Federal authorities identified the Christmas Day bomber. He is a 63-year-old white man by the name of Anthony Quinn Warner. He blew up an RV in front of the AT&T building in Nashville. He blew himself up, too. The blast rocked downtown, knocked out wireless communications regionally over the weekend, and injured three people. No else was harmed, though. The FBI figured out the who, what, where, when and how. What they don’t know is why. Prediction: that’s where all of this is going to end.

For nearly a decade, we have witnessed dozens if not hundreds of acts of mass violence that seem to have no rhyme or reason. Some are the result of mental illness. Some are the result of recognizable political ideologies. But others, like the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, don’t have anything to them to explain why. One day, Adam Lanza simply decided to murder his mom before shooting to pieces 20 six-year-old kids. No one knows his motive. Lanza doesn’t fit the scheme for understanding mass shooters (unless you believe his autism drove him to kill, an idea, I think, most people reject.)

The result was nothing being done. The result has been nearly a decade of mass death.

The question of motive matters for reasons behind criminal investigations. It matters to lawmaking and policymaking. If we don’t know why someone committed murder on a grand scale, we can’t tailor policy, much less statutory law, with precision. In the absence of a clear motive, we tend to throw up our hands. If it’s not mental illness, if it’s not political ideology, then he (and it’s nearly always a he) is just a “Lone Wolf.”

Making this worse is the widespread acceptance of this as something we can’t prevent. Like it or not, mass death is something we have come to see as normal, even expected.

The thing about “Lone Wolves” is they aren’t alone. Society is chock full of them. Some men, especially some white men, don’t have a reason for wanting to see the world burn other than wanting to see the world burn, even when, or especially when, they burn themselves up in the process.

A “death drive” should be a motive worth recognizing in the court of public opinion, which is where politics is born (though, perhaps, not a court of law, where standards of proof are, and should be, higher). It could be that Anthony Warner blew himself because he wanted to blow himself up.

Suicide bombers usually want something more, though. They usually want glory or fame or notoriety postmortem. For this reason, authorities are reportedly asking if Warner believed “the 5G conspiracy theory.” This is the (baseless) assertion that advanced wireless technology causes illness, like cancer, or makes humans vulnerable to illness, like the covid. (Angry mobs have burned down cell phone towers in the United Kingdom and Europe in the mistaken belief that they are spreading the new strain of the coronavirus.)

It could be, though time will tell, that Warner believed he was doing something noble by setting off an explosion outside Nashville’s AT&T building, thus temporarily knocking out wireless communications regionally. It could be that Warner wanted what most suicide bombers have wanted: to send a message.

Messages are central to political ideologies, which are themselves central to law enforcement agencies determining whether a crime is an act of terrorism. If Warner is found to have believed in “the 5G conspiracy theory,” however, the temptation will be to say that the crime was committed by a tinfoil hat-wearing kook; that it has nothing to with political ideology; that, therefore, it was not terrorism.

The political response from lawmakers and policymakers will likely be, as a consequence, a collective shrug. And sadly, that brings us full circle, back to our impotence in the face of mass death.

I wish more people understood that wanting to blow things up is a motive all its own. I wish more people understood that conspiracy theories are a kind of political ideology in their own right. (Imagine what they demand of people in order to believe they are true). I wish more people understood that conspiracy theories are not a bug but a feature of terrorism. (Imagine a way of thinking in which the enemy is so terrible that you have to kill yourself to kill it.)

If more people understood these truths to be self-evident, I think more people would be able to pressure lawmakers and policymakers into taking necessary action, whatever that might be.

Given that mass death is now normalized, however, most aren’t going to recognize terrorism even after seeing it.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 December 2020

Word Count: 773

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I think the point of wishing someone a happy holiday season is rooted in one of the themes of Christmas — peace on earth and good will toward all humanity. In other words, empathy. It’s a simple consideration for people who might not recognize the messiah but who nonetheless enjoy much-deserved downtime during this time of year.

Even the most conservative Christian can understand the virtue in “Happy Holidays.”

At the same time, many conservative Christians, but especially white evangelical Protestants (WEPs), are told they inhabit a world that persecutes the faithful for believing God sent to earth his only begotten son to redeem the world of Man. Obviously, no one is martyred anymore. Not obvious is that modernity, or modern life, has become a stand-in for Roman Emperors purging the empire of the Cult of Jesus.

The more the United States “progresses,” assuming that it does such a thing, the more WEPs believe a country that’s rightfully theirs to dominate is turning against them.

So right away there is a tension between feeling the need to be generous of heart toward one’s fellow human beings during a season invoking peace on earth and good will toward all humanity, and the need to see oneself as being persecuted (because the very idea of being persecuted for one’s beliefs has been stitched into one’s identity as a Bible-believing Christian).

This tension has always been more or less precariously balanced, but it could no longer be balanced, precariously or otherwise, after Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets decided to invent a scandal out of thin air.

I’m talking, of course, about “the war on Christmas.” It is many things, all of them steeped in bad faith, but most of it is this: the more people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” the more persecuted WEPs feel. The more persecuted WEPs feel, the more they’re justified in doing anything necessary to “take back their country” from “cultural Marxism,” etc.

“The war on Christmas” predates Donald Trump by at least a decade. But many WEPs believe God sent the president to save them, according to political scientist Matthew Wilson. “Some evangelicals really do see Trump as an instrument of the Divine Plan,” he said. “It stems in large part from the fact that evangelicals see their ideal of America as a godly commonwealth in existential danger.”

The “war on Christmas” is, therefore, part of another war.

On empathy, for one thing. The decades-long radicalization of the Republican Party has created conditions in which Republicans feel “strong social pressure” to reject the outcome of a lawful democratic election, according to political scientist Elizabeth C. Connors. Similarly, the GOP’s radicalization has created conditions in which any gesture of empathy, large or small, is forbidden.

They are seen as weakness, betrayal or something equally bad. When God is on your side, He’s not on theirs. To feel empathy, therefore — even just wishing someone a “Happy Holiday” — is to stand against God.

For this reason, no one should take “the war on Christmas” lightly. Everyone who cares about the fate of the nation should see it as a deep-seated expression of native-born fascism, which is to say, an outgrowth of the long and soft civil war against our democratic republic.

“The war on Christmas” isn’t silly. It isn’t trivial. It is part of a broader context in which huge swathes of the population reject not only reality but their obligation to other human beings such that the covid pandemic can kill three thousand Americans a day and people are still arguing over whether it’s a hoax.

For some, the way to cultivate empathy is to get people to see what the covid does to the body. Maybe then they’d feel more good will toward humanity. “Patients often grow ashen as their body struggles for nutrients,” wrote the Washington Post’s William Wan and Brittany Shammas. “Their skin becomes mottled with splotches of reddish purple as their heart pumps less and less blood to parts of the body that need it. Often, the room is eerily empty, with nurses and doctors trying to minimize risk of infection. The only constant is the low, steady hum of an oxygen compressor piping air to the patient’s nostrils. Amid the silent void, the patients’ dying breaths become magnified.

“The hardest thing about it is how alone they are in the end,” said Joan Schaum, a nurse with Hospice & Community Care in Lancaster, Pa.

This presumes two things. One, that WEPs and others will derive from empathy the motivation to do more to stop the spread of the covid. However, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, “white evangelical Protestants are the only religious group more likely to say that the outbreak was inevitable (55%) than to say it could have been controlled better (44%).”

You can’t stop a plague sent down by God, especially since doing so might feel like a betrayal of the leader whom God sent.

Two, that WEPs and others recognize the commonality between people. Fact is, most of them don’t. More precisely, most of them won’t. To recognize the common purpose between members of a political community such as the United States is to accept that other people have valid and legitimate political interests, which opens the door to thinking God might love people who you believe are persecuting your belief in God. That’s a place they will never go, because it challenges their core religious identity.

