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osama bin laden
Rising Military Suicides Bring the War on Terror Home
As with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short.
Jul 26, 2024
At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He reportedly wanted to “bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil,” provoking savage asymmetric conflicts that would send home a stream of “wooden boxes and coffins” and weaken American resolve. “This is when you will leave,” he predicted.
After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.
As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35%—883 troops—took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.
The war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001—a global conflict that still grinds on today—ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.
Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.
Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000—57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans—an estimated 30,177 of them—had killed themselves.
“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”
Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides
In June, a New York Times front-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them—a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.
The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
None of it should, however, have been surprising.
Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.
After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.
That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”
Quite obviously, it never happened.
The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.
Studies on the Shelf
Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.
While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.
Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops.
The New York Times recently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental healthcare providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.
The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.
Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”
Bin Laden’s Triumph
On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” U.S. President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001—a global conflict that still grinds on today—ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.
The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.
Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues.
During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.
Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.
“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans—four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths—has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.
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Bin Laden's Curse: From 9/11 to Jerusalem to Iran and Back Again
Although this week's deadly bombing in Kerman turns out not to implicate Israel, it certainly has a context in Tel Aviv’s reduction of Gaza to rubble and its murder of over 20,000 civilian noncombatants.
Jan 05, 2024
The responsibility for the bombing in Kerman, Iran, on Wednesday that killed at least 84 people and wounded another 284, has been claimed by the ISIL (Daesh, ISIS) terrorist group. The worst terrorist bombing in Iran since the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) blew up the Iranian leadership in 1981 struck at a commemoration of the assassination by Donald Trump of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Qasem Soleimani.
Initially, figures on the Iranian government blamed Israel, and threatened retaliation. Iran opposes the Israeli total war on the civilians of Gaza, and leads a loosely organized Alliance of Resistance (against Israeli militarism) comprising Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and Yemen’s Houthis. The modus operandi of the Kerman bombing, however, with its targeting of civilian crowds in the service of inflaming conflict, better suits ISIL. The ISIL leadership had taken over northern Iraq and eastern Syria 2014-2018 by fomenting Sunni-Shiite civil war.
The Gaza conflict is having the effect of strengthening Iran’s Alliance of Resistance on the one hand, and of raising jealousies among and galvanizing Sunni radicals on the other.
Although the bombing turns out not to implicate Israel, it certainly has a context in Tel Aviv’s reduction of Gaza to rubble and its murder of over 20,000 civilian noncombatants.
Osama Bin Laden gave three reasons for undertaking the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. — the US military presence in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia, the excess civilian deaths caused by the US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, and the Israel occupation of Jerusalem and the threat it posed to the al-Aqsa Mosque complex (Islam’s third holiest shrine).
The Palestine piece is crucial. I wrote in 2010, “Last winter during the Gaza War, an audio tape attributed to Bin Laden did not neglect to mention the need to recover al-Aqsa Mosque (the Muslim holy site in Jerusalem) for Islam. Before 9/11, in early 2001, Bin Laden was penning odes to the liberation of Jerusalem and reading them at his son’s wedding.”
The US and European press never gave the Palestine issue its due in explaining Muslim radicalism twenty years ago, because facing the truth was too painful.
The longer the Biden administration allows this savage carnage on the part of Israel to continue before the eyes of the world, the more likely it is that the whole Middle East and perhaps the Muslim world more widely will be destabilized.
If ISIL did strike Iran, it may well have done so to take the shine off Iran’s current street cred in the Muslim world over Gaza. As the major Sunni Muslim countries have fallen silent or secretly cooperated with the Israeli onslaught, Iran has vigorously denounced the Israeli campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Its proxy militias in Iraq and Syria have repeatedly attacked US military personnel at Tanf in Syria and at Ain al-Asad base in Iraq. The Houthis have closed the Red Sea to traffic by international container ship companies.
ISIL hates Shiites and sees them as wretched heretics, and has made attempts to establish itself among Palestinians. It would want credit for resistance to the Israeli campaign to go to Sunni radicals. This strike at Kerman was revenge for the Iranian role in defeating ISIL in Syria, an effort directed by Soleimani.
Indirectly, then, the Gaza conflict is having the effect of strengthening Iran’s Alliance of Resistance on the one hand, and of raising jealousies among and galvanizing Sunni radicals on the other.
The longer the Biden administration allows this savage carnage on the part of Israel to continue before the eyes of the world, the more likely it is that the whole Middle East and perhaps the Muslim world more widely will be destabilized. The US and its allies will not be left untouched by such a development, as the Red Sea debacle already demonstrates. But that interruption of container ship traffic could be a minor consequence of the Israeli genocide against Gaza compared to what is coming.
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Guardian Removes bin Laden Letter to America After Viral Resurgence
The U.K. paper confirmed it had removed the letter because of its sudden surge in popularity on TikTok and other social media sites.
Nov 16, 2023
The Guardian has removed Osama bin Laden's "Letter to the American People," which had been on its website for more than 20 years, after it went viral on TikTok and other social media sites.
"This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden's 'Letter to the American People,' as reported in The Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002," the page previously hosting the letter now reads. "The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023."
In the letter, which is still available via web archive, bin Laden outlines his grievances against the United States, including its support for Israel, its placement of military bases in Islamic countries, and its participation in or support of other military actions or economic sanctions against people in the Islamic world. He justifies his attacks on U.S. civilians by arguing that they have the power to vote for governments that support different policies. Bin Laden also makes homophobic and antisemitic remarks, including blaming Jews as a group for the excesses of U.S. capitalism.
"The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context."
The letter saw a surprising resurgence on TikTok over the past two days, as posters documented their responses to reading it for the first time.
"The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds," journalist Yashar Ali wrote on social media. "Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they'll never see geopolitical matters the same way again. Many of them—and I have watched a lot—say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to a hostile power."
The Wrap sourced the trend to a video posted by Lynnette Adkins that TikTok says is currently unavailable.
"I need everyone to stop doing what they're doing right now and go read 'Letter to America,' I feel like I'm going through an existential crisis right now," Adkins reportedly said.
Ali said he saw thousands of similar videos on TikTok and more on other social media platforms. 404 Media reported Wednesday that searching for "Letter to America" on TikTok brought up a few dozen results, some with as many as hundreds of thousands of views. Videos using the hashtag #LettertoAmerica have together generated 1.3 million views. However, the outlet noted that some of the videos were "not particularly viral by TikTok standards." The top-liked video had 75,000 likes, but true TikTok phenomenons can bee seen hundreds of millions of times. It also noted that not all of the videos expressed support for bin Laden's views: Some simply explained the letter, the trend, or the 9/11 attacks.
The Guardian confirmed to both The Wrap and 404 Media that it had removed the letter because of its surge in online popularity.
"The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context," the paper said in the statement. "Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead."
404 Media noted that removing the letter absent major factual errors or danger to life was a "highly unusual move," one that has only prompted more commentary on TikTok and other social media platforms.
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Bin Laden, Trump, and the American Empire
What we can learn from the 20 years between the 9/11 attacks and the January 6 coup attempt.
Jan 13, 2022
The end of 2021 and the beginning of a new year is a convenient time to take stock of the causes of America's decline.
