In this fast-paced century, rife with technological innovation, we’ve grown accustomed to the impermanence of things. Whatever is here now will likely someday vanish, possibly sooner than we imagine. Movies and music that once played on our VCRs and stereos have given way to infinite choices in the cloud. Cash currency is fast becoming a thing of the past. Cars will soon enough be self-driving. Stores where you could touch and feel your purchases now lie empty as online shopping sucks up our retail attention.

The ever-more-fleeting nature of our physical world has been propelled in the name of efficiency, access to ever more information, and improvement in the quality of life. Lately, however, a new form of impermanence has entered our American world, this time in the political realm, and it has arrived not gift-wrapped as progress but unpackaged as a profound setback for all to see. Longstanding democratic institutions, processes, and ideals are falling by the wayside at a daunting rate and what’s happening is often barely noticed or disparaged as nothing but a set of passing problems. Viewed as a whole, however, such changes suggest that we’re watching democracy disappear, bit by bit.

Plenty of checks but no balances A recent sign of our eroding democratic world was on display earlier this month with the eradication of trust in the impeachment process. Impeachment, of course, was the Constitution’s protection against the misuse of power by a president. When all was said and done and the Senate had let Donald Trump off the hook, it was clear enough that the power, the threat, of impeachment had itself been thoroughly hollowed out and made ineffectual.

On both sides of the aisle, senators agreed that the president had erred. Republican Lamar Alexander, for example, thought his actions were “wrong” and “inappropriate”; Republican Joni Ernst believed that he had “mishandled” things; while Rob Portman and Susan Collins, echoing Alexander’s sentiments, also labeled his actions “wrong.” It made no difference. The four of them like all the other Republican senators except Utah’s Mitt Romney had, to say the least, no appetite for removing their party’s president from office.

But the real lesson the country should have taken home was this: in the future, it would be foolish to place the slightest hope for protecting democracy in the process that Founding Father James Monroe once described as “the main spring of the great machine of government.” Today, no matter the facts, impeachment is dead in the partisan waters, an historical anomaly that’s long outlived its time.

The failure of impeachment also brought to light the weakness of the constitutional principle of checks and balances. In theory, when it comes to presidential behavior, Congress and the courts have the power to rein in the chief executive. But in this century, both congressional and judicial restraints have proven anemic. One of the many obvious things highlighted by the recent impeachment acquittal in the Senate is Congress’s ultimate ineffectuality when it comes to presidential power.

Donald Trump’s unabashed willingness to use his veto power in a fulsome, even autocratic, fashion only underscores this presidential reality. Recently, for instance, he confirmed that he will veto any bill passed by Congress requiring that he consult that body before launching military attacks on Iran. If recent history holds any lesson for us, it’s that Trump will do no such consulting, especially given the historic weakness of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Congress passed it to emphasize the necessity of getting its consent for war, but ever since its inception Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have all found ways around it.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the courts, Attorney General William Barr has boldly stated his belief that the president’s power dwarfs that of the other branches of government. “In recent years,” he claimed late in 2019, “both the legislative and judicial branches have been responsible for encroaching on the presidency’s constitutional authority.” True to his word, Barr has worked to ensure that the Justice Department has barely a scintilla of independence from the president, even as he lamented Trump’s public display via tweet of controlling the attorney general and that very department.

Of course, Barr’s modest protest about that tweeting rang hollow, given his actions. He played the central role in taking the sting out of the Mueller Report by publicly misrepresenting its conclusions before it was released. His Justice Department endeavored to give blanket immunity from testifying to Congress to individuals close to the president, decreeing that they were not compelled to appear, even when subpoenaed to do so — an assertion overruled by a federal judge but left unresolved in the courts to date.

Barr has also publicly rewritten history to contest, as he put it, the “grammar school civics class version of our Revolution… [as] a rebellion against monarchial tyranny.” Instead, he claimed, in making their new system, what the founders really feared was the tyranny of the “prime antagonist,” the British legislative body or parliament. And within days of the Senate’s acquittal of the president, Barr was once again on the march against obstacles to any presidential assertion of power. He even overruled his own prosecutors in the wake of a tweet by the president, and called for a reduction in the seven-to-nine year sentencing recommendations they were planning to make for presidential pal Roger Stone.

Like the impeachment process, the theory and practice of checks and balances now lies in ruin in a country whose billionaire president has written plenty of checks without balances of any sort. Think of him, in fact, as our very own unfounding father.

Questioning the legitimacy of the American election system Tellingly, the failure of the impeachment process and the collapse of the system of checks and balances have coincided with the onset of the primary season for election 2020. And the anti-democratic virus is visibly spreading in that direction as well. Some Senate Republicans, especially Maine’s Susan Collins, tried to hide behind the notion that, thanks to his impeachment, if not conviction, President Trump had “learned” a salutary lesson “from this case.” Within 24 hours, however, it was clear that the president had “learned” nothing, except that he could do what he pleased. It was, it turned out, the democratic system that had learned a lesson — and not a good one either.

In the case of the caucuses and primaries, those building blocks of presidential elections, our institutions seem as frail and ineffectual as the impeachment process itself. Failing to produce a discernible result in a timely manner, the future not only of the Iowa caucus but of caucuses in general is now being reconsidered. That caucus has, since 1972, been the first moment in the electoral process. It has also long been questioned, given the way that state ill-represents the diversity of the country. But the catastrophic collapse of this year’s version of the Iowa caucus process had nothing to do with issues of diversity and everything to do with interference, incompetence, and finally a disastrous “coding error” in an app.

As the New York Times reported, “the irregularities in the results are likely to do little to restore public confidence in the Iowa caucuses.” As a result, its days as first in the nation may indeed be over. In fact, caucuses in general may be headed for the graveyard. As former presidential candidate Julian Castro recently tweeted, the lessons learned in Iowa surpassed that of a single state, revealing instead “that our democracy has been mis-served by a broken system.” Even Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee, has weighed in, supporting a conversation about moving from caucuses to primaries in the remaining caucus states.

Once again, an established democratic institution is poised to be tossed into the trash bin of history.

Not surprisingly, an increasingly errant political process is being reflected in the culture at large. To take but one example: the newspaper candidate endorsement. This year, bizarrely enough, for the first time in its history, the New York Times chose to endorse not one candidate but two (Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren), a gesture that was tantamount to endorsing no one at all.

The paper’s editorial board simply punted, stating that they didn’t want to choose between two visions: “Both the radical and the realist models warrant serious consideration. If there were ever a time to be open to new ideas, it is now. If there were ever a time to seek stability, now is it.” In fact, their endorsement of “the most effective advocates for each approach” suggested that they were really endorsing a category rather than a specific candidate; namely, a woman. As the last sentence of the piece revealingly stated: “May the best woman win.”