Witnessing what the covid does to the body is not going to elicit empathy. Indeed, it might radicalize “God’s chosen people” more than they already are. For this reason, and in light of the death toll that continues to mount, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s over.

The Republican Party, and WEPs, have won the “war on Christmas.”

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 December 2020

Word Count: 970

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In choosing a title for his final, posthumously published book, the prominent public intellectual Tony Judt turned to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, published in 1770. Judt found his book’s title in the first words of this couplet:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay

A poignant sentiment but let me acknowledge that I’m not a big Goldsmith fan. My own preferences in verse run more toward Merle Haggard, whose country music hits include the following lyric from his 1982 song “Are the Good Times Really Over?”:

Is the best of the free life behind us now

And are the good times really over for good?

I wonder, though: Is it possible that the insights of an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish novelist-poet and a twentieth-century American singer-songwriter, each reflecting on a common theme of decadence and each served up with a dollop of nostalgia, just might intersect?

Allow me to try the reader’s patience with a bit more of Goldsmith:

O luxury! thou curst by Heaven’s decree,

How ill exchanged are things like these for thee!

How do thy potions, with insidious joy,

Diffuse their pleasures only to destroy!

Kingdoms, by thee, to sickly greatness grown,

Boast of a florid vigour not their own;

At every draught more large and large they grow

A bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe.

Down, down they sink, and spread a ruin round.

Powerful stuff, but here’s Haggard making a similar point without frills:

I wish a buck was still silver

It was back when the country was strong

Back before Elvis

Before the Vietnam War came along…

Are we rolling down hill

Like a snowball headed for Hell?

With no kind of chance

For the Flag or the Liberty Bell

Let me concede from the outset that these laments emerge directly from the heart of the patriarchy. In our present moment, some will discount the complaints of Messrs. Goldsmith and Haggard as not to be taken seriously. As the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, bellyaching white guys tend not to command a lot of sympathy.

Still, with this abysmal year finally ending, the melancholy notes sounded by Goldsmith and Haggard strike me as apt. The Age of Biden — or given our preference for faux intimacy, the Age of Joe and Kamala — beckons. Yet I’m anything but certain that 2021 will inaugurate a happier time.

That said, for those who believe history has its own rhymes and rhythms, the election of Biden and Harris just might herald a turning point of sorts. After all, for more than a century now, presidential elections occurring in even numbered years ending in zero have resulted in big changes.

Don’t take my word for it. Check the record.

Thanks to the assassin who prematurely terminated William McKinley’s presidency, the election of 1900 inaugurated the reformist Progressive Era. Two decades later, Americans yearning for a return to “normalcy” voted for Warren G. Harding. Instead of normalcy, they got the splashy upheaval of the Twenties and the ensuing Great Depression.

Once the balloting in 1940 handed Franklin Roosevelt an unprecedented third term, hopes entertained by some Americans of staying out of World War II were doomed. Global war vaulted the United States to a position of global primacy — and soon gave rise to new challenges. John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 empowered a generation “born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace” to address those challenges. Unanticipated complications ensued, as they did again in 1980 and 2000, the former initiating the Reagan Revolution, the latter election of George W. Bush setting the stage for the Global War on Terror and, by extension, Donald Trump.

The challenges awaiting Biden and Harris arguably outweigh those that confronted any of those past administrations, Roosevelt’s excepted. In a recent New York Times column, the man who lost that disputed 2000 election, Al Gore, inventoried the most pressing problems that Biden’s team will confront. In addition to the coronavirus pandemic, they include:

“40 years of economic stagnation for middle-income families; hyper-inequality of incomes and wealth, with high levels of poverty; horrific structural racism; toxic partisanship; the impending collapse of nuclear arms control agreements; an epistemological crisis undermining the authority of knowledge; recklessly unprincipled behavior by social media companies; and, most dangerous of all, the climate crisis.”

That makes for quite a daunting catalog. Yet note this one striking omission: Gore makes no mention of America’s seemingly never-ending penchant for war and military adventurism.

Before the Vietnam war came along Surely, though, war has contributed in no small way to “the bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe” besetting our nation today. And were Merle Haggard to update “Are the Good Times Really Over?” he would doubtless include the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq alongside Vietnam as prominent among the factors that have sent this country caroming downward.

In the evening of my life, as I reflect on the events of our time that ended up mattering most, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq top my list. Together, they define the poles around which much of my professional life has revolved, whether as a soldier, teacher, or writer. It would be fair to say that I’m haunted by those two conflicts.

I could write pages and pages on how Vietnam and Iraq differ from each other, beginning with the fact that they are separated in time by nearly a half-century. Locale, the contours of the battlefields, the character of combat, the casualties inflicted and sustained, the sheer quantity of ordnance expended — when it comes to such measures and others, Vietnam and Iraq differ greatly. Yet while those differences are worth noting, it’s the unappreciated similarities between them that are truly instructive.

Seven such similarities stand out:

First, Vietnam and Iraq were both avoidable: For the United States, they were wars of choice. No one pushed us. We dove in headfirst.

Second, both turned out to be superfluous, undertaken in response to threats — monolithic Communism and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — that were figments of fevered imaginations. In both cases, cynicism and moral cowardice played a role in paving the way toward war. Dissenting voices were ignored.

Third, both conflicts proved to be costly distractions. Each devoured on a prodigious scale resources that might have been used so much more productively elsewhere. Each diverted attention from matters of far more immediate importance to Americans. Each, in other words, triggered a massive hemorrhage of blood, treasure, and influence to no purpose whatsoever.

Fourth, in each instance, political leaders in Washington and senior commanders in the field collaborated in committing grievous blunders. War is complicated. All wars see their share of mistakes and misjudgments. But those two featured a level of incompetence unmatched since Custer’s Last Stand.

Fifth, thanks to that incompetence, both devolved into self-inflicted quagmires. In Washington, in Saigon, and in Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” baffled authorities watched as the control of events slipped from their grasp. Meanwhile, in the field, U.S. troops flailed about for years in futile pursuit of a satisfactory outcome.

Sixth, on the home front, both conflicts left behind a poisonous legacy of unrest, rancor, and bitterness. Members of the Baby Boom generation (to which I belong) have chosen to enshrine Vietnam-era protest as high-minded and admirable. Many Americans then held and still hold a different opinion. As for the Iraq War, it contributed mightily to yawning political cleavages that appear unlikely to heal anytime soon.

And finally, with both political and military elites alike preferring simply to move on, neither war has received a proper accounting. Their place in the larger narrative of American history is still unsettled. This may be the most important similarity of all. Both Vietnam and Iraq remain bizarrely undigested, their true meaning yet to be discerned and acknowledged. Too recent to forget, too confounding to ignore, they remain anomalous.

The American wars in Vietnam and Iraq are contradictions that await resolution.

Jaw, jaw, not war, war For that very reason, when politicians (including Joe Biden) talk about war, they talk about others, their all-time favorite being the one fought against Nazi Germany between December 1941 and May 1945. There — and not in Vietnam or Iraq — do members of the establishment find the lessons that they have enshrined as permanently relevant.

The first American war against Germany in 1917-1918 doesn’t carry much weight at all. Just a couple of years ago, its centennial came and went virtually unnoticed. Likewise, the war against Japan that occurred in tandem with the second war against Germany seldom gets much attention either. We “remember Pearl Harbor” and that’s about it.

The war against the Nazis, however, is a gift that never stops giving. It yields a great bounty of lessons: never appease; never hesitate to call evil by its name; never back down; and never flinch from the challenges of leadership, which necessarily implies a willingness to use force. And in moments of distress, channel your inner Winston Churchill circa 1940: “Never surrender!”