This past year saw both Washington's inglorious exit from Afghanistan after 20 years in the country that had served as the launching pad for its direct military intervention in the Middle East and an historic insurrection at the very heart of the empire. Add to this the absolute lack of traction for President Biden's recent "Democracy Summit" in contrast to Beijing's surefooted diplomacy, the erosion of an already weak U.S. economy by COVID-19 followed by uncontrolled inflation, and the deepening of the country's informal but very real civil war--and it is hard to avoid the sense that we are indeed at the end of an era.
The U.S. wasted trillions on fruitless military adventures, but the main economic consequence of the Middle East wars was to boost China's economic ascent at its expense.
Serving as the bookends of this era were two individuals that stamped their personalities on it: Osama bin Laden at the beginning and Donald Trump at the end.
Varieties of Imperial Decline
Ever since Paul Kennedy wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historians and others have tried to discover the universal elements of the phenomenon he called "imperial overstretch."
This might, however, be a futile enterprise. Tolstoy said that all families are unhappy but each of them is unhappy in its own way. The same thing might be said of the end of empires. All empires end, but each exits in its own distinct unhappy fashion.
Bankrupt at the end of the Second World War and facing spiraling financial and political costs as independence movements challenged their hegemony from East Asia to Africa, the British chose to cut their losses and liquidate most of their holdings, passed the task of ruling to indigenous elites, and largely left the defense of global capitalism to the Americans.
The French chose to hang on despite defeat in Indochina and a bloody stalemate in Algeria and could only be persuaded to give the latter independence when renegade military men threatened to take over the government itself to continue the empire. The Soviet Union was largely dissolved by a domestic reform effort that ran out of control, though defeat in Afghanistan made a not insignificant contribution.
Like the ascent to the zenith of empire, the descent from it does not follow a predetermined path but one that is shaped by contingencies, many of them surprising and unexpected.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the U.S. had staved off the economic challenge of Japan and seen the political and military challenge posed by the Soviets dissipate. Moreover, it seemed to have thrown off the "Vietnam Syndrome" with its victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. The American Empire appeared to be experiencing a second wind.
At this juncture, the choices for maintaining the empire boiled down to two. One, identified with the Democrats, favored the U.S. ruling via a multilateral economic order undergirded by the supremacy of its corporations and a liberal global political order propped up by unchallenged American military power and promoted by the "soft power" of liberal democracy. The other was championed by neoconservatives largely ensconced in the Republican Party who claimed the "unipolar" status of the United States provided a unique opportunity for reordering the world to the lasting advantage of the United States both strategically and economically--and demanded unilateral action to bring that about.
The debate between these two visions of the imperial future dominated American politics during the eight-year reign of the Democrats presided over by Bill Clinton.
Under the succeeding Republican administration of George W. Bush, US power was primed to do just what the neoconservatives wanted. It was, however, not predetermined that the Middle East would be the prime target of their global push to reorder the world. Tension with China was high in the first months of the new administration, with the Pentagon, in fact, identifying Beijing no longer as a strategic partner, as the Clinton administration did, but as a strategic rival. A new Cold War could have been launched at that juncture, with a China that was much, much weaker militarily and economically relative to the U.S. than it is now.
What made the difference in the fateful calculations of the neocons was one man: Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden's Historic Role
Bin Laden puts paid to those historians who belittle the role of personality in history. For what he did, probably without intending it, was direct U.S. military power to Afghanistan and the broader Middle East with his attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
Bin Laden hoped to create a hundred Islamic insurgencies by boldly baiting the Great Satan, much like Che Guevara hoped to create more Cubas in Latin America with his guerrilla experiment in Bolivia. Bin Laden failed in bringing about the purifying Islamic revolutions he sought, but he was wildly successful in a way he had not intended. For his move gave the American neocons the opportunity for the military action they had devoutly wished for to enable them to consolidate their new unipolar order.
Desire did not, however, end up with the object of desire, for the terrain in which the U.S. chose to wage an "exemplary war" to teach the rest of the world to get out of the way of America's hegemonic mission turned out to be populated by people, Afghans and Iraqis, who were no pushovers.
Bush II got the war he wanted but not the outcome he sought. Instead of his legions coming back home in triumph, they were plunged into what quickly became a quicksand from which they could not be extricated for two decades, and then only in shame and defeat under a Democratic administration in 2021.
The Economic Consequences of the Forever Wars
Being pinned down in what critics called the "forever wars" in the Middle East had momentous political and economic consequences for the United States. Washington set aside its definition of China as a strategic rival and sought instead to enlist Beijing as an ally in its "war on terror." China obliged, but devoted most of its efforts to economic diplomacy to gain markets and cultivate good relations with countries in the Global South, a contrast with Washington's bellicose behavior that did not go unnoticed.
The U.S. wasted trillions on fruitless military adventures, but the main economic consequence of the Middle East wars was to boost China's economic ascent at its expense.
With China reaffirmed as a political ally, the U.S. transnational corporations that had promoted the entente with China in their search for cheap labor during the Clinton presidency accelerated the transfer of their manufacturing processes to China, making the 16 years of the Bush II and Obama administrations a period of irreversible deindustrialization. Thousands of factories closed down in the industrial heartland in the Midwest and Northeast and at least 2.5 million high paying manufacturing jobs were lost to what some economists called the "China Shock."
China's rise to industrial prominence was not, in other words, predetermined. Bin Laden's baiting the U.S.--and Washington taking the bait--was a major reason why the China-TNC alliance continued and gathered force during the Bush II presidency instead of being sidelined by strategic concerns about China that were prominent both at the Pentagon and the neocons during Bush's first months in office.
Alternative Routes from Capitalism's Crisis of Profitability
If the U.S. being bogged down in the Middle East and China's benefiting from this were not predetermined, some would claim that the broad contours of economic change, at least in the U.S., were but the unfolding in time of contradictions already present at the heart of the premier capitalist country.
True, already in the 1970s and 1980s, the rate of profit had plunged from its postwar high of 16 percent in the early 1950s to around 6 percent. True, accessing cheap labor in the global South, where wages were a fraction of those in the United States, was certainly seen as a key solution. Still, breaking the social democratic compromise between labor and capital undergirded by Keynesian technocratic economics, where social peace was the quid pro quo for relatively high wages and limited profits, was no easy, largely predetermined process.
Even before China came into the picture in the 1990s, two "superstructural" factors were decisive in conditioning the way capital would respond to the crisis of profitability, one that would clear the way for the massive migration of U.S. jobs there.
The first was political in nature. The showdown between Ronald Reagan and PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, in 1981 became the key battle for U.S. labor's future, and Reagan's victory, like Margaret Thatcher's triumph over the miners in Britain, made the rest of management's campaign to break unions a mopping up operation. As in Britain, had the AFL-CIO come out in full support of the PATCO strike and had the air controllers won, it is conceivable that the right's offensive to destroy labor's power could have been slowed down, if not stopped, and neoliberalism's triumph could have been averted or, at the least, been much less thorough. The political consequences of concrete class struggles can never be underestimated.
The other critical condition for capital's triumph in the 1980s and 1990s was ideological in character. With the 1970s U.S. economy stuck in the "stagflation" whose underlying cause was the crisis of profitability, a revived classical market economics centered at the University of Chicago came to the rescue. Neoliberalism faulted state intervention as the central cause of U.S. economic stagnation, and capital, politicians, and academics united in a common cause for sweeping deregulation.