The Boston Globe promptly followed suit, rejecting the very idea of a candidate endorsement, despite a 200-year history of providing them. The Globe’s editorial board argued instead that the first two states in the primary season — Iowa and New Hampshire — were insufficiently diverse to justify their position in the order of primary states. It was time, they explained, “to call for the end of an antiquated system that gives outsized influence in choosing presidents to two states that, demographically, more resemble 19th-century America than they do the America of today.” Essentially, they did what the New York Times had done. They chose to take a stand on an issue rather than on a candidate. Are endorsements, too, no longer a piece of the disintegrating American political process? (A week later, The Las Vegas Sun likewise hedged its bet and endorsed two candidates rather than one; in its case, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar.)

The truth is that the very legitimacy of the American electoral system is now in question. Given Russian interference in the 2016 election (verified by a Senate Intelligence Committee report), not to mention reports on the same in the 2020 campaign, the increasing successes of aggressive voter suppression campaigns and lawsuits, and oft-repeated mantras from Donald Trump and his followers about potentially “rigged” elections, doubts aplenty are already afloat about the legitimacy of next November’s election results, no matter what happens on the ground.

The great unraveling As 2020 dawns, this erosion of our democratic institutions hardly comes out of the blue. Democratic principles have been visibly eroding since the beginning of this century. As I described in my book Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, the build-up in presidential powers began with George W. Bush who, after the 9/11 attacks, claimed that a “unitary” presidency was a more viable form of government than that prescribed by any separation-of-powers doctrine and its promise of checks and balances. Citing a national emergency that September, he would launch his “global war on terror” through a series of secret programs, including an offshore system of torture and injustice that left Congress, the courts, and the American public largely out of the conversation.

In the process, he removed the need for true accountability from the imperial presidency and the administration that went with it. Whether intentionally premising the decision to invade and occupy Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on a lie, staunchly refusing to prosecute those who implemented a policy of torture for suspects in the war on terror hatched in the White House and the Justice Department, or allowing a vast, warrantless, secret surveillance program against Americans as well as foreigners after 9/11, the Bush presidency shredded the concept of executive restraint. In the process, it left its unchecked acts on the table for any future president.

Barack Obama chose to “look forward” not back when it came to the CIA’s global torture program and continued to run the war on terror under the expansive Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress in September 2001. In the process, by avoiding accountability for the new version of an imperial presidency, he left the door open for Donald Trump to begin to create what could, in essence, prove to be a system of executive autocracy in this country.

Given the precedents created in the post-9/11 years, it really should be no surprise that President Trump ignores legalities and precedent, while refusing to observe restraints under the guise of security concerns, and expects not to face accountability. In the process, there is no question that the Trump presidency has already taken the template of the untethered executive and its anti-democratic excesses to a new level, simultaneously defying restraints while brazenly purging anyone who might disagree with him.

As Peter Bergen pointed out in discussing his new book, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, with the resignations or firings of generals once in top cabinet positions, Trump has succeeded in surrounding himself with “a group of yes-men, a small amount of yes-women, and family members.” Indeed, week by week, executive departments are rearranged and re-staffed to fill the administration with those willing to say yes, and only yes, to whatever the president wants.

Thirty-four years ago, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described American history as moving in 30-year cycles, alternating between liberal and conservative eras that, over the long haul, kept the Constitution and the country in balance. And indeed, there have been a few glimmers of light on the horizon recently, including a willingness of the courts, for instance, to halt an executive order allowing state and local officials to reject the resettlement of refugees in their communities.

But examples like that are too few and far between to qualify even as serious indicators of a cyclical return to normalcy, while, strand by strand, our democratic fabric is unraveling before our eyes. Unfortunately, Americans have all too often looked the other way as disappearing customs, principles, and institutions threaten to turn fundamental pillars of American democracy into relics from the past, as obsolete as the black-and-white television sets of my childhood.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, as well as the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief. She is the author and editor of many books, including Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State and The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days. Julia Tedesco contributed research to this article.

Copyright ©2020 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 27 February 2020
Word Count: 2,316
—————-

Yesterday, someone alleged that I was “vehemently anti-Bernie.” The context was a comment I made about youth voting. I said no one ever won the presidency counting on young voters turning out. My critic demurred, but he went farther. “Why should anyone take your pessimistic (anti-Bernie bias) rewrite (opinion) of history seriously? The youth vote for [Barack] Obama was unprecedented and he (checks notes) won.”

Don’t get me wrong. My critic is entitled to his opinion. If he thinks I’m “vehemently anti-Bernie,” more power to him. I bring this up because I think it’s a convenient illustration of something I want to talk about today, which is that my politics is black.

The history of African-American politics is the history of republican liberalism in this country. What black people have achieved is what the founders wanted Americans to achieve, and, yes, that’s in spite of their owning black people. Small-r republican liberalism demands representative government, individual liberty, equal protection under the law, and the cultivation of the common good. It honors freedom but demands responsibility. Citizens are not taxpayers. They are not consumers. They are citizens — the greatest gift of self-empowerment God ever bestowed on humanity.

Black history, in my view, is a history of making good on the Constitution’s preamble. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” It’s all right here. Democracy and brotherhood, equal justice and equal peace, security and prosperity — all the ideological hallmarks of black political thought and republican liberalism.

Black politics is hopeful because it must be in order to survive being cheated, robbed, humiliated or murdered in America. There is no sane person who ever gave up on hope. There is no moral conviction that is hopeless. You must believe tomorrow can be better even though you have every reason to believe it won’t be. You must believe this not for yourself, but for your children (your “Posterity”). Nihilism is a white luxury. (Blackconservatism comes close, though; it believes white people are immutably racist.)

Because black politics must be hopeful in order to survive — as well as thrive — hope is therefore pragmatic. It isn’t pie in the sky. It isn’t Pollyanna. It isn’t the bright side. It sees clearly. It must, because America is no place for false hope. While white people entertained themselves after 2008 with the idea of a “post-racial” America, no black person did. Yet Obama’s victory was indisputable evidence of its future possibility.

Black history, moreover, is a history of (often violent) white forces trying to stop the preamble, as well as the Declaration of Independence and the 14 Amendment, from becoming a permanent reality. To put this another way, black history is a history of white supremacy and white violence. Yet another way: black politics is anti-fascism.

Too few white Americans, in my estimation, understand that white supremacy, white nationalism, ethnonationalism, or whatever you want to call it is just another name for fascism. Too few white people understand that the “white” in white supremacy changes according to the contingencies of history. In this country, Italians weren’t white a century ago. Neither were the Irish. In Germany, Slavs weren’t white during the Nazi era. Neither were the Jews. Neither were homosexuals or the mentally ill.