The problem with clinging to such ostensibly canonical lessons today is that we are no longer the nation that defeated Nazi Germany. The United States was establishing itself as the dominant industrial power on the planet then, while Washington still had the capacity to mobilize the American people pursuant to what was described at the time as a “Great Crusade.” A taken-for-granted tradition of white supremacy underwrote a cultural unity that lent more than a modicum of substance to the claims of e pluribus unum. None of this remains faintly relevant today.

When it comes to present-day policy, the relevant fact is that we are the nation that failed in both Vietnam and Iraq. Along the way, we lost our status as the planet’s dominant industrial power. Meanwhile, Washington forfeited its authority to mobilize the American people for war. More recently, cleavages stemming from class, race, religion, gender, and ethnicity, split the country into antagonistic factions. Al Gore was merely premature when, as vice president, he famously mistranslated the nation’s motto as “out of one, many.”

Now, if you prioritize Vietnam and Iraq over the war against Nazi Germany, you’ll come face-to-face with a very different set of lessons. Here are four that the Biden administration might do well to contemplate.

First, situating the United States within a larger entity called the West — a notion dating from the time when America and Great Britain (with plentiful help from the Soviet Union) rallied to defeat Hitler — no longer works. The West doesn’t exist. These days when the United States opts for war, it must expect to fight alone or with only nominal allied assistance. This was true in Vietnam and again in Iraq. No grand coalition will form.

Second, however gussied up or camouflaged, imperialism no longer retains the slightest legitimacy. Peoples once classified as inferior, usually on the basis of skin color, no longer tolerate outsiders telling them how to govern themselves. Few Americans are willing to acknowledge the imperial motives that have long shaped this country’s global policies. The Vietnamese and Iraqis opposing the U.S. military presence in their midst entertained few doubts on that score; hence, the fierceness with which they defended their right to self-determination.

Third, if the United States remains intent on exporting its version of freedom and democracy, it will have to devise far less coercive ways of doing so. Rather than using armed force to alter the political landscape in faraway places, elites should acknowledge the limited utility of military power. Calling on the troops to defend, deter, and contain works far better than charging them to invade, occupy, and transform.

Fourth, dumb wars deplete. Vietnam and Iraq both inflicted untold damage on the American economy. With the U.S. government currently running an annual deficit of some $3 trillion, we can’t afford to squander any more money on ill-advised military campaigns. A less known quote attributed to Churchill commends itself in our present situation: “Jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war.”

As it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, the United States is badly in need of more jaw, jaw and less war, war — more fix, fix, and less fight, fight.

Over to you, Joe I am not enamored of presidents. I’m even less of a fan of “presidentialism” — the belief, firmly held by American elites, that the fate of the planet turns on what the president of the United States says or does (or doesn’t do). For that reason, I have learned not to expect much of whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office.

In practice, the Most Powerful Man in the World usually turns out to be not all that powerful. Rather than directing History with a capital H, he (not yet she), like the rest of us, is pretty much just along for the ride. In their own ways, Goldsmith and Haggard implicitly endorsed such a fatalistic perspective.

In political circles, a different view tends to prevail. Today, virtually all Democrats and many in the media ascribe to Donald Trump full blame for the mess in which this country finds itself. Yet Americans would do well to temper their expectations of what supplanting Trumpism with Bidenism is likely to produce.

On January 20, 2021, the “torch” to which John F. Kennedy memorably referred in his inaugural address will once again be passed. Let’s hope that, in grasping it, Biden and Harris will heed one of the principal lessons of the Kennedy era: no more Vietnams. To which I would simply add: no more Iraqs (or Afghanistans, or Yemens, or… well, you know the list). Only then might it become possible to undertake the daunting task of repairing our country.

Good luck, Joe. You, too, Kamala. In the coming days, you’re both going to need a truckful of it.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory. His new book After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed will be published in 2021.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 December 2020

Word Count: 2,311

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Why is the president downplaying the significance of a security breach said to be “on a scale Washington has never experienced,” according to the New York Times? As a result of a Russian hacking operation dating back to October 2019, Joe Biden will now “inherit a government so laced with electronic tunnels bored by Russian intelligence that it may be months, years even, before he can trust the systems that run much of Washington.”

The Russians not only got into government networks, but also its supply chain, which is vast. That’s why the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it “poses a grave risk to the federal government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”

That’s why one expert called it “the most consequential cyberespionage campaign in history and the fact that the government is absent is a huge problem.”

And yet Donald Trump said nothing for days until he said something, which was more of what you’ve come to expect from a man who conspired with the Russians to win the presidency in the first place. “I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control,” Trump tweeted. “The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality.”

He said the press corps “exaggerated the damage” and “the real issue was whether the election results had been compromised,” per the New York Times. “There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election,” Trump wrote.

In fact, the breach was like an act of war. US Senator Chris Coons told MSNBC:

It’s pretty hard to distinguish this from an act of aggression that rises to the level of an attack that qualifies as war. … [T]his is as destructive and broad scale an engagement with our military systems, our intelligence systems as has happened in my lifetime.

Biden appears to be preparing some kind of response: “A good defense isn’t enough,” he said, vowing “substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks.”

While reporters look into what that response might be given the damage done to the nation’s security, we should ask why Trump continues to deny Russian sabotage? Denial used to make sense. He feared widespread understanding of his conspiracy with the Russians to win the 2016 election might endanger his chances of being reelected. Denial was in his interest. What’s his interest now in the wake of defeat?

Trump’s might not be clear but the Republican Party’s interest is crystal. With the exception of US Senator Mitt Romney, who has always been a keen Russia critic, no one in the GOP has stepped forward to condemn Russia’s cyber-attack. No one has done what Coons and other Senate Democrats have done, likening the assault to an act of war, promising to support the next commander-in-chief in defending the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

They haven’t because saying nothing is in their interest.

Saying nothing improves their chances of winning Georgia runoffs needed to keep control of the US Senate. Saying nothing tells Vladimir Putin he can do whatever he wants. Saying nothing puts party over country, power over patriotism.

Indeed, the Republican Party’s interest seems rooted in its capacity to look the other way during times of national emergency. They looked away during the financial panic of 2007-2008, leaving the Democrats to pick up after a Republican administration that wrecked the economy while blaming them for ballooning deficits.

They looked away after the Sandy Hook massacre, allowing mass shootings to proliferate while blaming Democrats for trying to take guns away (a lie).

They looked away during the 2016 election, allowing the Russians to sabotage Hillary Clinton while blaming the Democrats for “spying” on Trump’s campaign.

They looked away as a once-a-century plague killed more Americans than all those who died fighting the Second World War.

And they looked away while a defeated president talked about declaring martial law.

What’s Trump’s interest? I don’t have an answer. All I can do is suggest that this latest attack on our sovereignty is a fitting end to a presidency that emerged in the shadow of the Kremlin. All I can do is suggest that small and hard-to-see but nonetheless appreciable acts of war were a feature of Trump’s presidency, not a bug. All I can do is suggest that malicious forces outside our borders have been working in concert and/or in tandem with seditious forces inside our borders to wound our country or worse. All I can do is suggest that the people calling themselves patriots are anything but patriotic.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 December 2020

Word Count: 775

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‘Tis the season to be folly
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
Don(ald) we now our gay apparel,
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!…

It’s party time in the nation’s capital and the Christmas spirit reigns supreme, even if the Texas Republican Party does want to secede from the Union. I mean, who doesn’t?

And hey, don’t you want to attend a party? After all, it’ll be at the White House, masks purely optional, social distancing not particularly necessary. Too bad you already missed the Congressional Ball (redubbed the “Covid Ball”) that The Donald and Melania so graciously hosted. Still, if you make it to one of the others, be sure to check out Melania’s decorations, not to speak of her just-unveiled new White House tennis pavilion of which she should be proud, despite all the criticism. After all, unlike you-know-who, she used the moment to welcome non-Trumpian presidents to come! (“It is my hope that this private space will function as both a place of leisure and gathering for future first families.”)