This political and ideological coalition was not, however, inevitable. Had the Democratic Party remained faithful to its New Deal roots and social democratic academics put up more of an intellectual fight, neoliberalism's rise could have encountered more resistance that, at the least, could have made its hegemony more fragile, a point to which we will return later.
In any event, it was the virtually unopposed neoliberal counterrevolution that made possible the corporate capture of public policy in the 1980s and 1990s, a development that set the stage for the large-scale transfer of American factories and jobs to China over the next two decades. Moreover, with their assertion, more by fiat than by proof, that market forces had "determined" that the U.S. competitive advantage no longer lay in manufacturing, the neoliberals not only promoted deindustrialization but, equally significant, the wholesale "financialization" of the U.S. economy.
Financialization was a process that involved focusing on the financial sector as the cutting edge of the economy owing to the greater returns on investment it offered compared to industry; promoting debt-driven consumption as the engine of growth; and converting workers from wage-earners to "shareholders" in U.S. corporations, thus reconciling labor and capital.
This "new" American economy created by neoliberalism was alleged to have entered a "mature" phase of permanent prosperity known as the "Great Moderation" in the 2000s. It fell apart with a vengeance with the financial crisis of 2008, which ushered in years of stagnation and high unemployment that gutted the economy of what dynamism it had left.
By the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, China, while still just the world's second biggest economy, had clearly displaced the U.S. as the center of global accumulation, accounting for 28 percent in global growth in 2019, more than twice the share of the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund.
Trump and the Crisis of the Imperial Order
But endless wars and the unraveling of the financialized U.S. economy are insufficient to explain the drastic decline of the empire from "unipolarism" to severe dislocation in less than two decades. One must bring into the equation the unfolding of what I have called the informal civil war in the United States. Central to explaining this cancer eating at the heart of the American political system was the evolution of white supremacy as a political and ideological force.
While the Republican Party had exploited the racial insecurities of the white population successfully since the late 1960s through the so-called "Southern Strategy" and racist dog whistle politics, it was not predetermined that white supremacy would become the dominant stream in conservative, right-wing politics that would subordinate and fuse with other streams such as cultural and religious conservatism, anti-liberalism, and populist disdain for scientific expertise.
Again, this was not inevitable. A key contribution to the expansion and consolidation of white supremacy was the defection from the Democratic Party of large sections of its white working class base--the pillar of the once solid "New Deal Coalition" put together by Franklin Delano Roosevelt--as "Third Way" Democrats from Clinton to Barack Obama legitimized and led in promoting neoliberal policies that had such a damaging consequences on the jobs and income of workers.
The Democratic Party leadership's surrender to neoliberalism has been well analyzed by Thomas Piketty, who noted that the base of the party from the 1960s on increasingly became composed of people with relatively high levels of education--professionals, academics, intellectuals, and even managers. The relatively well educated leadership of the party increasingly responded to the interests of these like-minded followers, resulting in many in the old union, working class base being steadily alienated from them.
Increasingly, what Piketty terms the "Brahmin Left" in the Democratic Party represented by the Clintons and Obama found a coincidence of intellectual and material interests with conservatives traditionally ensconced in the Republican Party. Their common agenda came to be espousal of neoliberalism, with the difference that the Democrats favored neoliberalism with "safety nets." This ideological convergence assured that while the independent left would be loud in its denunciation of neoliberalism, the dominant political response to neoliberalism would not come from the left but from another quarter when the right conjuncture emerged.
That conjuncture came with the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008. Its volatile mix of high unemployment and high inequality provided an indispensable context for white supremacy's breaking out to become the driving force of the politics of the white population, a development that took liberals and others by surprise.
Still, it could not have turned into the virulent, destabilizing movement it became were it not for one man. This brings us again to the role of personality, a factor that at certain historical junctures can become decisive. It was a volatile opportunist with weak ties to either the Republican establishment or Democratic establishment who elevated white supremacy from one of several streams of American right-wing politics to its hegemonic status.
In the 2016 elections, Donald Trump smelled an opportunity that a Democratic leadership tied to Wall Street ignored. By tying the crisis created by deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism to anti-migrant rhetoric and dog whistle anti-black appeals in a boisterous, redneck-captivating style, he was able to break through to the white working class that had already given signals earlier that it was ripe to be mobilized along racial lines.
The culmination of that process was the January 6 insurrection, a battle that Trump lost which may actually serve as a prelude to his winning the war, just as the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 prefigured Hitler's gaining power in 1933.
A Third Wind?
As the era 2001 to 2021 comes to an end, the American empire continues to be dominant, but its pillars have been severely eroded.
Its ability to discipline the rest of the world has been shattered by its defeat in Afghanistan. Its credibility even among its western allies as a reliable partner is at an all-time low. Its economy may still be the largest in the word, but it is no longer the center of global capital accumulation and confronts the prospect of its unraveling accelerating--especially now that the $1.75 trillion "Build Back Better" social and climate public spending bill that was supposed to be its program for revitalization faces uncertain approval in a deeply divided Congress. Meanwhile white supremacist politics has become the hegemonic force in the politics of the white population, creating not only deep polarization but an existential threat to the world's oldest democracy itself.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S. empire seemed to have a second wind, appearing to have put the "Vietnam Syndrome" behind it and its economy apparently gliding into a prosperous maturity. As events proved, that illusory second wind was short lived.
A third wind is, of course, a theoretical possibility. But while we should be wary of deterministic projections, how such a rejuvenation can take place is much, much less evident today. Each empire descends from the zenith in its own unique way, but if there is one path that is broadly similar to that being trodden by the United States, it is that of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Like the Ottomans then, the United States now is a very sick empire, faced abroad by powerful challenges to its hegemony, eroded by economic stagnation, shorn of ideological legitimacy, and torn apart internally by a civil war in all but name.
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Donald J. Trump as Osama bin Laden's Revenge
Murderous forever wars and a pandemic and president from hell.
Jul 16, 2020
It's July 2020 and I'm about to turn 76, which, as far as I'm concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn't going to start this piece with Donald J. Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly white nationalist and pro-Confederate positions (right down to the saving of the rebel stars and bars), not to speak of the Covid-19 slaughter of Americans he's helped facilitate. But then I read about his demand for a "National Garden of American Heroes," described as "a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live" and, honestly, though this piece is officially about something else, I just can't help myself. I had to start there.
Yes, everyone undoubtedly understands why General George Patton (a Trump obsession) is to be in that garden, not to speak--given the president's reelection politics--of evangelist Billy Graham, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and former president Ronald Reagan. Still, my guess is that most of you won't have the faintest idea why Davy Crockett is included. I'm talking about the frontiersman and Indian killer who died at the Alamo. Given my age, though, I get Donald Trump on this one and it gave me a rare laugh in a distinctly grim moment. That's why I can't resist explaining it, even though I guarantee you that the real subject of this piece is Osama bin Laden's revenge.
After all, The Donald and I grew up in the 1950s in different parts of the same bustling city, New York. We both had TVs, just then flooding into homes nationwide, and I guarantee you that we both were riveted by the same hit show, TV's first mini-series, Walt Disney's Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, starring the actor Fess Parker. Its pop theme song swept the country. ("Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free... Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three... Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.") The show also launched a kids' craze for coonskin caps. (Who among us didn't have, or at least yearn, for one?) So how could a statue of Fess Parker not be in the Garden of American Heroes?