Too few white Americans understand many conservative policies are fascist. For instance, policies forcing citizens to work in order to demonstrate that they are deserving of public assistance. The Nazis practiced an extreme version of the same belief. Arbeit macht frei (“Labor makes you free”) was displayed prominently over the gates of some of their prison camps. But free from what? From being who you are. You get public assistance after you stop being yourself. Impossible, of course, and that’s the point of such policies — to make the outcomes of sadist policies seem like a moral failing.

Most of Bernie Sanders’ most vocal supporters are white, and it puzzles them why black Americans are not backing the Vermont senator. From their perspective, black Americans would benefit the most from universal health care, greater job security, and higher taxation on the economic elites cheating black Americans out of their wealth.

They are right, of course, but that’s beside the point. The question isn’t whether black Americans want these things. (Black Americans have fought, bled and died for these and similar things.) The question is whether they can trust Sanders. More importantly, the question is whether they can trust white Americans to underwrite black American investment in Sanders. They say he will win by bringing out the youth vote. Will he?

My critic thinks so. Obama did it. Sanders can, too.

Obama didn’t. He supplemented his win with young voters. But his win didn’t depend on them. Things are different for Sanders. According to a new study, he’s probably going to push a lot of voters away. To win, he must get new voters, young ones, and to do that, he must drive out a percentage of young voters no one has ever driven out.

I’m not vehemently anti-Bernie. I’m not anti-Bernie. I’m Bernie-skeptical, though.

My politics is black. Yours* should be, too.

(*My apologies to my readers whose politics is already black!)

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

—————-
Released: 26 February 2020
Word Count: 903
—————-

I would rather not defend Bernie Sanders. So I’m not going to. Not yet.

Yes, the Vermont senator’s victory in Nevada was clear. He has the most delegates going into Saturday’s primary in South Carolina. But I refuse to talk about him as if he has a lock on the nomination. He needs nearly 2,000 delegates to win. He now has 34.

I do not know what I cannot know until the time in which knowing is possible. We are not there yet. Therefore, I’m not going to talk about Sanders as the frontrunner until the moment in which it’s possible to discern a frontrunner. I’m not going to talk about “momentum” until it’s possible to discern momentum. I’m not going to talk about “moderate” voters balking at “socialist” policies. There are no moderates and his policies aren’t socialist. Anyway, the time hasn’t arrived. No one knows anything.

Yes, there are pundits aplenty who are paid top dollar to state authoritatively that America will never elect a “socialist” president. Sure, they have some reasons to be skeptical. But being skeptical about a thing and knowing a thing are two separate things until the moment in which knowing a thing has arrived. And it hasn’t.

Many of the same people declared that America would never elect a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who now beclowns himself and the country daily. This isn’t to say they’re wrong about Sanders — I do not know because I cannot. This is to say they were wrong about Trump — I can know that. Isn’t it strange to trust them a second time?

If Sanders does win the nomination but loses the general election, these same pundits will declare authoritatively that they were right. They told ya so. But that is more coincidence than causality. They could not have known Sanders would lose (in this hypothetical) until he lost. (They can’t have known until the moment in which knowing is possible.) Presidential elections are the product of a multiverse of social factors. Claiming they were right about the outcome is rationalizing after the fact.

Here’s something normal people should keep in mind.

American politics tends to turn in 40- or 50-year cycles. That’s when the political parties organize themselves around a loose ideological consensus. From the 1930s to the 1970s, that consensus was liberal. The federal government was an increasingly active presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. It was a period of “positive liberty” during which the Democrats were the majority party. The Republican Party didn’t like it (conservative Republicans called liberal Democrats socialists), but it accepted it.

From the 1970s to the present day, the consensus was conservative. The federal government played an increasingly inactive, or hostile, role in the lives of ordinary Americans. It was a time of “negative liberty,” as the political scientists say. This era favored the Republican Party. The Democrats accepted it in order to play ball.

The presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump will probably be seen years from now as a period in which the last ideological consensus shattered and a new one emerged. I don’t know what it will be. (No one can know until the moment in which it’s possible to know has arrived.) I can say it won’t be “conservative.” It might be fascist. It might democratic socialist. It might be a return of majoritarian liberalism.

Most people saying Sanders can’t win came of age during the last ideological consensus. That’s when totalitarianism loomed large in the background and when American capitalism was the savior of the world after the Soviet collapse. People over the age of, say, 55—the oldest Gen Xers on up—still feel the sting of being called a socialist. People under 55, however, feel little or no sting at all. Indeed, for many of the youngest voters, opposition to “socialism” is opposition to public policies they want.

Sanders’ critics point to his Medicare for all plan as reason he can’t win. They say he can’t explain how he’ll pay for it. That may deter some from voting for him, but a vast number of others don’t care about the math. What they care about is Sanders fighting for them. Is that lying? Maybe. Is that buying votes? I suppose. His critics are free to claim such things. But they are not free to say they know he can’t win. They can’t.

All this is premature. Sanders has 34 delegates. Four Democrats have 46 between them. South Carolina will tell us how much black support Bernie Sanders has, and that will tell us more about his chances on March 3 (Super Tuesday). We do not know what we cannot know until the moment has arrived in which it’s possible to know.

Let’s stop pretending until then.

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

—————-
Released: 25 February 2020
Word Count: 794
—————-

There is no significant anti-war movement in America because there’s no war to protest. Let me explain. In February 2003, millions of people took to the streets around the world to protest America’s march to war against Iraq. That mass movement failed. The administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had a radical plan for reshaping the Middle East and no protesters, no matter how principled or sensible or determined, were going to stop them in their march of folly. The Iraq War soon joined the Afghan invasion of 2001 as a quagmire and disaster, yet the antiwar movement died down as U.S. leaders worked to isolate Americans from news about the casualties, costs, calamities, and crimes of what was by then called “the war on terror.”

And in that they succeeded. Even though the U.S. now lives in a state of perpetual war, for most Americans it’s a peculiar form of non-war. Most of the time, those overseas conflicts are literally out of sight (and largely out of mind). Meanwhile, whatever administration is in power assures us that our attention isn’t required, nor is our approval asked for, so we carry on with our lives as if no one is being murdered in our name.

War without dire consequences poses a conundrum. In a representative democracy, waging war should require the people’s informed consent as well as their concerted mobilization. But consent is something that America’s leaders no longer want or need and, with an all-volunteer military, there’s no need to mobilize the rest of us.

Back in 2009, I argued that our military was, in fact, becoming a quasi-foreign legion, detached from the people and ready to be dispatched globally on imperial escapades that meant little to ordinary Americans. That remains true today in a country most of whose citizens have been at pains to divorce themselves and their families from military service — and who can blame them, given the atrocious results of those wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Africa?