Meanwhile, even though more than 50 people in his circle have already been infected with Covid-19, her husband has been hosting up to 24 parties and celebrations of every sort at the White House this month. In other words, top-notch super-spreader Christmas fun until more or less the end of time. (If you’re well over 65, like I am, it may quite literally be your last chance to have a blast.) And whatever you do, when you’re freely wandering the White House, don’t miss that tribute to essential workers in the Red Room!

If, however, you’re of a slightly more serious frame of mind, how about cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at Mike Pompeo’s State Department? Hurry it up because one thing is guaranteed: it’s not going to be anywhere near as much fun in the Biden years. (I mean, so been-there, done-that, right?) And don’t worry, since the State Department building has been deep-cleaned repeatedly due to reported Covid-19 infections there and pay no attention to the fact that State Department personnel are being urged to work from home. I guarantee you that it’ll be a blast — and I don’t mean a bombing-Iran sort of blast either, though for all any of us knows, that might be in the works, too! After all, you could already have run into a bevy of foreign ambassadors and up to 900 guests (actually, fewer than 70 appeared) in rooms on the eighth floor of that building (but socially distanced, I swear) at gatherings that were supposed to go on until Christmas.

Whoa, rein in that sleigh, Santa! Sorry to disappoint, but Mike canceled his final superspreader party and went into quarantine last week after — big shock! — coming into contact with someone who had the coronavirus while hosting those “diplomats and dignitaries” at close quarters!

Deck the halls with boughs of folly indeed!

A historical switcheroo And 2020! What a year to celebrate, right? The very year when Donald Trump won his second term as president in a landslide — or am I confused? Did I mean lost the presidency in a landslide of pandemic deaths? Still, if in this “holiday” season, and in the true spirit of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, I were to be offered the chance to remake the history of this century, here’s the switcheroo I might choose to pull.

Let’s start with this simple fact: on December 9th, more people died in a single day from Covid-19 (3,124) than died on September 11, 2001, in the ruins of the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon (2,977). Or cumulatively speaking, think of it this way: more Americans have died in less than a year from the coronavirus than the 301,000 civilians that Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates have died in America’s forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen since 2001.

Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic has, of course, been to give awful advice, hold super-spreader rallies galore, and most recently host those ongoing, largely unmasked festivities at the White House; he has, that is, responded to the arrival of Covid-19 on our shores by committing murder big time. (Estimates are that, by February 2021, 450,000 Americans could be dead from the pandemic even as vaccines to prevent it begin to arrive. By the time this country is more or less safe — if it ever truly is — that number might be 600,000 (or almost in the range of the American toll in the “Spanish Flu” of 1918).

Now, to step back just a few years, consider the response of President George W. Bush to that one day of horrific death caused by 19 mostly Saudi hijackers aboard four commercial jets. In response to those 9/11 attacks, he launched what quickly became known as the Global War on Terror, promptly invaded Afghanistan, and a year and a half later did the same thing in Iraq. (That was, of course, something he and his top officials had begun thinking about — quite literally, in the case of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — in the rubble of the Pentagon, even though that country’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, had nothing whatsoever to do either with al-Qaeda or those terror attacks.) Of course, 19 years later, despite a president who swore he would end this country’s “forever wars,” the war on terror is still ongoing without a lasting victory or true success in sight.

Now, as this mad Trumpian Christmas of ours approaches with increasing parts of the country in lockdown and Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths eternally rising into record-breaking territory, here’s my fantasy proposition, my imagined historical switcheroo: What if, in response to 9/11, George W. Bush had, irresponsibly enough, simply thrown parties at the White House in high Trumpian-style; and what if, in response to the coronavirus crisis, Donald Trump had, responsibly enough, launched a global war on Covid-19 in true Bushian fashion? How differently history might have turned out.

The blazing fool before us Instead, of course, Bush did launch those disastrous invasions and Trump did launch his own personal war on truth when it came to the pandemic (and so much else). The result, in both cases: crimes and deaths galore. Though it’s seldom thought of that way, both of those twenty-first-century presidents of “ours” were, in a rather literal sense, mass murderers. In addition, thanks to the two of them and the cast of characters that accompanied them, we now live in a world of remarkable lies and self-delusion, whether we’re talking about the U.S. military or our health and well-being.

After all, if you don’t think this country is delusional when it comes to what still passes for “national security” consider this: just the other day, the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who can evidently agree on so little else, passed a record veto-proof defense bill giving the Pentagon a staggering $740 billion dollars for the next fiscal year. (Talk about inequality in this country with so many Americans at the edge of eviction or even hunger and Congress doing next to nothing for them!) In fact, together they actually agreed to offer more money than the Pentagon even asked for when it came to purchasing new arms, including extra Lockheed Martin F-35 jet fighters, already the most expensive and possibly least effective warplanes in history. Meanwhile, across the planet, the weaponry into which all that “national security” money has been poured is still killing people, including startling numbers of civilians, in never-ending unsuccessful wars that have turned millions of people in distant countries into displaced persons and refugees.

Considering such funding to be for “national security” isn’t just a joke, but a lie of the first order. It has, as a start, produced both global and national insecurity (while aiding the rise of what’s now called right-wing populism). Those disastrous but disastrously well-funded wars launched by George W. Bush proved to be, above all else, acts of mass murder abroad, even as they also led to the deaths, injuries, or PTSD misery of significant numbers of Americans. Think of them, in fact, as, in the most literal sense imaginable, war crimes.

Of course, those acts of mass murder all took place in distant lands far from most American eyes, even as, in an ever more unequal society, they deprived so many here of needed assistance. In part, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential campaign was a product of that mass murder abroad. And now, without ever actually ending those wars as he promised so vociferously, he’s become a mass murderer at home in his own striking fashion. In this pandemic year, think of him, whether in relation to Covid-19 itself or the election that took place in its midst, as launching a kind of war on terror on both Americans and our political system.

In the process, he’s helped create a world of staggering folly that should be eternally unmasked. (Whoops! Well, you know what I mean.) The America he’s played such a part in producing has created a kind of mental chaos that’s hard to take in. One nurse in unmasked South Dakota caught its sad spirit in this series of tweets:

I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real… These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.

She’s right. No credits roll and yet the president and his men, as well as Republican governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem who refuse to mandate masks are, in an obvious sense, aiding and abetting murders. Take, for instance, the president’s lawyer, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who traveled the country unmasked, ignoring social distancing guidelines wherever he went, to beat the post-election drums for Donald Trump. He then fell ill with Covid-19, was hospitalized, got special medications that most Americans could never receive thanks to his pal, and called into his own radio show from his hospital room to essentially denounce masking and social distancing and assure his listeners that Covid-19 was “curable.” (Tell that to the more than 300,000 Americans who have already died from it.)

Now, don’t such acts, multiplied many times over, qualify as part of what might be considered a homegrown war of (not on) terror in a world not of holly but folly this Christmas season? And I haven’t even mentioned the crimes this president and his administration have committed against the environment or President Trump’s criminal urge to torch the planet itself in a fashion that, given what we already know about climate change, will potentially result in so much more death, destruction, and displacement.

We live in a land of vast crimes against others and increasingly against ourselves. We also await a new president whose greatest ad line is simply that he is not Donald J. Trump (thank god!), though in all honesty that “new” has to be taken under advisement. Let’s hope for the best, especially when it comes to climate change, but Joe Biden will, after all, be 78 years old — by far the oldest president in our history — on entering the Oval Office. He’s the been-there, done-that man of our moment and, Obama appointee by Obama appointee, he seems largely intent on recreating a familiar past that helped create the very future we’re now mired in.

As we await him in a country on edge, armed, angry, and in a conspiratorial frame of mind, as we face a Mitch McConnell Republican Party that would rather take down the future than negotiate much of anything, Donald Trump, the murderer, continues to prove himself the ultimate, possibly all-time, sore loser, even as he parties away at the White House. He gives a pandemic version of Christmas true meaning.

