Endless War category archive

Old men lie. Young folks die.

Forty-four years ago today, four young folks died because they dared question the lies.

Old men keep on lying, young folks keep on dying.

Sit back and let George parse the melody.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laurie Essig comments on what she terms Machismo Man David Brooks’s “manhood problem.”

Some of the “manliest” of politicians have created wars without cause, made lives miserable for women, children, gays and any others who are not “man enough,” and generally created chaos in the world. Machismo is no substitute for foreign policy even if Brooks wants to fantasize about Obama swooping in on a white horse and sweeping him off into a future where strong men keep us safe from danger.

Do follow the link, if only to see the illustration.

Tom Plate of Loyola Marymount University argues against the United States’s media’s apocalyptic coverage of the events in Ukraine and the world in general. A nugget:

If Moscow can “get away” with seizing Crimea (and a slice of Ukraine), won’t this embolden Beijing to jump onto a disputed island in the East China Sea and do a “Putin”? Or might it not even justify a comparable putsch by Japan? Does not the current world (dis)order suggest the future belongs to the bold?

Implicit in this fearful assumption is the suggestion that if only the U.S. were more forceful against Russia, less “bad things” around the world would happen. This is fantasy.

He has a point. This is the “Shoot First” theory of international relations favored by the same Diminutive Phallus Brigade that believes in “Stand Your Ground.” Many of our media figures and politicians seems think that the U. S. is Gary Cooper, able to solve all problems in one High Noon moment, then relax as the credits roll and everyone lives happily ever after.

Outside of movies, the credits don’t roll and one High Noon moment leads to the next.

At Asia Times, Ramzy Baroud evaluates the cost of over a decade of the Wars of George the Worst.

He is not optimistic for the fortunes of the United States as arbiter of world affairs. Two snippets (emphasis added).

The (Iraq–ed.) war left the US fatigued and set the course for a transition in the Middle East, although not the kind of transition that the likes of former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had championed. There was no “New Middle East” per se, but rather an old one that is in much worse shape than ever before.

(snip)

The US has truly lost the initiative, in the Middle East region and beyond it. The neo-cons’ drunkenness with military power led to costly wars that have overwhelmed the empire beyond salvation. Now, US foreign-policy makers are mere diplomatic firefighters, from Palestine, to Syria to Ukraine. For the Americans, the last few years have been less a “reality check”, more the new reality itself.

Read it, and weep for the devastation wrought by the wars of the Mongers of War.

The Lebanon Daily Star takes a relatively balanced look at events in the Crimea, which is a lot closer to Lebanon than it is to the U. S. A. A nugget:

Finally, American politicians and pundits deserve a bouquet of dead flowers. No issue that enters the mosh pit of American politics can escape being framed in terms of domestic partisanship. But the future of Ukraine – and of Russia – is not a game that any U.S. leader can win or lose.

The West has no choice but to impose sanctions on Putin’s Russia, and they will now come fast and furious. But they are unlikely to be anything more than punitive, with no coercive power to reverse facts on the ground in Crimea.A sanctioned Russia – and a one that maintains its own set of sanctions – will be the new reality. But the great historic task remains to coax Russia back in the direction of membership in the international community.

Read the rest. You’ll learn stuff that has not been sufficiently addressed in our own domestic media.

Dan Simpson thinks it’s simple.

The effort to demonize — to Saddam-Hussein-ize — Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in the eyes of Americans should serve as ample warning that some of the people who run this country see an opportunity in the Ukraine-Crimea problem to start a profitable new war to take the place of the recently ended Iraq war and the winding-down Afghanistan war.

(snip)

The Pentagon budget just happens to be on the table at the moment in Washington.

Read the rest.

Ta-Nehisi Coates looks behind the curtain at the perpetual destruction machine as illustrated by the reappearance of Condoleeza Rice into public discourse:

War-mongering is self-justifying. If you bungle a war in Iraq, it does not mean you need to sit back and reflect on the bungling. It means you should make more war, less Iraq become a base for your enemies. If Vladimir Putin violates Ukrainian sovereignty, it is evidence for a more muscular approach. If he doesn’t, than it is evidence that he fears American power. If there are no terrorist attacks on American soil, than drones must be right and our security state must be effective. If there are attacks, then our security state must increase its surveillance, and more bombs should be dropped. Violence begets violence. Peace begets violence. The circle continues.

