Tag Archives: American empire

Happy new war.

President Bam-Bam has started off the new year with incoherent threats against Iran, and it appears as if the entire corporate media establishment is pretty much on the same page as him. I was greeted on New Year’s morning by the usual cavalcade of retired generals (e.g., Barry McCaffrey, etc.) and inside-the-Pentagon correspondents (e.g. Hans Nichols, etc.) that MSNBC (a.k.a. “the liberal news channel”) trots out whenever someone challenges the U.S. empire somewhere in the world. This time it’s Iraqis, and of course Iran is to blame … because we seem to want war with Iran. That’s why whenever they talk about our opposition in Iraq, these Iraqis are termed “Iranian-backed militias” or “Iranian-backed extremists,” though they would never call the forces we fund and train “American-backed militias”. Yes, Iran has substantial influence in Iraq – they share a long border and a troubled history with Iraq, so it’s no surprise. We, on the other hand, come from the other side of the Earth, and yet somehow we consider our enormous influence on Iraqi affairs more legitimate.

The Trump administration decided last week that it was a really, really good idea to conduct air strikes on an Iraqi Shi’ite militia group Kata’ib Hizbullah, killing 45 of them in supposed retaliation for mortar attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq that recently killed one U.S. contractor. (See Juan Cole’s blogpost on this for details.) The protests and intrusions at the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad were a predictable response to what General McCaffrey and others consider a proportionate use of force. (That was quickly followed by their assassination by drone of the Iranian Quds force leader Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad, a major escalation by Trump.) Not being a member in good standing of the American Empire Positive Propaganda Force, my first question is … just what the hell are we doing in Iraq in the first place? In all fairness, I think that question is on the minds of many Iraqis right now.

Okay, this isn't going so well.

In my humble opinion, there are a couple of things going on here. Of course, Trump likes to look tough, hence the drunken threat tweets and the rushing of 3000 more U.S. troops to Baghdad. But despite the fact that these threats are directed at Iran, I think deep in his tiny lizard brain he understands, albeit tenuously, that war with Iran would be a disaster for his presidency far worse than his impending impeachment trial or his failing trade war. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why. No modern president has had as high an approval rating as George W. Bush did in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and yet just a few years after invading Afghanistan and Iraq, his presidency was in tatters. His wars are still going on, metastasizing again and again into new, more toxic cycles of violence. And Bush’s wars were against one nation that was totally destroyed (Afghanistan) and one that was partially destroyed and starved to death (Iraq); we have essentially lost both of those wars. Iran would be harder to beat, and the events of this week demonstrate part of the reason why – the exercise of power by proxy, to put it in terms an imperialist might understand.

I have no doubt Trump’s foreign policy establishment is working towards war with Iran, whether or not that is their full intention. Smarter presidents than Trump (a category that includes every other president) have blundered into disastrous wars that have essentially destroyed their presidencies. Whatever Trump’s intentions may be regarding Iran, this escalation in Iraq may be the start of his ultimate undoing if he’s not careful. And the entire establishment – Trumpist and faux resistance – will wave him on into the catastrophe.

luv u,

jp

Empire news.

With the shit-cyclone rotating around the Trump presidency on a daily basis, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on elsewhere in the world. Most of the press coverage goes straight to Trump, Kushner, the Mueller probe, Stormy Daniels, on and on. Mind-numbing, and I think that’s probably what they’re aiming at. I always knew reality television was more than just bad entertainment – it gave me the creeps from The Real World and Survivor on forward, and now it’s president of the United States. Not a good outcome for a whole host of reasons.

Anyway, there is a world out there, and stuff is happening in it that I feel we should pay attention to. Here are a few items I’m looking at.

Peace?Korea – This was a momentous week in the standoff over the Korean peninsula, largely thanks to the efforts of South Korean President Moon Jae-In and the willingness on the part of Pyongyang to come to the table. Trump will take credit for anything good that happens, and that’s fine – sure, he’s nearly blown us all up over this, but let him have his squeak toy of triumph, so long as there’s no Korean War II. That would be a good thing for the world, as the hair-hat ass-clown said a few days ago. Will he meet with Kim Jong-Un as was announced on Thursday? No man can say. More on this next week.

Yemen – In the Senate, Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, and Chris Murphy have introduced a war powers resolution calling on the administration to stop supporting Saudi Arabia’s murderous assault on Yemen. SJ Resolution 54 has been introduced though not voted on yet – I encourage you to contact your senators and urge them to vote for this legislation. You can get their phone numbers off the web, or use the Stance app to send a recorded phone message (see http://takeastance.us/ for details).

Iran – There’s a good interview on Jeremy Scahill’s podcast Intercepted with Iranian scholar Holly Dagres about the history of the relationship between the United States and Iran and how its current system of government is a direct response to our interference (in the form of an coup) in the 1950s. Dagres also talks about the MEK terror group that counts many American political figures among its friends, including John McCain (big surprise), Howard Dean, and others. (Check it out at https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/intercepted-podcast-americas-distribution-of-violence/ ) Also, give a listen to Jeremy’s interview with Nikhil Singh in that same episode.

All right … back to work with me.

luv u,

jp

War and remembrance.

I mentioned last week that I have some problems with the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War. That was on the basis of just the first episode, so to be fair, my comments were a bit preliminary. I have not seen much of it since – just the odd half-hour here and there. (Frankly, it’s hard for me to come up with 18 hours of viewing time over the course of a week or two.) That said, the episodes I’ve seen since the first installment have done nothing to change my estimation of the overall project. It’s important to get many and varied perspectives from American veterans; I’m all for that. But the Vietnamese perspective that I’ve seen thus far has been very limited and two-dimensional. Further, the narrative seldom departs from the neo-imperial framing that has always defined mainstream retrospectives on this brutal war.