See the blazing fool before us,
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

 

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 December 2020

Word Count: 2,080

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(Part I)

Ten years young: Arab revolutionary protests As we mark a decade of Arab protests to replace entire government systems with more efficient, democratic, and accountable ones, the balance sheet of the uprisings seems slim.

Only Tunisia has transitioned to a constitutional democracy, and Sudan is in the midst of a fragile three-year transition. Major national protests still define Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, and Algeria, while Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen suffer serious warfare among local and foreign forces. Most other Arab countries have reverted to tighter autocratic rule that weakens personal liberties.

This conventional view of the Arab region after a decade of protests is incomplete, though. A more thorough analysis would recognise that major changes that will impact future governance continue to occur across the region. Ten years is not sufficient time to credibly assess these Arab revolutionary uprisings — “uprisings” because they are spontaneous civil protests, and “revolutionary” because they aim to totally change governance systems and citizen-state relations, including the values and actions of individual citizens.

To begin, it’s important to grasp two time frames which led up to the Arab uprising: First, the 50 years since 1970 during which military rulers who seized power across the region and used oil wealth to institutionalise mostly corrupt and inefficient autocratic systems; and second, the 100 years since WWI that gave birth to the modern Arab state system which has largely experienced erratic statehood and weak sovereignty, especially in recent decades.

The Arab uprisings mirror the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in the United States which also did not erupt in a vacuum. They emerged from a frustrated legacy of repeated earlier protests in the US over the past century, and were ignited by recent egregious acts of persistent physical or socio-economic brutality. The Arab uprisings similarly follow decades of failed smaller protests by politically helpless citizens against discrimination, inequity, and rising poverty and desperation.

 

In their breadth, depth, longevity, demands, and political action, the Arab uprisings are part of the long-denied process of national self-determination and state-building that Arab citizens yearn for, and now try to seize — with mixed results — in this early stage of collective street action.

New alliances and aspirations: The people as political actors
This decade of uprisings is historically significant for several unique aspects that the region had never experienced on such a large and sustained scale. The most striking is their continuity. Protests against state rule have occurred since 2010 in half the 22 Arab League countries, including some monarchies and oil-rich states. The regional spread is matched by the nationwide grievances of a majority of citizens within individual countries.

This was evident in Lebanon, Algeria, Iraq, and Sudan recently, where different sectarian, ethnic, ideological, and regional groups that occasionally had protested separately have now joined in single and coordinated national protests. They have learned that they all suffer the same stresses and inequities — few jobs, low pay, poor education and health services, rising inflation and poverty, imploding economies, unchecked corruption, and a general culture of uncaring and/or incompetent officials.

The common concerns of the protesters who seek a totally new government system are evident in the identical demands they raise in each country. Unlike the spontaneous 2010 protests that called for broad notions of dignity and social justice, today’s demands all seek a series of specific transformative steps to create more efficient, democratic, and accountable governments under the rule of law. They include: the resignation of all senior ruling officials, a transitional government to hold new parliamentary and presidential elections, a new constitution that guarantees citizen rights, an independent judiciary and anti-corruption mechanisms, and putting on trial former officials who ravaged the society and economy and grew wealthy in the process.

The current protests are striking also for bringing together different groups with a wide range of grievances that they had formerly raised separately, and almost always unsuccessfully. Environmentalists, activists for social justice, gender and minority rights, and democratic rule-of-law, and others joined hands for months on end to lobby for governance that would treat them all equitably.

Individuals and organised groups worked together in public squares to express their grievances and chart out solutions for the new states they sought to build. This generated two important new phenomena: many people who never expressed themselves in public joined the protests and became political actors (such as schoolchildren, teachers, and residents of remote provinces); and, most of them for the first time in their lives experienced contributing to shaping their anticipated new government and new national policies.

Activist citizens also created new organisations to replace moribund and corrupted state institutions, such as media organisations, professional unions, and self-help community centres.

Alongside these and other signs of the slow birth of a new Arab citizen, however, the last few years have also seen the brutal response of regimes and sectarian groups that refuse to share or relinquish power. Everywhere — in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, Morocco, and others — long-entrenched regimes reacted to the initial uprisings with promises of limited reforms, including a new prime minister, new elections, or more social spending.

Protesters rejected these as insulting sops that perpetuated the power structure and its failed policies, and they continued demonstrating to bring down the entire government. The power elite and its sectarian thugs and militias then reacted with brutal political or military force. They shot and killed hundreds of demonstrators, jailed or indicted protest leaders, burned down protest camps, and allowed moribund economies to whither even more, which drove more families into poverty and desperation.

The state’s harsh responses did not quell the protests — but the coronavirus in March 2020, did. For most of 2020, simmering citizen anger and fear failed to force new state policies, as the public pressure of the street protests dissipated.

As the virus-induced economic slowdowns and health concerns eventually halted most protests, some governments tried to use their coronavirus responses to generate new legitimacy among former supporters who had often joined the protests, and who saw their own life prospects shrivel by the month.

Protesters across the Arab region are on hiatus today, awaiting the end of the coronavirus threat and using the time to reassess their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, so that they are better prepared when the political protests resume — which they will, in some forms we may not grasp today.

(Part II)

Taking stock of an unprecedented decade The balance sheet is mixed. Tunisia and Sudan have achieved democracy or a transition to it, but both are in fragile condition. Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Iraq remain mired in domestic or regional wars. Monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco and Jordan to a lesser extent, all either prohibit public protest or allow only symbolic gestures that do not threaten the power structure. Foreign powers are frequently involved in the wars and in bolstering Arab autocrats.

The most important countries to monitor today are where the 2019-20 protests are certain to resume when conditions permit — Algeria, Lebanon, Sudan, and Iraq. Their uprisings all elicited limited state concessions without any real change in the exercise of power; only Sudan’s protests forced the military regime that ousted President Omar Hassan Bashir to negotiate a gradual transition to a democratic system. That arrangement is very fragile, with the civilian and military wings of the transitional authority often at odds (such as on normalisation with Israel) and the economy remains in dire straits.

The stalemate and pause see activists reassessing their tactics and strategy, with many advocating to organise at the grassroots and nationally to create political parties or movements that can contest future elections. The street protests and disruptions of normal life clearly have not caused regimes to cede power, and foreign parties are not stepping in to save collapsing economies. Most Arab elites and protesters realise that they are on their own, because the Arab region as a whole, for the most part, has lost its strategic relevance to foreign powers. Those powers that do intervene — like Russia in Syria — do so to maintain the autocratic order that serves their strategic interests.

The least visible but perhaps most significant change of the past decade that might define the future of political rule in Arab societies is the realization by individuals and masses alike that they are not helpless in the face of their ruling regimes, but rather that they can organise and protest and try to define their own future. That sense of agency and change-through-political action never existed on a wide scale before, and now permeates hundreds of millions of ordinary men and women of all ages. When it is mobilised again, it is likely to have more impact than it has this decade.

The lessons of an uprising on standby

The main lessons seem to be about the balance of power among the two forces that confront each other — the protesters who spontaneously took to the streets to remove their governments but did not master the keys to success, and the power elite that has ruled for decades and will fight to remain in place, even if it governs shattered societies like Syria, Yemen, and Libya. The 2010-20 decade is the latest and most robust, but not the final stage of Arab transitions to democracy and stability.

The confrontations will resume post-Covid because all the underlying conditions of citizen despair that prompted the uprisings continue to deteriorate. As citizen well-being plummets and poverty and vulnerability spread to over 70 percent of the population, confidence in governments vanishes and popular support for the uprisings increases.

These trends are repeatedly confirmed by opinion polls. The most recent regional survey, by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, showed that household income is insufficient for nearly 75 percent of families. One in five Arabs wants to emigrate, and almost one in every three 18-34-year-olds wants to leave for good. About half the people view government performance negatively, over 90 percent see corruption as prevalent, and less than one-third feel that the rule of law is applied equally to all citizens.

