in war after war across the Greater Middle East and Africa, even as foreign peoples pay a far higher price in lives lost and cities ruined. And I keep asking myself: Why, in this century, is the distinctive feature of America's wars that they never end? Why do our leaders persist in such repetitive folly and the seemingly eternal disasters that go with it?

History Demands: Turn Imperialist Wars Into Wars Against Imperialism

Global dominance has been the centerpiece of U.S. policy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union when the U.S. suddenly found itself without a counter to its global imperialist aspirations.  This drive for dominance has always been fueled by one objective – to position U.S. capitalist interests to more effectively plunder the labor and resources of the peoples and nations of the global South. In other words, it is and has always been both an imperialist and racial project. 
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