Yet that divorce has come at a considerable cost. It’s left our society in a state of low-grade war fever, while accelerating an everyday version of militarism that Americans now accept as normal. A striking illustration of this: President Trump’s recent State of the Union address, which was filled with bellicose boasts about spending trillions of dollars on wars and weaponry, assassinating foreign leaders, and embracing dubious political figures to mount illegal coups (in this case in Venezuela) in the name of oil and other resources. The response: not opposition or even skepticism from the people’s representatives, but rare rapturous applause by members of both political parties, even as yet more troops were being deployed to the Middle East.

What a youthful hobby has taught me about America’s wars When I was a kid, I loved to collect American stamps. I had a Minuteman stamp album, and since a stamp and coin dealer was within walking distance of my house, I’d regularly head off on missions to fill the pages of that album with affordable commemorative stamps. I especially liked ones linked to military history. Given the number of wars this country has fought, there were plenty of those to add to my album.

Consider, for instance, the stamps issued after the December 7, 1941, U.S. entry into World War II. Unsurprisingly, for a war that entailed mass mobilization and involved common sacrifice, many of them were meant to highlight the war in progress and what it was all about. So, for example, stamps were issued to remind Americans about subjects like: the countries overrun by Nazi Germany; Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation of their country; President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (FDR, too, was an avid stamp collector); and, as the tide turned, this country’s momentous victory against the Japanese on the island of Iwo Jima. Other stamps enjoined Americans to “win the war” and work “toward [a] United Nations.” These and similar stamps formed a tiny part of a vast war effort accepted by nearly all Americans as necessary and just. And when the war finally ended in August 1945, Americans rightfully celebrated.

Now, try to bring to mind stamps from America’s wars since then. If you’re old enough, try to recall ones you stuck on envelopes during the Korean War of the 1950s, the Vietnam War of the 1960s, or especially the war on terror of this century. How many of them celebrated momentous U.S. victories? How many hailed allies working in common cause with us? How many commemorated an end to such wars?

I pay close attention to stamps. I still enjoy walking to my local post office and seeing the new commemoratives as they come out. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, in stamp terms, there’s simply nothing to commemorate in America’s recent wars. Shouldn’t that tell us something?

I’m not saying that there are no stamps whatsoever related to those wars. In 1985, for instance, 32 years after the signing of an armistice not-quite-ever-ending the Korean War, a stamp in honor of its veterans was issued and, in 2003, another for the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington. Several stamps have similarly highlighted Vietnam veterans and Maya Lin’s iconic memorial to them.

But stamps that told us what either of those wars were for or that sought to mobilize Americans in any way? Not a chance. Ditto when it comes to this century’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or to the larger never-ending war on terror. Yes, a 2002 “Heroes USA” stamp featured firefighters raising the flag at the World Trade Center and was meant to provide money for injured first responders; and yes, there’s currently a “Healing PTSD” stamp for sale that raises money for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But as for stamps celebrating decisive victories in Kabul or Baghdad or Tripoli, you know the answer to that one as well as I do; nor, of course, were there any reminding us of the freedoms we were supposedly fighting to uphold in those wars.

In that context, let’s return to that FDR Four Freedoms stamp, which was very popular during World War II. Its message couldn’t have been more succinct. It read: “Freedom of speech and religion, from want and fear.” Of course, World War II was an atrocious war, as all wars are. But what (partially) redeemed it were its ideals, however imperfectly realized in the post-war world.

Still, when’s the last time the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp that so perfectly summed up “why we fight”? There are no such stamps today because our present wars have no higher purpose. It’s that simple.

We’re not supposed to notice that, since we’re not supposed to notice those wars to begin with, not in any visceral way at least. Even stamps like the recent PTSD one (with a 10-cent surcharge that goes to veterans) are an artful dodge. Should we really feel any better donating a few nickels or dimes to help veterans with their physical and mental struggles from wars made more horrendous because they were (and remain) so unnecessary?

Or thought of another way, why is the post office raising money for veterans’ health care? Perhaps because a staggering (and still rising) Pentagon budget only ensures that there will be more war — with more wounded veterans.

Looking back, yet again, to World War II I never miss the opening ceremonies to the Super Bowl.  As an exercise in pure Americana, they have no equal. This year’s included the usual trappings: a military color guard, an oversized flag, and a flyover by combat jets, including the new F-35 stealth fighter, a trillion-dollar boondoggle of the military-industrial complex. Since 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of the National Football League as well as the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, the opening ceremony featured centenarian veterans of that war helping with the pre-game coin toss. It was heartwarming to see those redoubtable vets and recognize their service.

But I can tell when my emotions are being manipulated. Watching them, I knew I was supposed to get warm and fuzzy about military service and maybe feel better about the NFL as well. Yet my respect for them and “the good war” they fought (to use Studs Terkel’s ironic title for his oral history of World War II) didn’t stop me from wanting to shower hot wrath on the leaders who have lied us into so many bad wars since then.

Speaking of warm fuzzies, consider the long opening commercial for the NFL that kicked off this year’s ceremonies. It featured an African-American boy running with a football, dodging various obstacles on a transcontinental journey to the Super Bowl, during which he pauses, reverentially, before a statue of Pat Tillman, the safety for the Arizona Cardinals who famously gave up a multimillion-dollar contract to enlist in the Army after 9/11. Tragically, he was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, a fact the U.S. military attempted to cover up in a conspiracy that went as high as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Even though it was just a commercial, it was right for that young boy to honor Tillman’s memory. But to what end? To make the NFL look patriotic or perhaps to overcome any lingering taint from principled (yet widely misunderstood) take-a-knee protests by players like Colin Kaepernick?

An honest accounting of America’s recent wars by the NFL might reflect on the fact that no other players have ever joined Tillman in giving up millions to enlist in the war effort. In fact, no players from any major league sport, whether baseball, basketball, or hockey, have done so. Not even NASCAR drivers, supposedly the salt of the earth, have, as far as I know, exchanged race cars for Humvees. Why should they? America’s recent wars might as well not exist for them — and, to be honest, for most of us as well.

I’m not calling for major sports stars to be drafted into the military as they were in World War II (though many athletes of that era volunteered first). What I’m suggesting is that, some 18-plus years later, they — like the rest of us — should begin paying real attention to America’s wars and what they’re about. Because that’s the only way, as a nation, we’ll ever come together and put a stop to them.

The answer to our collective apathy is not that war must become bloody awful here in the “homeland” before we finally do something to end it. Instead, it’s to listen to those who have seen the awfulness of war and the atrocious behaviors it enables and rewards.