These realities explain why 58 percent of the entire region view the uprisings positively, and in the four countries where the protests continue the public’s support ranges from 67 to 82 percent. The widespread desire for change only intensifies as economic conditions deteriorate and governments seem uncaring about their citizens’ suffering. Citizen agitation for deep change will persist, though it is not clear today in what form, due to the limited impact of the last decade’s activism.

We should view the revolutionary uprisings in Arab lands as dramatic elements in the state-building process that started a century ago, but never solidified its results in most cases because ordinary citizens never had an opportunity to shape decisions about national values or policies. The uprisings have sent the message that citizens need material well-being, opportunity, and security, as well as intangibles like dignity, respect, voice, and identity. They will continue to do that in new ways, with much greater awareness of how to confront stubborn state power.

As the Arab system of states now enters its second century of state-building, anxious and determined citizens who battled for a better life in the 2010-20 decade will keep trying to make sure that they finally exercise their right to, and participate in, their national self-determination.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

This article — Part I and Part II — originated in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 December 2020

Word Count: 1,887

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The leaders of the Republican Party are now slowly recognizing publicly that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States. While that may seem reassuring to those with an abiding faith in democratic institutions, it shouldn’t be that reassuring.

The more the GOP leadership moves forward, preparing itself to face a Democratic administration, the more Donald Trump’s insanest followers are going to feel betrayed. The more they feel betrayed, the more they are going to act violently.

I have no doubt about it. The pattern was established in the 1990s. Whenever there’s a Democratic president, there’s mass violence of one variety or another, some of which is transparently political, as when Dylann Storm Roof entered an AME church in Charleston to murder Black people kneeling in prayer.

Most mass shootings are not transparently political but they are nonetheless inherently political. They reflect something sinister in our society, something deeply paranoid yet deeply entitled, and ready to kill itself if that’s what it takes to kill its mortal enemy, whoever that is.

That’s the context. Add to that events of the present: a president refusing to concede while flunkies attempt to execute a coup d’etat; close allies inside and outside the government urging him to declare martial law.

Add to that context events of the past: Trump’s victory by way of Russian sabotage; the insistence that investigations into Trump-Kremlin relations are part of a conspiracy deep in the government attempting to depose him and the confederate nation-within-a-nation for which he stands; the logical transmogrification of that conspiracy theory into one that now ensnares even Trump’s appointees to the US Supreme Court; and leading Republicans, such as US Senator Rand Paul, who give oxygen to it by accusing Biden of stealing the election.

During Trump’s tenure, he encouraged violence against political enemies broadly interpreted by the perpetrators of mass violence to be anyone who was not among the “real Americans” living in the confederate nation-within-a-nation for which the president stood. Anti-Trump protesters were mowed down in Charlottesville in 2017. Jews were massacred in Pittsburgh in 2018. Immigrants, and the urban setting they and their white liberal allies lived in, were targeted for elimination in El Paso in 2019.

In each case, leading Republicans never pointed a finger at Trump. Instead, they sought cover on ground that was sacred to them, the Second Amendment. The occasional spasm of violence, some actually said, was the price of our freedom.

By the time Trump took office, the Republicans were practiced in looking the other way.

They looked the other way when the previous Democratic president asked them to join efforts to save the US economy from collapse; when the Russians helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton; and when the Russians pulled off the biggest hack in our history, including the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees our bomb stockpile.

They continued before and after Robert Mueller all but named Trump in the commission of federal crimes punishable by law; when the president involved a foreign leader in an international scheme to defraud the American people; and when the Senate Republicans acquitted him, as if they did not see the treason in front of them.

The worst time they looked the other way was when the new strain of the coronavirus arrived. Since March, the covid has killed more than 318,000 Americans and infected millions more. This past week saw more than 3,000 deaths per day, with the daily equivalent expected over the next 60 to 90 days despite a vaccine being rolled out and another waiting in the wings.

More people have died from the covid pandemic than all who died fighting in the Second World War. By the time this is all over, more Americans will have died than all who died fighting in all foreign wars combined.

The Republicans have looked the other way during a viral plague just as they looked the other way during a plague of mass shootings and mass death, a plague that will grow in intensity under a Democratic president even as the viral plague subsides. And they will continue looking away even as they stoke the paranoia and entitlement that inspires people to kill themselves in order to kill their enemies, whoever they are.

I haven’t hoped much for reform since Dec. 14, 2012 when 20 first-graders were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a few miles down the road from where I am writing this, in Newtown, Conn. I don’t see much reason to hope in the near term either. That said, things might change when most people most of the time stop seeing mass shootings as an issue of gun rights that will never be resolved.

All shooting massacres are political violence no matter what the shooter’s motives are. They are political violence in the service of a political party making the political decision to look the other way while sickness, suffering, and death engulf our beloved country.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 December 2020

Word Count: 829

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Details of a $900 billion covid relief bill will likely be released some time today, according to Bloomberg. Sources say the package will likely include “$600 in payments for individuals, $300-per-week in supplemental unemployment insurance payments and aid for small businesses as well as roughly $17 billion for airlines.” Legislation will not include state and city aid, however. That seems to be a concession on the part of the Democrats in exchange for GOP lawmakers dropping a corporate liability shield.

The country is in desperate need of relief, not least because as many as 40 million people risk being evicted from their homes, according to the Aspen Institute. (As I’m writing this, news came of jobless claims jumping unexpectedly to their highest level in three months.)

To truly boost the economy, though, the Democrats should aim at the bottom of the social order, which is to say poor Black people, especially poor Black women. Anything helping people at the bottom is going to help everyone else. To do this, the Congress should get rid of the Hyde Amendment. The Democrats should justify getting rid of it using the same argument that went into establishing it.

What is the Hyde Amendment? It’s a provision of federal law named after the late Henry Hyde, a major abortion opponent. It bans Medicaid money from being used to pay for abortions with few exceptions, including risk of death to the mother. It has been attached, more or less unchanged, to every spending bill since 1976.

For years, even defenders of abortion were OK with it. They recognized the legitimacy of the claim that Americans who oppose abortion on religious grounds should not be forced to pay for something that violates their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Things are different now, as was apparent after then-candidate Joe Biden said he was OK with it before getting excoriated by women’s groups and heel-turning in a hurry. He and other leading Democrats now support repealing it with the so-called EACH Woman Act.

I don’t know how one can go about calculating the economic impact of the Hyde Amendment. I’m sure someone somewhere has. However, common sense tells us that whatever the actual number is, it’s gotta be big, especially with reference to the poor. The poor are not poor because they don’t have money. The poor are poor, because they are stuck in a social context in which they must spend all they have, and more. If they don’t, something bad is going to happen — for instance, going hungry or getting kicked out of the house with nowhere to go.

The Hyde Amendment caused “a 13 percent increase in births among Medicaid recipients after the amendment was enacted, and estimated that it prevented more than 60,000 abortions per year,” according to the New York Times. Again, whatever the actual total of its economic impact, it’s gotta be big.

Which is why the Congress should get rid of it. The Republicans will balk, but that doesn’t mean the Democrats shouldn’t try. And now is the time, because now is when the covid pandemic has turned everything upside down. It’s now OK for taxpayers, even religiously conservative taxpayers, to pay for things that might violate their religious beliefs. That it’s OK is the only logical conclusion one can draw from the absence of any religiously conservative taxpayer lodging a complaint over this fact: religious groups of all varieties received billions in the last round of covid relief.

