Tag: War on Terror

Another Take on Memorial Day

The Daily Escape:

Dunn’s River Falls, near Ocho Rios, Jamaica – 2019 photo by Ashleigh Reutzel

There were many excellent Memorial Day columns posted over the weekend, and Wrongo wants to draw your attention to Andrew Bacevich, who wrote about visiting Marseilles, Illinois, which curiously, has our only monument honoring those who died in our wars in the Middle East: (emphasis by Wrongo)

Marseilles retains one modest claim to fame. It’s the site of the Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial, dedicated in June 2004….The memorial, created and supported by a conglomeration of civic-minded Illinois bikers, many of them Vietnam veterans, is the only one in the nation that commemorates those who have died during the course of the various campaigns…that have involved U.S. forces in various quarters of the Greater Middle East over the past several decades.

That tells you quite a bit about how Americans value the American sacrifice in these wars. More from Bacevich: (more emphasis by Wrongo)

Any American wanting to pay personal tribute to those who fought and died for our country in World War II or Korea or Vietnam knows where to go — to the Mall in Washington D.C….Nowhere else in this vast nation of ours has anyone invested in…the effort to remember more than a generation’s worth of less-than-triumphant American war making. Marseilles has a lock on the franchise.

We’ve been at war in the Middle East since Desert Storm. It’s hard to believe that a “Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial” isn’t on the National Mall. But, the Vietnam vets had to fight to have their monument built, over resistance from Washington.

Bacevich is originally from a nearby Illinois town, and sadly, his son is among the Middle East dead listed on the monument: (emphasis by Wrongo)

…I find myself uneasy with any reference to American soldiers having died for freedom in the Greater Middle East. Our pronounced penchant for using that term in connection with virtually any American military action strikes me as a dodge. It serves as an excuse for not thinking too deeply about the commitments, policies, and decisions that led to all those names being etched in stone, with more to come next month and probably for many years thereafter.

He closes with this:

Just as there are all-but-mandatory venues in Iowa and New Hampshire where candidates are expected to appear, why not make Marseilles, Illinois, one as well. Let all of the candidates competing to oust Donald Trump from the White House…schedule at least one campaign stop at the Middle East Conflicts Wall, press entourage suitably in tow.

One of the catch phrases of our cheap American patriotism is: “Thank you for your service,” which many (well-meaning) people say when they meet an active duty or veteran military person. As a former Army officer, Wrongo has always tempered his appreciation on hearing that with the idea that the unspoken part of that phrase is: “better you than me.”

We are reverent, but disengaged from our military. We love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them, is our norm. That wasn’t always the case. WWII and Korea were in the forefront of people’s minds while the fighting was underway. Americans were drafted into the military as late as Vietnam, and Nixon learned how difficult it was to keep Vietnam off the minds of the people.

Since we ended the draft in 1973, America hasn’t won a war. Now, less than one percent of the nation is in uniform. What is more alarming, military service has increasingly become a family affair. Coupled with troop-basing in the West and Southeast, we are quickly evolving into a Praetorian military culture, precisely as American culture fragments. Hero worship of our military has created a separate caste of military professionals. Unchecked, this will ultimately fracture our society.

Even well-meaning people don’t want to know what our policies have created, both at home and abroad. The cost of our wars is ruinous, partly because the human dimension is nearly absent from the discussion.

War is bankrupting us during a time of relative peace. We have no discernible threat comparable to our certain costs. And our media doesn’t always help us see the threats clearly.

These wars are all post-Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) wars. There have been no victory parades since the first Gulf War.

And all of these wars contribute to our fractured politics. We continue to use debt to cover the costs of our ever-expanding military, at the sacrifice of domestic needs like infrastructure, education and healthcare. We gotta wake up.

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What, Me Worry?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” –HL Mencken

As we head towards the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, it is interesting to look at a recent survey by Ipsos Public Affairs, Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens? that was cited in an article by the World Economic Forum. The global conclusion was that people think things are getting worse:

Between October and November 2016, the percentage of people who believe things are on the right track in their country dropped by 2 percentage points to 37% globally.

The survey is conducted online monthly in 25 countries by Ipsos. The countries are Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the US. Ipsos samples 18,110 adults aged 18-64 in Canada, Israel and the US, and aged 16-64 in all other countries. They were interviewed between October 21st and November 4th 2016, with about 1000 people participating in the US and other Western countries.  The survey has an estimated margin of error of +/-3.1 percentage points.