The crucial take-away, as regards our public discourse at least, is that being always wrong about everything gets you a gig at the Washington Post.

Reg Henry tries to make sense of out what’s happening in Ukraine and of possible courses to take. A nugget:

If this were our backyard being destabilized, what would we do? Well, actually we know; Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, ostensibly to rescue American medical students, but really to stop it from it becoming another Cuba.

Moral equivalence? No, logical equivalence. I think we are the good guys and Vladimir Putin is a weasel, but good guys and bad guys all have their reasons. It is necessary to understand those reasons if we are to act sensibly.

Instead, those who loved the Cold War are delighted that it’s back . . . .

At Asia Times, Mikhail A Molchanov, a professor of Ukrainian descent at a Canadian university, tries to provide a Russian perspective on the events in Ukraine. Whether or not you find it credible is not the issue; the issue is that there are other ways of interpreting what’s happening there than we are not hearing from our media, whose coverage seems to boil down to “Russia. Bad.”

I urge you to read it.

Here’s a snippet:

By the end of his second term in the office, Putin must have lost all doubt as to the real motivation behind the US championing of “democracy” world-wide – to expand its sphere of influence and prolong its global hegemony while eliminating and weakening potential rivals by all means available, not excluding crude military power. He witnessed, and could not prevent, the unlawful dismemberment of Serbia and the quick recognition that Western powers hastened to grant to the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo.

(snip)

The fact is, no matter how corrupt or weak Ukraine’s Yanukovych is, he remains the democratically elected president deposed in a revolution which had full support of the West from the beginning.

Our media are not known for analytical brilliance or balance as regards foreign policy. They have obediently sold us wars based on lies from the Mexican War on down; just in my lifetime, they led the cheers for the Viet Namese War, the overthrow of Allende in Chile, the Dominican invasion, the Nicaraguan incursions, and the Crusades of George the Worst, just to mention a few.

Grains of salt are wise additions to the news junkie’s diet.

I think John Cole is on to something:

I guess watching the Russians do what they want in Ukraine is how the rest of the world felt when we invaded Iraq.

He is quite correct, but the analogy hardly casts a pleasant light on the reign of George the Worst and on those who readily deferred to his aggressions, now, does it?

These two links help cast some light on what’s going on in Ukraine: Line one and link two.

Aside:

In the part of Delaware where I used to live, there were many Americans of Ukrainian descent. The pastor of the local Ukrainian Orthodox Church–where they had the best pirogies in the world at their bazaar and we attended a service once at which First Son’s girlfriend fainted (the usher came to us quietly and said, “Your daughter’s fainted” only she wasn’t our daughter who was standing next to me) and everyone was very nice, but that’s another story–lived three doors up the street (and he was a heck of a nice fellow).

This gives me no particular insight. It’s just a thing.

What Noz said.

William Pfaff wonders what the United States will leave behind as it winds down in the Middle East.

He is not sanguine.

The American departure will leave behind much carnage and ruin. It will leave America’s largest and most expensive (former) embassy on earth — “bigger than the Vatican City,” we proudly were told, as construction was under way in Baghdad’s Green Zone. It will serve as a monument to American strategic ambition, becoming the American Ozymandias (“look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). Tourists will visit it.

The Army is investigating kickback fraud for recruiting recruits. In a program in which “recruiting assistants” were paid an “incentive” for convincing persons to enlist; the “assistants” used inside information to claim bounties incentive payments for convincing persons they had not convinced.

The program began, natch, in 2005 because the military was having difficulty meeting quotas for cannon-fodder for the wars of George the Worst. Fraud began to be suspected in 2007 and the Army shut the program down in 2011.

From my local rag:

Army criminal investigators are probing the actions of more than 1,200 individuals who collected suspect payouts totaling more than $29 million, according to officials who were briefed on the preliminary findings of the investigation and would discuss them only on the condition of anonymity. More than 200 officers are suspected of involvement, including two generals and dozens of colonels.

The alleged fraud drew in recruiters, soldiers and civilians with ties to the military who submitted, or profited from, false referrals registered on a website run by a marketing firm the Army hired to run the program. Suspects often obtained the names of people who had enlisted from recruiters, claimed them as their referrals, and then kicked back some of the bonus money to the recruiters.

How very free market.

Many more details at the link.

Policy failure complains that President Obama does not support failed policy hard enough.

Via Bob Cesca.