Consider the words of E.B. Sledge, a Marine who fought at Peleliu and Okinawa in World War II’s Pacific island campaign against the Japanese. Nightmares haunted him for 25 years after the brutal fighting on those islands ended. He described the war he experienced as an exercise in sheer terror with grown men screaming in agony and sobbing in pain, with fighting so sustained that soldiers moved about like zombies, having been in the line of fire for days on end. Exhaustion bred murderous mistakes that too often were dismissed with a mind-numbing euphemism I’ve already succumbed to in this piece: “friendly fire.” And that, mind you, was “the good war.”

So, while saluting those photogenic centenarian vets featured by the NFL, we should also remember those who didn’t come home and those who came home with radically altered lives. Sledge, for instance, recalled a buddy of his, Jim Day, who dreamed of running a horse ranch in California after the war. But as Sledge recounted in a talk in 1994, “At Peleliu, a Japanese machine gun shattered one of Jim’s legs.” All that was left was a stump with blood spurting out of it.

”Later, when Jim came to the First Marine Division reunions (maybe some of you can’t conceive of this), we would have to help him go to the bathroom. His wife had to do that at home. The poor man couldn’t handle it by himself, because of that stump of a leg cut off at the hip. He died a premature death after years of pain and back trouble.”

Sledge and his horrific nightmares, his friend Jim and his crippling injury, those are glimpses of the true face of even the least indefensible of wars (and America’s twenty-first-century versions of the same are, unfortunately, anything but defensible). The question is: why don’t more Americans react with genuine horror when a draft dodger like Donald Trump boasts of all those wonderful weapons this country is buying (and using and selling) that are proudly “Made in the USA”?

No longer should we permit the powerful to obfuscate war, to boast (as George W. Bush did) of “mission accomplished” or of game-changing “surges,” or of “turning corners.”  Such lies serve only to distract us. Instead, Americans need to turn “eyes front” and face the ugly realities of permanent war.

Do that and we may well reinvigorate our democracy. If not, we may well kill what’s left of it.

A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, William Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He still keeps a small collection of U.S. airmail stamps. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2020 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 25 February 2020
Word Count: 2,197
—————-

The impeachment of the president of the United States! Surely such a mega-historic event would reverberate for weeks or months, leaving in its wake no end of consequences, large and small. Wouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it?

Truth to tell, the word historic does get tossed around rather loosely these days. Just about anything that happens at the White House, for example, is deemed historic. Watch the cable news networks and you’ll hear the term employed regularly to describe everything from Oval Office addresses to Rose Garden pronouncements to press conferences in which foreign dignitaries listen passively while their presidential host pontificates about subjects that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with him.

Of course, almost all of these are carefully scripted performances that are devoid of authenticity. In short, they’re fraudulent. The politicians who participate in such performances know that it’s all a sham. So, too, do the reporters and commentators paid to “interpret” the news. So, too, does any semi-attentive, semi-informed citizen.

Yet on it goes, day in, day out, as politicians, journalists, and ordinary folk collaborate in manufacturing, propagating, and consuming a vast panoply of staged incidents, which together comprise what Americans choose to treat as the very stuff of contemporary history. “Pseudo-events” was the term that historian Daniel Boorstin coined to describe them in his classic 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. The accumulation of such incidents creates a make-believe world. As Boorstin put it, they give rise to a “thicket of unreality that stands between us and the facts of life.”

As substitutes for reality, pseudo-events, he claimed, breed “extravagant expectations” that can never be met, with disappointment, confusion, and anger among the inevitable results. Writing decades before the advent of CNN, Fox News, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, Boorstin observed that “we are deceived and obstructed by the very machines we make to enlarge our vision.” So it was back then during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a master of pseudo-events in the still relatively early days of television. And so our world remains today during the presidency of Donald Trump who achieved high office by unmasking the extravagant post-Cold War/sole superpower/indispensable nation/end of history expectations of the political class, only to weave his own in their place.

As Trump so skillfully demonstrates, even as they deceive, pseudo-events also seduce, inducing what Boorstin referred to as a form of “national self-hypnosis.” With enough wishful thinking, reality becomes entirely optional. So the thousands of Trump loyalists attending MAGA rallies implicitly attest as they count on their hero to make their dreams come true and their nightmares go away.

Yet when it comes to extravagant expectations, few pseudo-events can match the recently completed presidential impeachment and trial. Even before his inauguration, the multitudes who despise Donald Trump longed to see him thrown out of office. To ensure the survival of the Republic, Trump’s removal needed to happen. And when the impeachment process did finally begin to unfold, feverish reporters and commentators could find little else to talk about. With the integrity of the Constitution itself said to be at stake, the enduringly historic significance of each day’s developments appeared self-evident. Or so we were told anyway.

Yet while all parties involved dutifully recited their prescribed lines — no one with greater relish than Donald Trump himself — the final outcome was never in doubt. The Republican Senate was no more likely to convict the president than he was to play golf without cheating. So no sooner did the Senate let Trump off the hook than the fever broke. In an instant, the farcical nature of the entire process became blindingly apparent. Rarely has the gap between hype and actual historical substance been so vast.

The effort to oust the president from office had unleashed a tidal wave of angst, anxiety, anger, and hope. Yet a mere handful of weeks after its conclusion, the impeachment of Donald Trump retains about as much salience as the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which concluded in 1868.

What does the instantaneous deflation of this ostensibly historic event signify? Among other things, it shows that we still live in the world of pseudo-events that Boorstin described nearly 60 years ago. The American susceptibility to contrived and scripted versions of reality persists, revealing an emptiness at the core of our national politics. Arguably, in our age of social media, that emptiness is greater still. To look past the pseudo-events staged to capture our attention is to confront a void.

Pseudo-events gone wrong Yet in this dismal situation, flickering bits of truth occasionally do appear in moments when pseudo-events inadvertently expose realities they are meant to conceal. Boorstin posited that “pseudo-events produce more pseudo-events.” While that might be broadly correct, let me offer a caveat: given the right conditions, pseudo-events can also be self-subverting, their cumulative absurdity undermining their cumulative authority. Every now and then, in other words, we get the sneaking suspicion that much of what in Washington gets advertised as historic just might be a load of bullshit.

As it happens, the season of Trump’s impeachment offered three encouraging instances of a prominent pseudo-event being exposed as delightfully bogus: the Iowa Caucus, the State of the Union Address, and the National Prayer Breakfast.

According to custom, every four years the Iowa Caucus initiates what is said to be a fair, methodical, and democratic process of selecting the presidential nominees of the two principal political parties. According to custom and in accordance with a constitutional requirement, the State of the Union Address offers presidents an annual opportunity to appear before Congress and the American people to assess the nation’s condition and describe administration plans for the year ahead. Pursuant to a tradition dating from the early years of the Cold War, the National Prayer Breakfast, held annually in Washington, invites members of the political establishment to bear witness to the assertion that we remain a people “under God,” united in all our wondrous diversity by a shared faith in the Almighty.