And since Donald Trump is himself the essence of a bad novel (though he's also become our reality), I just wonder: What about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, especially since there are no plans for Native Americans in his garden-to-be? They were a crew obviously put on Earth to be wiped out by white colonists, cowboys, and the cavalry in the kinds of Westerns both of us trooped to local movie theaters to see back then.
Or how about Hopalong Cassidy (Hoppy!), that other TV cowboy hero of our childhood? Doesn't he deserve to ride in that garden next to another Trump military fixation, General Douglas MacArthur? After all, I know that Hoppy was real and this is how: When I was seven or eight, my father had a friend who worked for Pathe News and I rode in front of the tripod of his camera on the roof of that company's station wagon in a Macy's Day Parade in my hometown. (I still have the photos.) Somewhere along the route, Hoppy himself--I kid you not!--rode by on his white horse Topper and, since I was atop that station wagon and we were at about the same height, he shook my hand!
And here's what makes Cassidy especially appropriate for The Donald's garden landscape: in the 1950s, he was the only cowboy hero who dressed all in black right up to his hat (normally, a sign of the bad guy) and, in the process, created a kid's craze for black shirts (his version of a coonskin cap), breaking its past association with either Italian fascism or mourning and bringing it back into the culture big time. Tell me honestly, then, don't you think a garden of "heroes" in the age of Trump should have a few black shirts and an increasingly Mussolini-ish look to it?
An American Garden of Blood
So Donald Trump and I both lived through the same TV world in our childhoods and youth. We also lived through 9/11, still in the same city, although unlike him, I wasn't practically a "first responder" at the site of those two downed towers, nor did I see all the Muslims celebrating across the river in Jersey City (as he claimed he did). Still, of one thing I'm convinced: Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden's revenge.
Of course, that was all so long ago. The new century had barely begun. I was only 57 and The Donald 55 when those two hijacked planes suddenly slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in our hometown, a third one plunged into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth (probably heading for the White House or the Capitol) crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back. Ever since, all you have to do is write "9/11" and everyone knows (or thinks they know) what it stands for. But on 9/11, there was, of course, no 9/11.
It was a breathtakingly unexpected event (although, to be fair, the CIA had previously briefed President George W. Bush on Osama bin Laden's desire to hijack commercial planes for possible terror operations... oh, and there was that FBI agent in Phoenix who urged headquarters "to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools"). Still, the downing of those towers and part of the headquarters of the singularly victorious military of the ultimate superpower of the Cold War, the one already being called "indispensable" and "exceptional" in 2001, was beyond shocking.
Admittedly, there's history to be remembered here. After all, it wasn't actually that military or that Pentagon that downed the Soviet Union. In fact, when the American military fought the Soviets in major proxy wars on a planet where nuclear catastrophe was always just around the corner, it found itself remarkably stalemated in Korea and dismally on the losing side in Vietnam.
No, if you want to give credit where it's due, offer it to the CIA and Washington's Saudi allies, who invested staggering effort from 1979 to 1989 in funding, supporting, and training the Taliban's predecessors, groups of Afghan Islamic extremists, to take down the Red Army in their country. Supporting them as well (though, as far as is known, probably not actually funded by the U.S.) was a rich young Saudi militant named, believe it or not, Osama bin Laden who, before that war even ended, had founded a group called "the Base" or al-Qaeda, and would, in 1996, declare "war" on the United States. Oh yes, and though it's seldom mentioned now, when charges are flying fast and furious about the possible recent Russian funding of Taliban militants to kill at most a few Americans in Afghanistan, in those years the U.S. poured billions of dollars into... well, not to put it too subtly, empowering Islamic extremists to kill the soldiers of that other superpower by the thousands in... yes, Afghanistan. How's that for shocking?
In 1989, the defeated Red Army finally limped home from what the Soviet Union's leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had taken to calling "the bleeding wound." Only two years later, his country imploded and the U.S. was left alone, officially victorious, on Planet Earth (despite future fantasies of a horrific "axis of evil" to be faced), the first country in endless centuries of imperial rivalry to find itself so.
And what exactly did that triumphantly indispensable, exceptional superpower do but, a decade later, get dive-bombed by 19--just 19!--largely Saudi hijackers in the service of tiny al-Qaeda and that wizard of terror Osama bin Laden, whose urge was then to provoke Washington into a genuine war in the Muslim world and so create yet more Islamic extremists. And did he succeed? You bet--and in a fashion even he undoubtedly hadn't conceived of in his wildest dreams. Think of 9/11, in fact, as the greatest example of "shock and awe" in this century.
Here's a feeling I still remember from the weeks after the 9/11 attacks when I saw where the administration of President George W. Bush was heading toward the invasion of Afghanistan and then, god save us, Iraq; when I watched our mainstream media narrow its focus to this country as the most victimized yet dominating and exceptional place on Earth and Osama bin Laden as the ultimate evil on this planet; when I watched the never-ending memorial ceremonies begin and what soon came to be called "the war on terror" be launched with up to 60 (count 'em: 60!) countries in its gun sights, even if I didn't yet know that, on 9/11 in the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had turned to an aide and said, "Go Massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not," with a future invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq clearly in mind, though the Iraqi autocrat had no relation whatsoever to al-Qaeda (something you wouldn't have known from the top officials in that administration in those years) --- when, in short (though I didn't yet think of it that way), I watched my own country become a "bleeding wound" that has never stopped flowing and, in Donald Trump's Covid-19 moment, has turned into an American Garden of Blood.
Back in late September 2001, despite having been deeply involved decades earlier in the nightmare of the Vietnam War (and opposition to it), I could already sense war coming and it occurred to me that this was going to be the worst period I had ever experienced. Now that we're in Donald Trump's America, with hundreds of Americans dying daily of a disease that a reasonably responsible president and administration could have brought under control, the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 are beginning to look like a drop in the casualty bucket. (By the beginning of April 2020, Covid-19 deaths in New York City alone had already surpassed those of 9/11 by 1,000.)
And I wasn't wrong in that hunch about this being the worst period, was I? Mind you, it was just a gut feeling then, no more--even though it would soon enough lead, almost inexorably, to the creation of my website, TomDispatch, and its focus on what turned out to be America's never-ending wars of this century.
A Passport to Nowhere
Let's get one thing straight, though. If, at that moment, you had told me that this country was going to launch a series of forever wars across what would turn out to be a significant part of the planet and fight them hopelessly for almost two decades or that, the more success proved absent in those same years, the more one administration after another would pour taxpayer dollars into the U.S. military, the 17 "intelligence" agencies, and the rest of the national security state; that what's still known, with no accuracy whatsoever, as the "defense budget" would years ago have become larger than those of the next seven best-funded military powers on the planet combined and, by 2020, the next 10, and would still be rising; that domestic investment, from infrastructure to pandemic preparedness, would be starvedfor money in those same years, and that just about no one would protest any of this in the halls of Congress or the streets of America, I would have thought you a madman--or rather, the world's best writer of dystopian fiction.
