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iraq war
Dear Canada: Beware of Peter Hoekstra!
As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as a hostile guest—not an ambassador worthy of distinction or trust.
Mar 08, 2025
On February 22nd, the Michigan Republican Party met in Huntington Place in Detroit to elect a new chair. After the ballots were counted, State Senator Jim Runestand prevailed over President Donald Trump’s choice, “fake elector” Meshawn Maddock. Even though he had delivered Michigan to the GOP column, incumbent Peter Hoekstra didn’t run again. He couldn’t, because as of November he is awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate to be Trump’s ambassador to Canada.
During his three-decade plus career in government, Hoekstra has amassed quite the right-wing record. In the 90s, he was a fierce foe of workplace safety and union reformers. Teamster warehouse director Tom Leedham called Hoekstra “a congressman who tried to eliminate the forty-hour workweek, and gut overtime and job safety laws.” As chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Hoekstra led a witch hunt into the Teamsters that ended up removing Ron Carey, the only reform president ever elected in Teamsters history, from office shortly after the union won a hard fought battle against UPS. Hoekstra proclaimed in 2000 that if he and his allies “had not acted, Ron Carey would still be president of the Teamsters.”
On foreign policy, Hoekstra’s tenure was similarly malicious. After voting for the Iraq War, Heokstra remained convinced well into 2006 that Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction. To that effect, he announced that U.S. troops had actually found WMDs that year. Too bad for Hoekstra they turned out to be defunct weapons that predated the Persian Gulf War. The WMD lie remained just that, a lie. He also palled around with David Yarushalmi, an anti-Muslim bigot who once called Blacks “the most murderous of peoples.”
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well.
In 2012, Hoekstra attempted to unseat Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenhow. His campaign’s Super Bowl ad featured an Asian woman, bicycling through a rice paddy, who castigated “Debbie Spend It Now” in broken English. A clear attempt to resuscitate the “Yellow Peril,” a journalist called it “the most racist political ad of the year.” Heokstra’s campaign floundered and he lost in a landslide.
Hoekstra’s post-Congress years saw him argue that the CIA’s torture program, euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation,” produced “actionable intelligence.” He took time in 2016 to defame Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin over her “egregious” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. After co-chairing Donald Trump’s winning Michigan campaign in 2016, Hoekstra was back in government. For his services, he was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the Netherlands, his birthplace.
As Trump’s ambassador, Hoekstra was dogged by reporters over his false 2015 claims that there were Muslim “no-go zones” in the Netherlands, in which cars and politicians were “being burned.” In 2020, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands posted a bizarre image of a graveyard containing German soldiers from World War II. The account said the graves were a “terrible reminder of the cost of going to war and why we must always work towards peace,” seemingly forgetting what side the U.S. was on during the war. The whole thing was reminiscent of when President Reagan went to a graveyard containing bodies of Hitler’s SS to declare the dead Nazis were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
Hoekstra’s tenure was marked by accusations that he openly interfered in Dutch politics. In 2019 he hosted a party for the far-right Forum for Democracy whose anti-Islam, anti-immigrant views nicely dovetailed with his own. Diplomats are prohibited from interfering in their host countries politics by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Although other political parties in the Netherlands complained, Trump lost the following year’s presidential election and Hoekstra was out. Or was he? Hoekstra’s reward for helping Trump win the Mitten State, is once again, an ambassadorship, but this time to Canada.
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well. Given that he has already violated diplomatic protocol via his involvement in the domestic politics of the host country, and that a stated goal of the Trump administration is the annexation of Canada as the 51st state, it stands to reason that Hoekstra will use any available means to further that project as ambassador. In short, he will attempt to undermine Canadian sovereignty under the guise of diplomacy.
Although Peter Hoekstra will almost certainly be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that’s no reason for him to be treated as just another ambassador in Canada. As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as someone who will undermine Canadian independence in the service of American empire.
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Reflecting on the 22 Years Since the World Said No to War
Over $21 trillion were blown on wars. Think what alternative uses for those trillions might have been, and weep.
Feb 15, 2025
Dedication: to the Declaration of Independence; it is worth re-reading.
What do we have to show for more than 20 years of war and trillions of dollars spent, since that prophetic day, February 15, 2003, when the world said no to the impending war on Iraq?
It may be useful to reflect on the past decades of never-ending wars and peer at the near future to assess where we might be headed.
The fact that there has been no accountability for U.S. war crimes now holds crucial consequences for our society, as we are faced with renegade rule in all branches of government.
The Middle East is destabilized and war-ravaged and with 4.7 million people killed. This number includes indirect deaths from food insecurity, demolished infrastructure, environmental damage, and the chaos that ensues when people are bombed, in addition to those killed outright in military strikes. Women and children continue to suffer the deepest and most brutal consequences of the wars. More than 7.6 million children in post 9/11 war zones are suffering from acute malnutrition.