This year all three went haywire, each in a different way, but together hinting at the vulnerability of other pseudo-events assumed to be fixed and permanent. By offering a peek at previously hidden truths, the trio of usually forgettable events just might merit celebration.

First, on February 3rd, came the long-awaited Iowa Caucus. Commentators grasping for something to write about in advance of caucus night entertained themselves by lamenting the fact that the Hawkeye State is too darn white, implying, in effect, that Iowans aren’t sufficiently American. As it happened, the problem turned out to be not a lack of diversity, but a staggering lack of competence, as the state’s Democratic Party thoroughly botched the one and only event that allows Iowa to claim a modicum of national political significance. To tally caucus results, it employed an ill-tested and deficient smartphone app created by party insiders who were clearly out of their depth.

The result was an epic cockup, a pseudo-event exposed as political burlesque. The people of Iowa had spoken — the people defined in this instance as registered Democrats who bothered to show up — but no one quite knew what they had said. By the time the counting and recounting were over, the results no longer mattered. Iowa was supposed to set in motion an orderly sorting-out process for the party and its candidates. Instead, it sowed confusion and then more confusion. Yet in doing so, the foul-up in Iowa suggested that maybe, just maybe, the entire process of selecting presidential candidates is in need of a complete overhaul, with the present quadrennial circus replaced by an approach that might yield an outcome more expeditiously, while wasting less money and, yes, also taking diversity into account.

Next, on February 4th, came the State of the Union Address. Resplendent with ritual and ceremony, this event certainly deserves an honored place in the pseudo-event Hall of Fame. This year’s performance was no exception. President Trump bragged shamelessly about his administration’s many accomplishments, planted compliant live mannequins in the gallery of the House of Representatives to curry favor with various constituencies — hatemongering radio host Rush Limbaugh received the Medal of Freedom from the First Lady! — even as he otherwise kept pretty much to the model employed by every president since Ronald Reagan. It was, in other words, a pseudo-event par excellence.

The sole revelatory moment came just after Trump finished speaking. In an endearing and entirely salutary gesture, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, standing behind the president, promptly rendered her verdict on the entire occasion. Like a thoroughly miffed schoolteacher rejecting unsatisfactory homework from a delinquent pupil, she tore the text of Trump’s remarks in two. In effect, Pelosi thereby announced that the entire evening had consisted of pure, unadulterated nonsense, as indeed it had and as has every other State of the Union Address in recent memory.

Blessings upon Speaker Pelosi. Next year, we must hope that she will skip the occasion entirely as not worthy of her time. Other members of Congress, preferably from both parties, may then follow her example, finding better things to do. Within a few years, presidents could find themselves speaking in an empty chamber. The networks will then lose interest. At that juncture, the practice that prevailed from the early days of the Republic until the administration of Woodrow Wilson might be restored: every year or so, presidents can simply send a letter to Congress ruminating about the state of the nation, with members choosing to attend to or ignore it as it pleases them. And the nation’s calendar will therefore be purged altogether of one prominent pseudo-event.

The National Prayer Breakfast, which occurred on February 6th, completes our trifecta of recent pseudo-events gone unexpectedly awry. Here the credit belongs entirely to President Trump who used his time at the dais during this nominally religious event as an opportunity to whine about the “terrible ordeal” he had just endured at the hands of “some very dishonest and corrupt people.” Alluding specifically to Pelosi (and perhaps with Mitt Romney also in mind), Trump denounced his critics as hypocrites. “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” he said. “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that that’s not so.”

Jesus might have forgiven his tormentors, but Donald Trump, a self-described Christian, is not given to following the Lord’s example. So instead of an occasion for faux displays of brotherly ecumenism, this year’s National Prayer Breakfast became one more exhibition of petty partisanship — relieving the rest of us (and the media) of any further need to pretend that it ever possessed anything approximating a serious religious motivation.

So if only in an ironic sense, the first week of February 2020 did end up qualifying as a genuinely historic occasion. Granted, those who claim the authority to instruct the rest of us on what deserves that encomium missed its true significance. They had wasted no time in moving on to the next pseudo-event, this one in New Hampshire. Yet over the course of a handful of days, Americans had been granted a glimpse of the reality that pseudo-events are designed to camouflage.

A few more such glimpses and something like “the facts of life” to which Boorstin alluded so long ago might become impossible to hide any longer. Imagine: No more bullshit. In these dark and discouraging times, aren’t we at least entitled to such a hope?

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 24 February 2020
Word Count: 1,918
—————-

BEIRUT — When Syrian fighters were recruited to fight Libya in late 2019, many eagerly signed up, thinking this was going to be a quick 3-month adventure that paid good money.

They were recruited by Turkey to fight alongside the forces of Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, engaged in an uphill battle against the Libyan National Army of Field-Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who is backed by Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Syrian Organisation for Human Rights (SOHR) said Turkey was paying recruits up to $2,000 per month to save Tripoli from a Haftar takeover. The number of Syrian fighters crossed the 1,000-man mark in October and at least one Syrian has been killed in the Libyan battlefield, SOHR said.

Five months later, none has returned to Syria and more are being shipped off to Libya, only this time to fight alongside Haftar against their fellow Syrians, creating a mini Syrian civil war on Libyan territory.

Two sides of the Libya war “We have entered a new stage in the Syrian conflict,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, senior diplomatic editor at Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, “a stage where Syrians are fighting the war of others in faraway places. With no doubt, this will add to existing complications in the Syrian national patchwork.”

A recent report in Asharq Al-Awsat stated that additional Syrian fighters arrived in Libya in February, recruited by Russia from Douma in the Damascus countryside. Fifty of them signed 3-month contracts and are to receive $800 per month.

Those Syrians will be exempted from mandatory military service back home, given that they are mostly former opposition fighters who reconciled with the Russian and Syrian armies two years ago. They, of course, will be fighting fellow Syrians in Libya.

The Douma factor No breakdown is available as to who the Syrian fighters are nor what cities or towns they originate from. However, Douma is a former hub for the Syrian opposition and its sons are fighting on two sides of the Libyan conflict, shooting at each other outside of Tripoli. This will have ripple effects on Douma, which has not recovered from the trauma of war, nor has it been reconstructed.

“Sending them to Libya — a battlefield to which they have no connection whatsoever — will undoubtedly reflect negatively on their home communities” said Amer Elias, a political analyst in Damascus. “It will reduce their popularity because people will accuse them of abandoning both their cause and community.”