Vietnam war seriesWe’re told, for instance, that in 1969 Hanoi would not consider an agreement that would leave the Saigon government in place. Actually, it wasn’t just Hanoi; it was a large percentage of the people under the dictatorial governance of South Vietnam – at least those who had not already been brutalized, burned to a cinder or chopped to pieces by that late date. One important point that’s getting lost in this series is the fact that the vast majority of ordinance dropped by the U.S. in Vietnam was dropped on South Vietnam, not North Vietnam. This is reflective of that imperial framing – South Vietnam was “ours” to rampage over, so look elsewhere. Also, perhaps I’m missing too much, but virtually all of the atrocities I’ve heard described in this series have been on the anti-Saigon side. (I hope this is just a reporting error on my part.) And the picture they paint of Le Duan is practically that of a ruthless super villain, “Dr. No” figure.

No such depictions on the American side – just a lot of well-meaning actors gone awry. And seemingly very little reliance on official documentation from the period. I’m hearing a lot of recorded phone calls and office conversations, but not even contemporaneously available material like excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, let alone subsequent declassified documentation. The authors seem unaware of or uninterested in American planners’ thinking on why the war was being fought in the first place; the danger of a good example of independent development, outside of the U.S.-run system; the desire to provide a recovering Japan with markets, raw materials, and labor and (post-1949) to prevent them from accommodating to communist-led China.

I will watch more, of course, but I am not sanguine about this effort. We are currently in the midst of a 16-year conflict in Afghanistan. It would help to understand the last pointless, seemingly endless conflict a lot more clearly than this series allows.

luv u,

jp

Middle passage.

Trump was on the road this week, touching base with traditional allies, shaking his fist at traditional foes, making occasional awkward statements and non-sequiturs but generally doing what is expected of him as official high protector of the empire. Amazing how quickly even a low-intelligence loose cannon like “The Donald” will snap into place when there are longstanding economic and imperial ties in play.

At the helm of the Death Star. Who knew it was in Saudi Arabia?Much as he criticized Saudi Arabia during the primary campaign and even the general election, it was all smiles and bows and the dangling of manly swords when he arrived in Riyadh, not to mention threats against Iran and its embattled Shi’a allies in Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere. Then there’s the humongous arms sale, allowing Saudi to continue the bloody Yemen adventure that Trump will not mention but can’t stop funding with U.S. taxpayer dollars. (My money’s being used inappropriately. Someone call Mick Mulvaney!)

I have to think that the institutional elites that most benefit from the imperial profit machine probably don’t much mind Trump as a foreign policy president. His ignorance very likely is, in their eyes, his most positive attribute. The man knows nothing about any of the regions he is likely to visit as president. That means he can be steered into preferred policies by his aides. He is the proverbial empty vessel, even more so than George W. Bush was – at least Bush had some vague sense of his own objectives and a team of fanatical, experienced bureaucrats to fill the void between his ears. With Trump, there’s none of that. He’s truly at sea.

Empire abhors a vacuum, and so the absence of leadership is filled with the priorities of the forever-state. This is not a conspiracy theory – every empire that has lasted as long as ours has a structure of governance and self-perpetuation. It’s that great self-driving car, running over people of color by the thousand in thirsty pursuit of the next filling station. That’s why the pieces all fall into place, and the policy stays within certain boundaries, sometimes jiggling a little leftward, occasionally lurching to the right, but never crossing the line.

When I say “never”, I mean other than that one time with Dubya Bush when his reckless war-making tested those limits and brought on the correction we saw in 2006 – one of the most amazing periods in recent history. I suspect Trump’s correction will come from some other quarter, but I guess we will see.

luv u,

jp

So long, proconsul.

Gates is leaving, but his wars will remain with us, it appears. He didn’t start them, of course, but he was brought in to manage them after they went seriously off the rails. In what I will always consider to be among the clearest evidence of the existence of a permanent institutional foreign policy consensus, Gates was hired to replace Rumsfeld in 2006 when it was obvious that the Bush team’s invasion of Iraq was shaking the American empire to its very foundations. I imagine there was resistance from Bush himself, from Rumsfeld, of course, and from Cheney – they had problems with the Iraq Study Group’s findings and doubled down on their Iraq disaster, but they had lost the confidence of that institutional elite by that time, and the loss of Congress to the Democrats nudged Rumsfeld over the edge. Cheney was effectively sidelined for the remainder of Bush’s second term.

So it goes with empires, I guess. Ours rolled along swimmingly for the last century, gathering steam after World War II, flattening its dissidents, outlasting its main rivals … until we managed to elect a man so incompetent he could, to borrow a phrase, destroy the empire merely by strolling through it. I’m sure to the nation’s imperial board of trustees, George W. seemed a relatively safe bet, particularly with such seemingly reliable minders as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld keeping an eye on the store. That miscalculation is proving very costly. Just as our attack on Vietnam bled us dry (to say nothing of what it did to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians), this past decade of war – coupled with an amazingly irresponsible policy of deep war-time tax cuts – has helped to hobble our economy, perhaps beyond recovery.

Obama should well be celebrated by the ownership class in America. What the hell, he has salvaged the empire, shored up the banking system, shielded the financial managers from accountability. Beats the hell out of me why they would want rid of him, except that they may want an even better deal. He is trying to return us to that proven imperial model of having others fight our wars for us while resorting to a Murder, Inc. strategy for what is now called “high value” targets. Obama may not succeed in that effort, but he’s trying. So Gates will leave, satisfied, I’m sure, that the republic… I mean, the empire is in good hands, his charge fulfilled.

So, farewell, Proconsul Gates. Off to Capri with you, then.

luv u,

jp