If you had told me that, in those very years, of the two great powers of this century, China and the United States--one rising, the other ever more clearly falling--the latter would lose approximately 7,000 military personnel (and at least another 8,000 military contractors) and many more wounded, not to speak of those who came home with PTSD or, under the pressure of repeated deployments to the sorriest of conflicts, committed suicide, while the former, as the New York Times reported recently in the wake of a bloody (but not weaponized) clash on China's disputed Himalayan border with India, would have lost next to none, I wouldn't have believed you. ("In four decades," as the Times wrote, "the People's Liberation Army had lost just three soldiers to fighting abroad--troops who were killed in United Nations peacekeeping operations in Mali and South Sudan in 2016.")
If you had told me that, facing a devastating virus, the leader of one would largely suppress it--admittedly using the most authoritarian of methods--while, in his search for reelection, the leader of the other, officially still the greatest power on the planet, would ignore it, open the economy, churches, schools, and institutions of every sort and watch it run wild without a plan in sight; if you had told me that fewer than 5,000 people would die in the first of those countries and more than 134,000 (and still counting) in the other, leaving the American dead of 9/11 and the bloody wars of this century in the shade, and that it was all only getting worse, I wouldn't have believed you. Not for a second.
And if, above all, you had told me that, deep into those years of bleeding abroad and increasingly at home, a near majority of Americans would vote to (as I wroteduring election campaign 2016) send a suicide bomber into the White House, I would have told you that, though Osama bin Laden had been killed by SEAL Team Six in Pakistan and buried in the briny deep in 2011, Donald Trump was his living revenge, and that bin Laden had won twice--once thanks to those ludicrous, murderous forever wars across much of the Muslim world and the second time thanks to the pandemic from hell and the president from the same place.
Imagine if, in 1991 when the Soviet Union imploded, I had told you that, in 2020, not quite three decades distant, an American passport would be, more or less literally, a document for a trip to nowhere. Talk about a bleeding, or even hemorrhaging, wound! In the years to come, I think it will be ever more obvious that Donald Trump was, in fact, proof of Osama bin Laden's success, of the fact that 9/11 and those 19 hijackers were all that was needed to produce the world of his dreams and the wounds that went with it.
And if, by the way, you wondered why I wrote this piece with the longest sentences I could possibly create, the answer is simple enough: two decades into the twenty-first century, I think it should be obvious that Americans have been given an exceptionally, perhaps even indispensably long sentence without parole on a planet already heating to the boiling point, 94,000,000 miles from the sun.
No, this truly won't be "the American century," but I doubt it will be the Chinese one either. By the time this crew is done, it may be nobody's century. Thanks a heap, Osama! This is your bleeding wound, too.
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A Reminder Following Baghdadi's Death: 'The Terrorists We're Killing Today Are the Terrorists We Created Yesterday'
"Nobody is better than the U.S. at killing terrorists. Nobody is better than the U.S. at creating terrorists."
Oct 28, 2019
Following news that the infamous leader of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest, killing himself along with three of his children, over the weekend during a clandestine raid by U.S. Special Forces (also infamous) in northwest Syria, critics of the U.S. global war on terrorism are highlighting how Baghdadi's death exemplifies the endless and cyclical nature of a global conflict that perpetuates the very terrorism it claims as its mission to destroy.
"There would have been no Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had Bush not invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003." --journalist Spencer Ackerman"Nobody is better than the U.S. at killing terrorists. Nobody is better than the U.S. at creating terrorists," tweeted author and peace activist Medea Benjamin on Sunday. "The cycle continues. The weapons companies get rich. Children--yes, including Bagdadi's children--die."
Writing for The Week on Monday, freelance columnist Joel Mathis argues that al-Baghdadi's "grisly demise"--though greeted with cheers by many in the U.S., the western world, and across Middle East--should be viewed neither as triumph nor a victory.
Don't misunderstand: Baghdadi was evil. Under his leadership the Islamic State beheaded hostages and violently imposed the worst sort of theocratic rule wherever its caliphate could be established. He kept sex slaves for his personal gratification--including, reportedly, U.S. hostage Kayla Mueller. It is impossible to mourn him.
But while Americans celebrate Baghdadi's death, they should also think critically about his life -- and see it as a cautionary tale against U.S. meddling in Middle East affairs.
According to Mathis, the story of this latest terrorist leader should be a "reminder that when America ventures abroad, we sometimes help create the monsters we later feel compelled to destroy, starting a loop of self-justification that results in an endless string of 'forever wars.'"
Responding to Mathis' column, journalist Will Bunch put it this way:
Like others before him, the origin story of Baghdadi's vicious campaign can be found in the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the brutality that followed. Himself a prisoner at the notorious Camp Bucca prison, Baghdadi was among those held by the U.S. military during the early years of the Iraq occupation following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Writing for Common Dreams on Monday, longtime anti-war campaigner and humanitarian Kathy Kelly--who, as co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, has traveled into U.S. war zones for decades--remembers her visit to Camp Bucca in 2004 as being "one of the most hellish spots" she had ever encountered in the world.
Allowed to speak with a small group of prisoners, Kelly recounts how the young men corroborated grievances that others had shared about Camp Bucca as they "spoke of loneliness, monotony, humiliation, and the fearful uncertainty prisoners face when held without charge by a hostile power with no evident plans to release them."
President Donald Trump, who took to a podium in the White House on Sunday to announce Baghdadi's death, is the third U.S. president in a row to hold such a press conference, with George W. Bush in 2006 announcing the demise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Barack Obama doing the same after Osama Bin Laden was assassinated by U.S. Special Forces at a Pakistani compound in 2011.
The Daily Beast's Spencer Ackerman writes that these "three fatal milestones all point to the strategic incoherence within a global war that has now lasted an entire generation."
There would have been no Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had Bush not invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003. That war created an opportunity for a mass murderer, Zarqawi, to construct an al Qaeda franchise more bloodthirsty than even the one bin Laden created. Even after Zarqawi's 2006 death, bin Laden could never rein in al Qaeda in Iraq, documents recovered after the 2011 raid on his Abbottabad compound showed, and he grew particularly dyspeptic over the offshoot's clear desire to declare a caliphate.
[...]
No one should think the fall of the caliphate, let alone Baghdadi's death, means that U.S.' jihadist adversaries have achieved their final form. Whatever else the war on terrorism is, its history shows it yielding further generations of jihadists as long as there are American forces hunting, surveilling, and killing Muslims worldwide. Part of that dynamic involves those newer generations emerging when U.S. forces pull back but leave intact the apparatus of the war on terrorism--the drone strikes, the surveillance dragnets, the lethal raids--as happened in Iraq in 2011 and, very likely, will happen in Syria now, in 2019. Maintaining that apparatus is supposed to hedge against withdrawals from agonizing ground conflicts. Yet at each turn of the war's ratchet, the jihadists have only come back in more violent form and greater mass, the exact opposite of what any war is supposed to achieve.
According to Ackerman, anyone exploring whether or not Baghdadi's death spells the end of the Islamic State or if it represents a crucial turning point in the global war on terror is asking an inane kind of question.
"As proficient as U.S. special operators have become at manhunting these past 18 years, and as central as manhunting has been during that time, there is no campaign plan, not even a theory, by which the killings of jihadist leaders knit up into a lasting victory," writes Ackerman.
"Asking for one," he continues, "would require reckoning with the catastrophic failure represented by a war that only perpetuates itself."