Maher, a Syrian barber from East Ghouta, whose cousin is fighting in Libya, told The Arab Weekly: “We are not happy with his decision but we cannot blame him. He is doing it only for the money.”

“He was uprooted from his home, which was demolished, and sent to live in Jarabulus (a Turkish-occupied city in northern Syria). He cannot find a job and needs to feed his four little children,” Maher said. “When you are sinking, you take anything that is offered to you — even if it’s a straw.”

Maher insisted that his cousin went to Libya “so that he can live and make money. He sought martyrdom in Syria but he doesn’t want to die in Libya.”

Abu Nader, a former member of the armed opposition in Homs, now reconciled with the government, disagreed. Working as a taxi driver in Damascus, he said: “When all of this started, we took up arms to defend our homes and children, not to fight for [Turkish President] Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Halfway through the war, we realised that Erdogan was using us and willing to trade us for any deal that satisfied his ambitions. He doesn’t care about the people of Syria. Anybody who still takes money from him is a traitor to the blood of Syrians.”

The Syrian fighters sent to Libya can be broken down into four main groups. Two are mercenaries from the Al-Mutassim and Sultan Murad Divisions who are in Libya out of obedience to Erdogan. The third group is engaged in Libya because they are ideologically committed to jihad, mainly being fighters from the Sham Legion. The fourth are Russia-paid mercenaries fighting in Libya for purely financial reasons.

No sense at all “My son went to Libya,” said Um Ubada, a Palestinian-Syrian housewife from the demolished Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus. “He was told he was going to fight someone called Khalifa Haftar. I don’t know who Haftar is and I don’t care. I want my son back.

“I don’t want him to be killed and don’t want him to kill Syrians. We have had enough bloodshed. He didn’t go there to fight Syrians but to fight Libyans.”

“The recruitment of Syrian rebels in the Libyan war makes no sense to Syrians or Libyans,” said Hassan Hassan, director of the Non-State Actors Programme at the Centre for Global Policy in the United States. “Turkey did great damage to both causes by sending mercenaries to Libya, especially at a time when northern Syria was being attacked by the Syrian regime and when Turkey failed to force Russia to abide by its promises of de-escalation.

“It also remains unclear why Libyans need a few hundred fighters from Syria. The whole thing makes no sense and is greatly damaging.”

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian historian and author of Under the Black Flag (IB Tauris, 2015).

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 24 February 2020
Word Count: 865
—————-

If you watched the Democratic debate last night, as I did, you witnessed a first-degree murder along with millions of other eyewitnesses. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, with help from Bernie Sanders, cut Michael Bloomberg into pieces before eating him.

It was good to see, not so much because Bloomberg is the wrong choice for the Democratic Party, but because the media mogul, whose products I quite like, has never been tested. It was good to see, moreover, because the debate audience saw what happens to a billionaire exploiting a political system vulnerable to his vast wealth.

They got to see that system’s deep ironies, too. Even as Warren ate a forkful of Bloomberg, rolling it around her mouth, savoring the flavor and sighing with satisfaction, three House Democrats endorsed Bloomberg after receiving donations.

I think Warren and Bloomberg have something in common other than the relationship between chewer and chewee. Together, they are the only candidates, as I see it, who are explicitly anti-Donald Trump. Indeed, all of them are Democrats (Sanders is an independent running for the party’s nomination), but that’s not the same thing.

Bloomberg, for all his flaws, and there are many, has won respect for being strategically cold-blooded. In terms of policy, he’s quite good with respect to gun control, climate change and the commonwealth. But that’s not how he’s pitching himself. He’s a single-issue candidate, and that issue is defeating the president.

A cold-blooded focus isn’t enough, however. Bloomberg, who’s worth something like $56 billion, has virtually limitless resources. His team can spend all of its time attacking the president instead of fundraising. Resources like that go a long, long way in an information environment like ours in which there are a thousand ways of reaching voters — TV, social media, YouTube “influencers,” Twitter memes, etc.

Yes, he’s buying his way into Democrats’ heart and minds, and they might be OK with that, because the moral imperative to defeat an authoritarian wipes out all others.

Warren’s anti-Trumpism is less obvious. She isn’t a single-issue candidate. (“I got a plan for that” is her signature response to nearly all press inquiries.) But she does have something neither Bloomberg nor Sanders nor the others have. Her message, her personality, her rhetoric and her policies are all centered on the act of fighting.

This was on display last night. She told Bloomberg the Democratic Party can’t have its own version of Donald Trump. She told Sanders that Democratic voters won’t gamble on his “revolution.” She told the debate audience, vote for me and I’ll fight for you. Translation: I will fight the president and the Republican Party, and we will win.

As hard as it may be for some liberal to accept, this is what most Democrats want to hear. Climate change, immigration, corruption — no one thinks these are unimportant. But they do not elicit urgency the way Trump does. Sure, Warren rubbed her belly after dining on Bloomberg’s 78-year-old liver, but the two have much in common.

Up to this point, I have not been explicit about who I think would be a decent Democratic president. I have instead exhorted liberals to just pick a candidate, for Christ’s sake. Let’s just move on to overthrowing the fascist president already. I still believe that, just as I still believe Democratic Party unity is more important than who the actual nominee is. But none of that speaks to my own preference for a nominee.

Warren is my preference.

Indeed, I don’t understand why voters would choose Sanders when Warren is available. Ideologically, they are cut from the same cloth. The only difference is fundamental — Warren wants to fight for the little guy by fighting against power, corruption and authoritarian creep. She does not want, to paraphrase Pete Buttigieg, to “burn the house down.” She does not want, as she said, to gamble on a so-called revolution.

She also lives her values. Meanwhile, Sanders leaves open the use of superdelegates to win the nomination after condemning them in 2016. He says he won’t release his full medical records after a heart attack and after condemning Hillary Clinton in 2016 for not releasing the transcripts to highly paid Wall Street speeches. None of this is to mention his thuggish habit of polarizing would-be allies, suggesting a critic of his policies is just one more person to be added to the list of enemies to be destroyed.

Warren doesn’t do that. She’s a fighter, not a divider.

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

—————-
Released: 20 February 2020
Word Count: 745
—————-

Where have you gone, Smedley Butler? A nation turns its lonely eyes to (someone like) you…
by
There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.

Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations — that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.

But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”

Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”

Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.

Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)

Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.

Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.

Why no antiwar generals When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.

Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.

The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and — on some level — cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.

Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.

Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster — earned his star.

Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista” protégés and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.

But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.

At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game” most citizens had.

More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.

One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.

What would Smedley Butler think today? In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.

Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.

Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…”

Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and his forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 20 February 2020
Word Count: 2,365
—————-

Why is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan behaving like a bully? The short answer is because he believes he can get away with it.