This might not sound pivotal, but think about it. White evangelical Protestants, most of whom believe Islam, Hinduism and even Catholicism are false religions, paid to keep mosques, temples and parishes open after the covid relief act passed in the spring. White evangelical Protestants, who among all Americans oppose abortion the most, funded congregations that not only tolerate abortion but openly defend its practice, such as the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA), respectively. By the same logic of the Hyde Amendment, white evangelical Protestants saw their sincerely held religious beliefs and liberties violated in one way or another.

Of course, white evangelical Protestants could put a stop to this violation of their faith and religious freedom. They could, as with abortion, demand the Congress not force them to pay for things they don’t agree with. But that would require removing themselves from being eligible for federal aid in the middle of a plague. Given that three-quarters of “Christian churches and Christian organizations” asked for and got forgivable business loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, that seems unlikely.

The solid religious foundation beneath the Hyde Amendment has melted into the air.

The Democrats always make an economic and social justice case for repealing it, but they don’t have to do that anymore. The onus isn’t on them. All they need do is show things have changed. All they need do is show the Republicans, who will insist the Hyde Amendment is about religious freedom, don’t mean it. They don’t mean it, because religious freedom didn’t stop them from voting to fund “false religions” that openly defend abortion on religious grounds.

Indeed, the pandemic is forcing every one of us to reassess what we thought was true but in this new light isn’t so true.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 December 2020

Word Count: 873

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It was the end of October 2001. Two friends, Max Elbaum and Bob Wing, had just dropped by. (Yes, children, believe it or not, people used to drop in on each other, maskless, once upon a time.) They had come to hang out with my partner Jan Adams and me. Among other things, Max wanted to get some instructions from fellow-runner Jan about taping his foot to ease the pain of plantar fasciitis. But it soon became clear that he and Bob had a bigger agenda for the evening. They were eager to recruit us for a new project.

And so began War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, a free, bilingual, antiwar tabloid that, at its height, distributed 100,000 copies every six weeks to more than 700 antiwar organizations around the country. It was already clear to the four of us that night — as it was to millions around the world — that the terrorist attacks of September 11th would provide the pretext for a major new projection of U.S. military power globally, opening the way to a new era of “all-war-all-the-time.” War Times was a project of its moment (although the name would still be apt today, given that those wars have never ended). It would be superseded in a few years by the explosive growth of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Still, it represented an early effort to fill the space where a peace movement would eventually develop.

All-war-all-the-time — for some of us We were certainly right that the United States had entered a period of all-war-all-the-time. It’s probably hard for people born since 9/11 to imagine how much — and how little — things changed after September 2001. By the end of that month, this country had already launched a “war” on an enemy that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us was “not just in Afghanistan,” but in “50 or 60 countries, and it simply has to be liquidated.”

Five years and two never-ending wars later, he characterized what was then called the war on terror as “a generational conflict akin to the Cold War, the kind of struggle that might last decades as allies work to root out terrorists across the globe and battle extremists who want to rule the world.” A generation later, it looks like Rumsfeld was right, if not about the desires of the global enemy, then about the duration of the struggle.

Here in the United States, however, we quickly got used to being “at war.” In the first few months, interstate bus and train travelers often encountered (and, in airports, still encounter) a new and absurd kind of “security theater.” I’m referring to those long, snaking lines in which people first learned to remove their belts and coats, later their hats and shoes, as ever newer articles of clothing were recognized as potential hiding places for explosives. Fortunately, the arrest of the Underwear Bomber never led the Transportation Security Administration to the obvious conclusion about the clothing travelers should have to remove next. We got used to putting our three-ounce containers of liquids (No more!) into quart-sized baggies (No bigger! No smaller!).

It was all-war-all-the-time, but mainly in those airports. Once the shooting wars started dragging on, if you didn’t travel by airplane much or weren’t deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, it was hard to remember that we were still in war time at all. There were continuing clues for those who wanted to know, like the revelations of CIA torture practices at “black sites” around the world, the horrors of military prisons like the ones at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, and the still-functioning prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And soon enough, of course, there were the hundreds and then thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars taking their places among the unhoused veterans of earlier wars in cities across the United States, almost unremarked upon, except by service organizations.

So, yes, the wars dragged on at great expense, but with little apparent effect in this country. They even gained new names like “the long war” (as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis put it in 2017) or the “forever wars,” a phrase now so common that it appears all over the place. But apart from devouring at least $6.4 trillion dollars through September 2020 that might otherwise have been invested domestically in healthcare, education, infrastructure, or addressing poverty and inequality, apart from creating increasingly militarized domestic police forces armed ever more lethally by the Pentagon, those forever wars had little obvious effect on the lives of most Americans.

Of course, if you happened to live in one of the places where this country has been fighting for the last 19 years, things are a little different. A conservative estimate by Iraq Body Count puts violent deaths among civilians in that country alone at 185,454 to 208,493 and Brown University’s Costs of War project points out that even the larger figure is bound to be a significant undercount:

“Several times as many Iraqi civilians may have died as an indirect result of the war, due to damage to the systems that provide food, health care, and clean drinking water, and as a result, illness, infectious diseases, and malnutrition that could otherwise have been avoided or treated.”

And that’s just Iraq. Again, according to the Costs of War Project, “At least 800,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan.”

Of course, many more people than that have been injured or disabled. And America’s post-9/11 wars have driven an estimated 37 million people from their homes, creating the greatest human displacement since World War II. People in this country are rightly concerned about the negative effects of online schooling on American children amid the ongoing Covid-19 crisis (especially poor children and those in communities of color). Imagine, then, the effects on a child’s education of losing her home and her country, as well as one or both parents, and then growing up constantly on the move or in an overcrowded, under-resourced refugee camp. The war on terror has truly become a war of generations.

Every one of the 2,977 lives lost on 9/11 was unique and invaluable. But the U.S. response has been grotesquely disproportionate — and worse than we War Times founders could have imagined that October night so many years ago.

Those wars of ours have gone on for almost two decades now. Each new metastasis has been justified by George W. Bush’s and then Barack Obama’s use of the now ancient 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which Congress passed in the days after 9/11. Its language actually limited presidential military action to a direct response to the 9/11 attacks and the prevention of future attacks by the same actors. It stated that the president

…is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Despite that AUMF’s limited scope, successive presidents have used it to justify military action in at least 18 countries. (To be fair, President Obama realized the absurdity of his situation when he sent U.S. troops to Syria and tried to wring a new authorization out of Congress, only to be stymied by a Republican majority that wouldn’t play along.)

In 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq War, Congress passed a second AUMF, which permitted the president to use the armed forces as “necessary and appropriate” to “defend U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” In January 2020, Donald Trump used that second authorization to justify the murder by drone of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general, along with nine other people.

Trump steps in In 2016, peace activists were preparing to confront a Hillary Clinton administration that we expected would continue Obama’s version of the forever wars — the “surge” in Afghanistan, the drone assassination campaigns, the special ops in Africa. But on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, something went “Trump” in the night and Donald J. Trump took over the presidency with a promise to end this country’s forever wars, which he had criticized relentlessly during his campaign. That, of course, didn’t mean we should have expected a peace dividend anytime soon. He was also committed to rebuilding a supposedly “depleted” U.S. military. As he said at a 2019 press conference,

“When I took over, it was a mess… One of our generals came in to see me and he said, ‘Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘That’s a terrible thing you just said.’ He said, ‘We don’t have ammunition.’ Now we have more ammunition than we’ve ever had.”

It’s highly unlikely that the military couldn’t afford to buy enough bullets when Trump entered the Oval Office, given that publicly acknowledged defense funding was then running at $580 billion a year. He did, however, manage to push that figure to $713 billion by fiscal year 2020. That December, he threatened to veto an even larger appropriation for 2021 — $740 billion — but only because he wanted the military to continue to honor Confederate generals by keeping their names on military bases. Oh, and because he thought the bill should also change liability rules for social media companies, an issue you don’t normally expect to see addressed in a defense appropriations bill. And, in any case, Congress passed the bill with a veto-proof majority.