What critics cannot seem to overstate is just how important the history is--even as the history is what most often gets buried when the latest "most-wanted terrorist" turns up dead. As Ackerman concludes:
Trump's pullback from northeastern Syria has troubled American strategists. The persistence of the war on terrorism, which set the context for that pullback, troubles them less. At a Reuters forum in September, I asked former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis why military officers never put forward a theory of victory in the war on terrorism. He responded that terrorism was a persistent reality, "an ambient threat," and so was an American response. "This desire to have the war over, I understand it, but this is a war that springs from root causes that will have to be addressed at the same time we're fighting," Mattis said. "It will be there throughout our lifetimes."
Terrorism, as old as human history, will indeed be present throughout our lifetimes. But that elides the choice America makes to wage a war against it that only makes jihadism worse. While the bombs drop, American officials never get around to addressing Mattis' undefined "root causes," because some of those root causes are the bombs themselves. And all that means Baghdadi's death gains the U.S. as much as the broader war on terrorism does: ultimately nothing, only a fleeting feeling of national pride briefly concealing the worsening wreckage of a generation.
Echoing both Ackerman and Benjamin, Mathis notes the sinister and circular nature of it all.
"If you step back and look at U.S. policy over a 20-year timeline, you recognize the logic as endlessly circular," Mathis writes. "We must have troops in the Middle East to neutralize threats to America that might never materialize if we didn't have troops in the Middle East."
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One Year After Khashoggi Murder, Chorus of Demands for Saudi Govt. to Face Consequences
"Despite the backlash directed at the kingdom, the Saudis haven't faced serious consequences for the slaying of Khashoggi or its slaughter of civilians in Yemen."
Oct 02, 2019
Saudi Arabian rights activists joined with advocacy groups to mark the one-year anniversary of journalist Jamal Khashoggi's death Wednesday with actions and calls for accountability.
"Any talk of assuming responsibility for Jamal Khashoggi's killing is meaningless if not met with the immediate and unconditional release of dozens of individuals who continue to languish in prison, and who continue to be at risk of torture and other ill-treatment, solely for having expressed their opinion in a peaceful manner," said Amnesty International's Middle East research director Lynn Maalouf.
Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Common Dreams reported Wednesday that an official complaint was filed with the International Criminal Court over the incident.
In the year since the killing, Saudi Arabia has dumped funding into public relations to improve the kingdom's standing in the U.S., according to Open Secrets.
Saudi Arabian interests reported spending just over $16 million on foreign influence operations from October 2, 2017, until October 2, 2018, according to OpenSecrets' analysis. In the year since Khashoggi's death, Saudi interests have poured more than $27 million into influence operations disclosed in Foreign Agent Registration Act filings in OpenSecrets' Foreign Lobby Watch database.
CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, in an opinion piece for Common Dreams Tuesday, wrote that those who buy the explanation from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is known as MBS, are complicit in the kingdom's rewriting of the facts of the murder.
"Who is more evil," said Benjamin, "the maniacal Saudi crown prince responsible for Khashoggi's murder and the murder of tens of thousands of Yemenis, or the mendacious world leaders and businesspeople who continue to embrace what should be a pariah state?"
The prince's acknowledgement over the weekend that he bore general responsibility for the murder--a statement that left out any direct admission of responsibility or apology--spurred Human Rights Watch's Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson to call the comments "insufficient."
"If he's serious, the crown prince and his government should provide transparency into the ongoing trial and reveal everything they know about the planning, execution, and aftermath of Khashoggi's murder," said Whitson. "Instead, Saudi authorities are doubling down on repression and continuing to silence independent Saudi voices that Khashoggi sought to defend."
In a statement, Amnesty said it is supporting the launch of a podcast for Saudi expats fighting for free expression in the kingdom. Saudi scholar Hala al-Dosari said that the podcast "will present a powerful platform for Saudi journalists, scholars, and activists to counter the state-led propaganda and misinformation campaign."
"It will engage the Saudi people in a rare and free discussion on issues such as public participation, rule of law, feminism and other issues related to human rights," said al-Dosari.
There are a number of people in Saudi prisons who need solidarity, Amnesty said:
To date, Amnesty International has documented the cases of at least 30 prisoners of conscience who are behind bars serving prison sentences of between five and 30 years solely for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly. Amongst those currently detained are Mohammad al-Qahtani, a founding member of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association who called for the protection and promotion of human rights and provided legal support to families of detainees, and Waleed Abu al-Khair, a lawyer who defended human rights defenders before his imprisonment. Mohammad al-Qahtani and Waleed Abu al-Khair were tried and sentenced before the counter-terror court to 10 and 15 years in prison, respectively, for their peaceful human rights work.
Critics of President Donald Trump pointed to a pattern of coddling MBS from the White House as a reason that, a year after the murder, next to nothing has been done.
"Despite the backlash directed at the kingdom, the Saudis haven't faced serious consequences for the slaying of Khashoggi or its slaughter of civilians in Yemen," the Center for International Policy's Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung wrote Wednesday. "That is thanks in large part to one man--President Trump. He has loudly and emphatically defended Saudi Arabia at every opportunity."
In a tweet, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for action.
"A year has passed, but Donald Trump and his administration have done nothing to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). "He and his family deserve justice."
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The United States of... American Exceptionalism and Overseas Meddling
On living in a nation of political narcissists
May 21, 2019
In this country, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let's face it, when it comes to election meddling, it's been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign, whether it was, as Jared Kushner improbably claimed, "a couple of Facebook ads" or, as the Mueller report described it, "the Russian government interfer[ing]... in sweeping and systematic fashion."
Even though most Americans might find it hard to believe, we weren't exactly the first country to have an election meddled with by an intrusive foreign power with an agenda all its own.
But let me mention just a few of the things that we didn't learn from the Mueller report. We didn't learn that Russian agents appeared at Republican Party headquarters in 2016 with millions of dollars in donations to influence the coming election. (Oops, my mistake! That was CIA agents in the Italian election of 1948!) We didn't learn that a Russian intelligence agency in combination with Chinese intelligence, aided by a major Chinese oil company, overthrew an elected U.S. president and installed Donald Trump in the White House as their autocrat of choice. (Oops, my mistake again! That was the CIA, dispatched by an American president, and British intelligence, with the help of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later BP. In 1953, they overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the elected prime minister of Iran, and installed the young Shah as an autocratic ruler, the very first -- but hardly the last -- time the CIA successfully ousted a foreign government.) We didn't learn that key advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin were in close touch with rogue elements of the U.S. military preparing to stage a coup d'etat in Washington, kill President Barack Obama in a direct assault on the White House, and put the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in office. (Sorry, again my slip-up and full apologies! That was President Richard Nixon's adviser Henry Kissinger in contact with Chilean military officers who, on September 11, 1973--the first 9/11--staged an armed uprising during which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of that country, died and army commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet took power.) We didn't learn that, at the behest of Vladimir Putin, Russian secret service agents engaged in a series of plots to poison or in some other fashion assassinate Barack Obama during his presidency and, in the end, had at least a modest hand in encouraging those who did kill him after he left office. (Oh, wait, I was confused on that one, too. I was actually thinking about the plots, as the 1960s began, to do in Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.) Nor, for that matter, did we learn that the Russian military launched a regime-change-style invasion of this country to unseat an American president and get rid of our weapons of mass destruction and then occupied the country for years after installing Donald Trump in power. (Sorry one more time! What I actually had in mind before I got so muddled up was the decision of the top officials of President George W. Bush's administration, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to launch a "regime-change" invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on fraudulent claims that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and install a government of their choice in Baghdad.)