He apparently thinks he has no real challenger at home or abroad and so he can push the envelope to his advantage and get away with it.

The bullying starts a home where Erdogan sees plots and coups everywhere. When it is not his US-based arch-rival Fethullah Gulen orchestrating coups against him, it is George Soros who is seeking to undermine his government.

“There are Soros-like people behind the curtains who seek to stir up things by provoking revolt in some countries,” he said February 19.

Even Turkish courts have got it wrong when they “dared” to free civil society figure Osman Kavala and other defendants in the trial of the 2013 Gezi protests. Those protests were a “despicable attack just like military coups,” Erdogan said. “They were not innocent riots.”

On Planet Erdogan, judges can send people to jail the same day courts acquit them, as they did in the case of Kavala and company.

Authoritarian minds do not see the world as it is. It is all centred on them and geared to obstructing the path of the righteous sultan.

Internationally, Ankara’s bullying goes full throttle, too. The three traditional guardrails that kept Turkish politics in check — the United States, the European Union and Russia — are occupied elsewhere.

US President Donald Trump is trying to get re-elected and tending to his personal and personnel problems. The European Union is kept busy by the follies of Brexit, which kept it focused on the saga going on between London and Brussels.

The third major player in this equation, Russia, where President Vladimir Putin is into his own ego trip and engaged in Syria where Russians have become deeply involved in the country’s civil war.

In the Arab world, Erdogan apparently thinks there is no figure strong enough to oppose the man who believes he is the new sultan. Furthermore, his prescience counts on the help of the Muslim Brotherhood to secure his leadership of the Islamic world. At least, so he thinks.

So the bully bullies on.

After dispatching thousands of mercenaries and extremists from the Syrian battlefield to fight in Libya, he denounced European peace efforts as undue interference in the oil-rich North African country. He is so blinded by his own ego that he fails to realise his brazen interference in Libyan affairs.

Erdogan criticised the European Union’s decision to launch a maritime effort focused on enforcing the UN arms embargo around Libya, accusing European countries involved of “interfering.”

“I want to specifically mention that the EU does not have the right to make any decision concerning Libya,” Erdogan said. “The EU is trying to take charge of the situation and interfere.”

“You have no such authority,” Erdogan clamoured.

He is strangely posturing as if Libya was once again part of the Ottoman Empire with himself as grand vizier. He applauded the decision of his Libyan protege, Government of National Accord Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, to withdraw from Libyan peace talks in Geneva.

Erdogan does not hide his proclivities to war and military force, anywhere. In Syria, he betrays the same disposition in his showdown with Russia and his support to terror-inclined jihadists.

Countries in North Africa and the Middle East are showing signs of wariness about his behaviour.

It is time that the Russians, the Europeans and the Americans wake up to the mounting threat at the crossroads of the Middle East and Europe.

There are reports of a push back by countries of the region being coordinated by Egypt. Many other countries are also concerned by his bullying and with good reason.

Claude Salhani is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 20 February 2020
Word Count: 620
—————-

The president pardoned a motley crew of thieves, crooks and liars Tuesday with a crush of pardons aimed at … no one knows. Perhaps Donald Trump is planning to pardon Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and the other grifters and goons ensnared in Robert Mueller’s investigation, but honestly, he probably just wanted to act kingly.

All presidents have the authority to grant “Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States,” according to the US Constitution. (A president can pardon only for federal offenses, not state and local offenses.) But just because something is constitutional doesn’t mean it’s lawful or moral. One state legislator voted against impeaching former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. One state senator voted against convicting him. Everyone thought he was guilty. Everyone, that is, except Trump.

That said, the president is indeed establishing a precedent future presidents can follow if they choose to. I don’t suggest making pardons personal and arbitrary, as Trump has. But I do think a future Democratic president could be less constrained than they have been in the past. By that, I mean avoiding any hint of ideology and partisanship.

If this Republican president can pardon Blagojevich for selling Barack Obama’s former Senate seat, then the next Democratic president can pardon 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country who have left everything behind for a better life. Crossing the border once, or overstaying one’s visas, are misdemeanors and civil infractions, respectively, crimes far less severe than Blagojevich’s. Pardoning 11 million people might not be lawful, but it would be moral. And it would result in more than that.

One result would be enormous backlash. That alone would be neither surprising nor sufficient reason for not pardoning unauthorized immigrants. The Republicans decided a decade and more ago that the Democrats were not the loyal opposition but instead the enemy. The next Democratic president will weather blowback merely for being a Democrat. The only question would be the blowback’s size and intensity.

A more important result would be taking the air out of the immigration debate.

For years, the Democrats accepted the Republican demand that the US spend billions militarizing the southern border to “secure” it. Over time, however, it became clear the Republicans were bargaining in bad faith. For them, the border would never be secure enough. They would therefore never agree to comprehensive immigration reform.

Meanwhile, all those billions being sent to the border were creating a bureaucracy dedicated to treating border-crossing immigrants as a subspecies of humanity. Trump did indeed order border agents to confiscate babies and set up internment camps to warehouse them. But the capacity for doing that was developed long before Trump.

Moreover, a federal bureaucracy swimming in cash and directed by an authoritarian executive appears to be developing a dangerous internal culture. Customs and Border Protection, or border patrol, is starting to think of itself as the president’s gestapo, according to former border agent Jenn Budd. “They say they will become a ‘national police force’ to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens,” she wrote.

All of this — the Republicans’ obstruction, the president’s sadist policies toward border-crossers and a budding fascist bureaucracy at the CBP — all of this is anchored on the fact that crossing the border is a crime demanding “justice.” Remove the crime and you remove the rest. There’d be no need for billions in border security, no need for a militarized southern border, and no need for deportations or even “sanctuary cities.”

A mass pardon would change the entire debate.

Again, there will be blowback, but blowback might be worth it if the next Democratic president can take the national focus away from “criminals” threatening our “way of life,” and toward the new legal status of 11 million exonerated human beings. The Republicans will find some way to balk, but at least it won’t be “securing the border.”

Speaking of which, there won’t be a need for a border wall. Pardoning 11 million people would send a clear signal: the world’s tired, poor and huddled masses won’t be hunted down like animals and removed from the lives they have worked so hard to build for themselves and their children. A border wall was never going to keep people out anyway. It is a Republican fetish. Well, they’ll have a new fetish after a pardon: preventing 11 million people from gaining voting rights and rewarding Democrats.

A mass pardon would in effect open the southern border without the Democrats having to make the argument for opening it. That would be a boon to deindustrialized cities, to farmers in need of labor, and to the national economy as a whole. Would it be lawful? I don’t know. Reckless? Maybe. But it would indeed be the right thing to do.

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

—————-
Released: 19 February 2020
Word Count: 795
—————-