As Pentagon expert Michael Klare pointed out recently, while it might seem contradictory that Trump would both want to end the forever wars and to increase military spending, his actions actually made a certain sense. The president, suggested Klare, had been persuaded to support the part of the U.S. military command that has favored a sharp pivot away from reigning post-9/11 Pentagon practices. For 19 years, the military high command had hewed fairly closely to the strategy laid out by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld early in the Bush years: maintaining the capacity to fight ground wars against one or two regional powers (think of that “Axis of Evil” of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran), while deploying agile, technologically advanced forces in low-intensity (and a couple of higher-intensity) counterterrorism conflicts. Nineteen years later, whatever its objectives may have been — a more-stable Middle East? Fewer and weaker terrorist organizations? — it’s clear that the Rumsfeld-Bush strategy has failed spectacularly.

Klare points out that, after almost two decades without a victory, the Pentagon has largely decided to demote international terrorism from rampaging monster to annoying mosquito cloud. Instead, the U.S. must now prepare to confront the rise of China and Russia, even if China has only one overseas military base and Russia, economically speaking, is a rickety petro-state with imperial aspirations. In other words, the U.S. must prepare to fight short but devastating wars in multiple domains (including space and cyberspace), perhaps even involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the Eurasian continent. To this end, the country has indeed begun a major renovation of its nuclear arsenal and announced a new 30-year plan to beef up its naval capacity. And President Trump rarely misses a chance to tout “his” creation of a new Space Force.

Meanwhile, did he actually keep his promise and at least end those forever wars? Not really. He did promise to bring all U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by Christmas, but acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller only recently said that we’d be leaving about 2,500 troops there and a similar number in Iraq, with the hope that they’d all be out by May 2021. (In other words, he dumped those wars in the lap of the future Biden administration.)

In the meantime in these years of “ending” those wars, the Trump administration actually loosened the rules of engagement for air strikes in Afghanistan, leading to a “massive increase in civilian casualties,” according to a new report from the Costs of War Project. “From the last year of the Obama administration to the last full year of recorded data during the Trump administration,” writes its author, Neta Crawford, “the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led airstrikes in Afghanistan increased by 330 percent.”

In spite of his isolationist “America First” rhetoric, in other words, President Trump has presided over an enormous buildup of an institution, the military-industrial complex, that was hardly in need of major new investment. And in spite of his anti-NATO rhetoric, his reduction by almost a third of U.S. troop strength Germany, and all the rest, he never really violated the post-World War II foreign policy pact between the Republican and Democratic parties. Regardless of how they might disagree about dividing the wealth domestically, they remain united in their commitment to using diplomacy when possible, but military force when necessary, to maintain and expand the imperial power that they believed to be the guarantor of that wealth.

And now comes Joe On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden will become the president of a country that spends as much on its armed forces, by some counts, as the next 10 countries combined. He’ll inherit responsibility for a nation with a military presence in 150 countries and special-operations deployments in 22 African nations alone. He’ll be left to oversee the still-unfinished, deeply unsuccessful, never-ending war on terror in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia and, as publicly reported by the Department of Defense, 187,000 troops stationed outside the United States.

Nothing in Joe Biden’s history suggests that he or any of the people he’s already appointed to his national security team have the slightest inclination to destabilize that Democratic-Republican imperial pact. But empires are not sustained by inclination alone. They don’t last forever. They overextend themselves. They rot from within.

If you’re old enough, you may remember stories about the long lines for food in the crumbling Soviet Union, that other superpower of the Cold War. You can see the same thing in the United States today. Once a week, my partner delivers food boxes to hungry people in our city, those who have lost their jobs and homes, because the pandemic has only exacerbated this country’s already brutal version of economic inequality. Another friend routinely sees a food line stretching over a mile, as people wait hours for a single free bag of groceries.

Perhaps the horrors of 2020 — the fires and hurricanes, Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy, the death, sickness, and economic dislocation caused by Covid-19 — can force a real conversation about national security in 2021. Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us — or indeed the world — any safer. This is the best chance in a generation to start that conversation. The alternative is to keep trudging mindlessly toward disaster.

 

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new Dispatch book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 December 2020

Word Count: 2,490

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The language we use to describe political reality can create its own reality so that we end up fighting over a fiction instead of a fact. I’m thinking particularly of the word “divided.” The Washington press corps uses it loosely to mean opposition of some variety, usually between the two parties, but also nationally. We’re told America is “divided” on any given issue, particularly with reference to the presidential election.

But, again, the language we use to describe political reality can create its own political reality, a false one, if we’re not careful about how and why we use it. The result can be our fighting over a fiction, rather than a fact. The consequence, I contend, is allowing language to control us instead of us controlling the language. The consequence is endangering ourselves instead of affirming and empowering ourselves as we should.

What if we’re not that divided? Consider history. We inhabit, after all, a heterogeneous country, racially, religiously and geographically. It has been this way since before white people settled the continent. You could say, and I would say, we’ve always been divided in one way or another, because the United States is a federation of different regions and states.

Total agreement is not possible or even desirable. Someone will always disagree, and that’s a good thing. So, if America has always been divided, our current “division” seems so unexceptional as to be scarcely worth mentioning.

Of course, it is worth mentioning. The question, then, is how it’s mentioned. Here, we have to be mindful of the Washington press corps’ self-interest, by which I mean professional self-interest. Disagreement, controversy, conflict — these will always be newsworthy, even if they are, in the grand scheme of things, rather insignificant — insignificant because wherever you find human beings gathered in an effort to organize themselves, you’re going to find disagreement, controversy and conflict.

Because most people most of the time don’t have access to information about what’s going on in Washington, most people most of the time trust the press corps to tell them what’s going on. But because the press corps is in the habit of talking up disagreement, controversy and conflict, because disagreement, controversy and conflict are considered newsworthy, most people most of the time believe America is, in fact, divided even though most “division” is rather normal, ordinary and ephemeral.

What about the election? “Half the country” voted for Donald Trump. “The other half” voted for Joe Biden. Indeed, as Dave Wasserman reported, Trump came within 65,009 votes of winning. Surely, no matter how the press corps talks about “division,” the election really does illustrate just how divided we have become as a country.

Looks can be deceiving, though. A margin of more than 65,000 votes is meaningful but only in the context of the Electoral College. The Electoral College is many things, none of them democratic. Something so anti-democratic cannot measure how divided we are.

Fact is, Trump lost by 7.1 million votes. And fact is, Biden won more votes than any candidate, Republican or Democrat, ever. In terms of the percentage of the popular vote, among Democrats, only Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama (the first time) got a higher share. Among Republicans, only Dwight Eisenhower (twice), Richard Nixon (reelection), Ronald Reagan (reelection) and George HW Bush did.

Yes, our anti-democratic Electoral College system produced an outcome by which it seems we’re very nearly divided down the middle. That’s until you remember that Trump could have won the Electoral College but lost 7.1 million votes.

What each stood for and against matters, too. Biden for order, union and cooperation. Trump for chaos, disunion and negation. Biden stood for equal human rights and against fascist collectivism. Trump stood for inequality in all its forms and against republican democracy.

Talking up a divided America is privileging the loser over the winner. The privilege ought to go to the candidate who brought as much unity as it’s possible to bring to a country as heterogeneous as ours. It should go especially to the 81,283,485 people who smashed all the old records to save our democratic republic.

The language we use to describe political reality can create its own reality so that we end up fighting over a fiction instead of a fact.

Sixty-two percent of Americans, now that the Electoral College has finalized the results, say the election is over and it’s time to move on, according to a new poll by CBS News. Yes, lots of Republicans disagree, but so what? Unity doesn’t come, and has never come, when everyone agrees. All you need is a majority. Biden has that, and we should remember that.

We keep telling ourselves we’re divided. By any reasonable measure, however, America is united.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 December 2020

Word Count: 793

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