No, none of that happened here. Still, even though most Americans might find it hard to believe, we weren't exactly the first country to have an election meddled with by an intrusive foreign power with an agenda all its own! And really, my examples above just begin an endless list of events the Mueller report didn't mention, ones that most Americans no longer know anything about or we wouldn't have acted as if the Russian election intervention of 2016 stood essentially alone in history.
I don't, however, want that to sound like blame. After all, if you lived in the United States in these years and didn't already know the secret history of American intervention and regime change across the globe from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union, you could be forgiven for thinking that never had anyone done anything quite so dastardly as did the Putin regime in attempting to hack and alter the results of an American election. In the media, that Russian intervention has (with the rarest of exceptions) been covered as if it were an event unique in history. Admittedly, whatever the Russians did do in 2016 to lend a hand to Donald Trump, they didn't plan a coup d'etat; it wasn't an assassination attempt; and it wasn't, in the normal sense, what has come to be known as "regime change."
A World of Chaos Without End
Let's start with one thing that should have been (but wasn't) obvious since the first reports on Russian meddling in the election campaign of 2016 began to appear. Historically speaking, such a plan fits well with a classic Russian tradition. As scholar Dov Levin discovered in studying "partisan election interventions" from 1946 to 2000, the Russians -- the Soviet Union until 1991 -- engaged in a staggering 36 of them globally.
Whatever the Russians did do in 2016 to lend a hand to Donald Trump, they didn't plan a coup d'etat; it wasn't an assassination attempt; and it wasn't, in the normal sense, what has come to be known as "regime change."
If, however, you jumped to the conclusion that such an impressive cumulative figure gave the Russians the world's record for election meddling, think again. In fact, it left them languishing in a distant second place when it came to interfering in other countries' elections over more than four decades. The United States took the crown with, by Levin's count, a distinctly imperial 81 interventions! (USA! USA!)
Put another way, the two Cold War superpowers together meddled in approximately "one of every nine competitive elections" in that era in at least 60 countries covering every part of the planet but Oceania. Moreover, only seven of them were in the same election in the same country at the same time.
And elections are but one part of a story of meddling on a scale that has been historically remarkable. In her book Covert Regime Change, Lindsey O'Rourke notes that between 1947 and 1989, a span of nine Cold War-era American administrations, the least number of "U.S.-backed regime-change attempts" per president was three (Gerald Ford's administration), the most 30 (Dwight D. Eisenhower's). Harry Truman's administration came in second with 21, Lyndon Johnson's third with 19, Ronald Reagan's fourth with 16, John F. Kennedy's fifth with 15, and Richard Nixon's sixth with 10.
And keep in mind that, while such numbers remain unprecedented, despite a number of short-term successes from Iran to Guatemala, this was not generally a notable record of success in remaking the world in the image Washington desired. Many of those regime-change attempts, especially against countries in the Soviet bloc, failed dismally. Others created chaos or regimes that not only did their citizens little good but didn't end up doing much for Washington either. Still, that didn't stop one administration after another from trying, which is why the numbers remain mind-boggling.
And then the Soviet Union imploded and there was but a "sole" superpowerleft on Planet Earth. Its leaders had no doubt that its ultimate moment had come and it was to be no less than "the end of history"! The planet was obviously Washington's for the taking. No more need for subterfuge, subtle election meddling, secret support for dissidents, or even covert regime change, not when the only opposition to an American planet was a few weak "rogue states" (think: the "axis of evil," also known as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea), a desperately weakened and impoverished but still nuclear-armed Russia, and a modestly rising future power in Asia.
And then, of course, came 9/11, that staggering act of blowback--in part from one of the great "successes" of CIA covert action in the Cold War, the decisive defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan thanks to the funding and arming of a set of extremist Islamist militants, a war in which a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden gained a certain modest reputation. On that day in 2001, the last superpower, the one exceptional nation, became the planet's greatest victim and all hell was let loose (just as bin Laden hoped it would be).
In response, in a world without other superpowers, the country with, as one president proudly put it, "the finest fighting force that the world has ever known" no longer needed to meddle secretly (or at least in a fashion that allowed for "plausible deniability"). With the invasion of Afghanistan that October, open regime change became the order of the day. Iraq would come in 2003, Libya in 2011. The U.S. Air Force and the CIA's drones would bomb and missile at least seven countries across the Greater Middle East and North Africa repeatedly in the years to come, helping reduce great cities to rubble, uprooting and displacing massive numbers of people, creating failed states galore, and setting in motion forces that, from Pakistan to Syria, Yemen to Niger, would in turn unsettle a significant part of the planet.
And, of course, it would all prove to be a militarized failure of the first order. And yet, with a potential new conflict ramping up in Iran and the U.S. still fighting in Afghanistan almost 18 years later, America's wars show little sign of winding down. Only recently, for instance, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff assured a group of senators that the American military would "need to maintain a counterterrorism presence as long as an insurgency continues in Afghanistan," which should be considered the very definition of a forever war. Think of it as a world of chaos without end and now consider again that Russian meddling in an American election.
Exceptional Meddling
So the issue isn't faintly whether Russian electoral meddling was despicable or not. The issue is that it's been covered here, like so much else has in this century, as yet another case of American exceptionalism (but never narcissism).
By the way, whatever the Russians did in 2016 (or may do in the future to American or other elections) is deplorable and should be denounced, no matter how slapdash it might have been. After all, as Dov Levin discovered, it doesn't necessarily take much to affect the result of an election in another country. Here's his conclusion for election meddling in the Cold War era:
"I find that an electoral intervention in favor of one of the sides contesting [an] election has a statistically significant effect, increasing its vote share by about 3%. Such an effect can have major 'real life' implications. For example, such a swing in the vote share from the winner to the loser in the 14 U.S. presidential elections occurring since 1960 would have been sufficient to change the identity of the winner in seven of these elections."
As we all know, a 3% shift in the 2016 election in several states would have made a staggering difference. After all, as the Washington Post reported, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by "0.2, 0.7, and 0.8 percentage points, respectively--and by 10,704, 46,765, and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too."
So the issue isn't faintly whether Russian electoral meddling was despicable or not. The issue is that it's been covered here, like so much else has in this century, as yet another case of American exceptionalism (but never narcissism). As on 9/11--forget that first 9/11 in Chile--we eternally stand alone in our experiences because, by definition, we are the special ones, the ones who matter.
In the case of election meddling, however, this country just joined a moiling crowd of the interfered with--and largely by us. It was a classic case of getting a taste of one's own medicine and not liking it one bit. It should have taught us a lesson about our own global behavior since World War II. Instead, it's simply continued us on a path of exceptional meddling that will prove someday to have been one of the great follies in history.
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Fire the Nutcases Leading Us to War
Trump is playing with fire by making threats against Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and China. He appears well on the way to a major war by either plan or accident.
May 20, 2019
President Donald Trump claimed last week that he does not want war with Iran. If he really believes this, the president ought to look into what his subordinates are doing.