Over 38 million people have been displaced across Asia. A global refugee crisis due to violence and climate change continues unabated as internecine armed conflicts rage and weapons flow across every continent.
In the Afghan and Iraq wars, 53,533 U.S. service members were wounded, over 7,000 killed, and over 30,000 committed suicide. At this point, 22 veterans a day commit suicide; this number has been doubled in the past.
Over $21 trillion were blown on wars. Think what alternative uses for those trillions might have been, and weep for the hungry, unhoused, those lacking healthcare or going bankrupt during a health crisis that insurance refuses to cover, our always under-funded schools, the lack of public transit systems, and the intentional failure to transition from fossil fuels to mitigate the climate crisis that now has us firmly in its grip. Weep for what did not happen that could have benefited everyone and might have transformed our society in positive ways. Instead, trillions went to a few military contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrup Grumman.
Political accountability for the lies told prior to the shock and awe attack on Iraq and all the subsequent war crimes has been zero. The fact that there has been no accountability for U.S. war crimes now holds crucial consequences for our society, as we are faced with renegade rule in all branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—with each branch imposing a reactionary political will on all of us, with impunity, respecting no protocols, laws, or even the battered Constitution they swear to uphold. The wars always come home.
The horror visited on Gaza cannot be overlooked. The U.S. supplies lethal arms to Israel’s vengeful, genocidal rampage that has destroyed Gaza and unmercifully persecutes the West Bank. U.S. military support to Israel stands at over $22 billion since October 7, 2023 with additional billions of military aid in the pipeline. Gaza is a ruin of rubble, homes destroyed, no hospitals, no schools, tens (likely hundreds) of thousands killed, at least a hundred thousand wounded (thousands of children with arms and legs blown off), more than 95% of the population is starving. Governments and institutions failed to call for an end to the massacre, yet punished those speaking out for a cease-fire and arms embargo. What can and will be done to mitigate the ordeal the people of Gaza and the West Bank endure, living under murderous occupation?
The devastation from the wildfires in Los Angeles and Israel’s military destruction in Gaza bear an eerie resemblance to each other, one landscape caused by blowback from nature for our failure to care for our planet, the other by intentional military destruction. How painfully similar these landscapes are, as stunning symbols of the harm human beings do to their environment and to each other.
During these decades, the Pentagon budget has risen to astronomical heights despite the fact that the Pentagon has never passed an audit (those wishing to focus on waste in government might start there). The Department of Defense is the single largest fossil fuel consumer in the world and the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, yet environmental organizations and putative leaders carefully avoid implicating wars and militarism as part of the environmental crisis we face.
U.S. popular culture is driven by a saccharine romance with militarism in which the devastating realities of war are obscured, minimized, sanitized. “Enemies” are manufactured to resemble peoples who have governments the U.S. does not like, so that current politics and policies justify wars waged by the Pentagon. The enemy is familiar to all, no questions asked. The wars are so “vast and … absentee” (apologies to Thomas Pynchon) that the wretched, inflicted suffering endured by human beings goes on for years without notice by mainstream society.
The U.S. has only one political party: the War Party. Everyone in the established status quo agrees on policies to develop and build any and all weapons, to foment and continue to wage wars, abrogating international law and treaties that stand in the way. Those of us who rightly object to such destructive folly (defined by Barbara Tuchman as policies pursued that are counter to the true interest of a society) are treated with withering scorn at best and dismissed out of hand by a venal, corrupt establishment that literally coins money for itself by investing in merchants of death.
Environmental consequences loom, military destruction around the world is a significant contributor that includes elevated carbon dioxide released by bombing and the highly polluting jet fuel used for bombing missions. Scarce resources should be used to lessen suffering in our society and across the world, not employed for destructive purposes. Like it or not, we live on an interdependent, ecologically fragile planet. Humans, as Russell Means used to say, are “cursed with rationality,” which enables the crude justification of policies that are detrimental to life on Earth. The stark, evident fact is that Planet Earth itself, and all living things, cannot take any more war.
Do we face an imminent endgame in which nuclear weapons are used? All nuclear nations are busily upgrading their arsenals, flouting the international ban treaty. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 89 seconds to midnight, although moving it to midnight and saying there will be no more changes unless humanity finds a way to save itself might be more apropos for the historical moment we are living in.
Is it at all possible for people to rise up in large enough numbers, out of love for Planet Earth and all living things, across the globe to prevent such a catastrophe, as it is clear that there is no governmental or institutional entity willing or able to call a halt to military madness?
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Could the US Military’s Recruitment Problem Be a Good Thing?
Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills?
Feb 09, 2025
Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”
“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.
“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.
Indeed, war unites us... in hell.
The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.
The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”
While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?
Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.
Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?
The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”
The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?
And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.
Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.
All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.
And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.
But the U.S. had to defend itself!
This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.
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