Among their bellicose actions are deployment of the 'Abraham Lincoln CVN-72' carrier task force to the coast of Iran, massing a strike package of B-52 heavy bombers in Qatar, just across the Gulf from Iran, positioning more US warplanes around Iran, readying a massive cyber attack against Iran, and trying to stop the export of Iranian oil, upon which its economy depends.
"Like a shark, the US warfare state has to keep moving. So it finds threats popping up all over."
Plus repeated attempts to overthrow the government in Tehran - something the US already did very skillfully in 1953.
If all this is not war, according to Trump, then what is? It's war by another name. Just what the US did to Cuba, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, Nicaragua, Syria, and, since 1979, Iran. Like a shark, the US warfare state has to keep moving. So it finds threats popping up all over.
The latest alleged grave 'threat' to America's security was an ancient wooden dhow. Spotted by US satellites, this decrepit old sail-powered tub was claimed by Washington war promoters, led by the enrage John Bolton, to be carrying Iranian missiles. What unbelievable rubbish.
Many moons ago, I used to oversee dhows based in Dubai smuggling expensive Western luxury goods and small gold 'ten tola' bars into India and Iran. They would dodge Indian and Pakistani patrol boats; if caught, 'baksheesh' (bribes) were paid. Some of the smuggled goods even found their way into the Soviet Union, via caravans through Afghanistan.
All this was worthy of Sinbad the Sailor and the Arabian Nights. Great fun and profitable, but hardly of any strategic consequence. But now, Washington's war-mongers claim the dhows will threaten 'US interests' in the Gulf region. 'US interests' are, of course, whatever and wherever Washington says they are.
This is yet another charade that will be amplified by the tame US media, and gobbled up by the credulous public unsure if the Gulf is off Texas or Iran. It joins the huge lies about World War I - 'Belgian babies spitted to German bayonets' - Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, anthrax attacks, and Saddam's 'drones of death.' Some cynics would add 9/11 and Osama bin Laden to the cast of manufactured villains.
We now know that all the reasons cited for attacking Iraq in 2003 where false. Pure lies. War propaganda. President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair led us into a war by a campaign of lies that fed off one another. Media that supported the war with false news was equally guilty.
Yet we still see, for example, the Murdoch-owned media, New York Times and Washington shamelessly promoting more war in the Mideast. US media has made little progress since the yellow journalism era of William Randolph Hearst. As the great Mark Twain said, 'if you don't read the daily newspapers you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.'
Which leads us to ask the question: given all these lies, is it not time for us to begin questioning the official narrative about World War II?
Trump is playing with fire by making threats against Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and China. He appears well on the way to a major war by either plan or accident. He is provoking and trifling with two major, nuclear-armed world military powers, Russia and China. Instead of capable diplomats, Trump keeps consorting with men of low character and even lower knowledge. It's like the hostess who will never invite to her party another woman who is younger and more attractive.
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WaPo Must Acknowledge CIA Role in Pakistan Polio Crisis
It’s common moral sense that to prevent future problems, one must have an accurate and true accounting of how these problems were created
May 15, 2019
If the last three years have taught us anything, it's that it's much easier to blame "fake news" than to look in the mirror and see how one's own country, and their powerful institutions, may bear responsibility for a social ill. This jingoistic narcissism is on full display in a Washington Post editorial (5/10/19) that blamed a recent upsurge in polio in Pakistan on "guns, fear and fake news"--while ignoring the CIA's central role in the crisis entirely.
The editorial, "The World Is Close to Conquering Polio. Humans Are Holding Us Back," started off naming the Official Oriental bad guys:
The world's long and ambitious quest to conquer polio has come tantalizingly close to success, only to slip away because of unforgivable behavior by thugs and exponents of ignorance.
The "thugs" named by the Post are "hard-line Islamist forces," fueled by nebulous "social media." While no doubt Islamist forces and their ability to communicate amongst themselves contribute to the problem, the other party primarily responsible for the recent surge in anti-vax sentiment in Pakistan--the US Central Intelligence Agency--is notably unmentioned.
Reading the scolding editorial, one would never imagine that anti-polio efforts in Pakistan (as well as Afghanistan), according to numerous reports--including the New York Times (4/29/19) last month--have been severely undermined by the 2011 revelation (Guardian, 7/11/11) of a secret ruse cooked up by the CIA to use a hepatitis B vaccine drive to gather DNA in an effort to track the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden (efforts, it's worth nothing, that didn't actually help in finding bin Laden).
Not only did the vaccine drive have an ulterior motive, it wasn't even a real vaccine drive. While the hepatitis vaccine doses themselves were real, the undercover CIA operators administering them did not return a month after the first dose to give the necessary second inoculation, rendering the whole process inert--meaning that the rural Pakistanis who were promised immunization were lied to, and left vulnerable to a life-threatening disease.
After the revelation, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) harshly criticized the CIA ruse, with MSF's international president Unni Karunakara telling the Guardian (7/14/11):
The risk is that vulnerable communities--anywhere--needing access to essential health services will understandably question the true motivation of medical workers and humanitarian aid....The potential consequence is that even basic healthcare, including vaccination, does not reach those who need it most.
Indeed, this is exactly what has happened. As the New York Times (4/29/19) reported last month:
The fact that the CIA used a vaccination team to track down Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani town in 2011 has helped fuel the resistance to vaccination campaigns in the country.
An earlier Washington Post report (3/4/19) from March about the rise of anti-vax sentiment in Pakistan, by Pamela Constable and Haq Nawaz Khan, also conspicuously failed to mention the CIA's role in creating the crisis. Instead, the 1,150-word dispatch linked to an article that did mention it, but the hyperlinked text dismissed it as "tales of foreign plots," without noting that it was a very real foreign plot that the Pentagon itself has admitted to.
It's hard to comprehend the cognitive dissonance required to ignore the CIA using medical professionals as spies, thereby undoing decades of trust-building by international aid organizations in Pakistan, only to turn around and smugly finger-wag those subjected to the cynical ruse for being ignorant.
It's the same arrogance that allowed Hollywood to give the 2013 Best Picture award to a film (very loosely based on a true story) about the CIA using fake filmmakers as spies in Iran, only to turn around in 2014 and produce a docudrama demonizing Iran for imprisoning an Iranian Canadian filmmaker who was accused of doubling as a spy. Is it not obvious that operations like the one celebrated in the former film provide rationalization for the all-too-real arrest dramatized in the latter one? Why don't we ever talk about global trust-shattering the CIA engages in that gives this fake news rocket fuel, rather than act as if paranoia overseas emerges out of nowhere, or due to some innate native ignorance?
It's common moral sense that to prevent future problems, one must have an accurate and true accounting of how these problems were created. The Washington Post would rather engage in power-flattering, vaguely Orientalist "oh dearism" than take on the CIA--a massive center of power that they could actually exert some influence over.
Could Congress pass a law banning spies from posing as medical professionals? Could they bar the use of journalistic cover as well (a tactic the Agency still reserves the right to use)? Could we address what the US and its intelligence agencies could do to prevent the sort of cynicism and fear that resulted from their 2010 DNA-gathering scheme? No, it's far easier for the Post--itself long an ideological partner of the CIA--to just blame "fake news" and avoid any type of introspection at all.
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