Here is a chart giving a snapshot of right track/wrong track just prior to the US presidential election:

This shows the US in the middle of the pack, with 65% of those surveyed saying we are on the wrong track. That is consistent with other surveys of American sentiment. In China, 90% of people expressed confidence in their country’s direction, followed by Saudi Arabia (80%), India (76%) and Russia (58%).

  • Among Western nations, Canadians are the only people with a predominantly positive outlook (54%).
  • The US showed a small month-on-month drop in “right track” from 37% to 35%.
  • France and Mexico bring up the rear as their citizens have the least confidence in their country’s direction: 88% and 96% of the populace respectively believe that their country is on the wrong track. Only 4% of Mexicans think their country is on the right track!

Ipsos also surveyed the issues that worry citizens in each country the most. They asked the question: Which three of the following topics do you find the most worrying in your country? In the US, the top three issues were:

  • Terrorism: 33%
  • Healthcare: 32%
  • Financial/Political Corruption: 29%

It is not clear that terrorism is profoundly worrying to Americans, since 67% of those surveyed chose something else to worry about. Remember that the rankings are based on how frequently the item is mentioned as the first in a list of three issues. Here is an Ipsos chart that compares the number one issue people worry about in each country:

Only Turkey, Israel and the US ranked terrorism first. Americans fear terrorism slightly more than uncertainty with their healthcare (32%). And they worry about corruption slightly more (29%-28%) than they worry about crime and violence. Where are poverty and social equality? Seventh, with 19%. What about education? Ninth, with 15%. Maintaining social programs are 14th tied with inflation at 7%.

Fear is emotional, it is not driven by logic about actual levels of risk. Assessment of risk is (mostly) a logical process, with a tiny element of emotion. Acts of terror are frightening, but the likelihood of one happening to you is infinitesimally small in the US. It is therefore, an irrational fear.

OTOH, do people worry about being mugged when walking through a sketchy part of the city? Most do. How many actually get mugged? Not many. But that fear has a basis in fact.

And terrorism isn’t about killing as many people as it can. It is about gaining a political victory through terror. Think about the 9/11 attack in NYC. Millions watched the Towers fall. Those in NYC saw the smoke for weeks. That is the end point of terror, and probably explains why so many rank it as their top worry.

In the survey, six countries worried more about terrorism than the US. They are: Turkey (66%), Israel (51%), France (44%), India (43%), Saudi Arabia (40%) and Germany (34%).  Those countries all have more real-world reasons to worry about terrorism than do Americans.

However, our neo-con politicians in collusion with a number of think tanks, and the military-industrial complex, have made a significant portion of Americans believe it is a rational fear. They do this for financial gain and control.

Control keeps the grift going.

And, like Israel, the more Muslims we kill, the more terrorists we create. Where is the virtue in this for anyone except the Defense Department, Lockheed, Rockwell, Northrup, Raytheon, Honeywell and Wall Street?

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Welcome to the TerrorDome

Last Thursday night it was in Nice, France. Next, will be another city. Maybe on another continent. In the last month, dozens of terror attacks have killed hundreds of people across the world. Every public event is a potential target for these killers, who not only welcome death, but confuse our leaders who have tried to stop them.

From Rami G. Khouri at Agence Global:

Every terror attack generates anger, shock, and powerful emotional and political commitments of our indomitable will not to be terrorized, to stand firm and strong, to affirm liberty, free speech, and pluralism. We are all, sincerely, Boston, Paris, London, Nice, Orlando, Dacca, New York, Baghdad, and a hundred other cities around the world, and a hundred more that will be attacked in due course. We will stand with them all in a steel chain of humanity against barbarism.

But, then what? What happens if after a dozen more attacks, the power of their barbarism outpaces the power of our solidarity? Do we willingly give up all of our rights to be kept safe by an authoritarian leader?

We need to debate what we can really do to fight terror, and win.

The policy responses of Western governments and the emotional responses of entire societies suggest we have no idea how to respond to defeat this monster. More from Khouri: (editing by the Wrongologist)

We see no serious questioning of whether… [our] primary focus on militarism reduces or increases the terror threat. We see no credible willingness among most governments, and most of their associated media and intellectual spheres, to transcend Islam as the main analytical…[frame in which to view] the world of terror.

Was the truck driver behind the attack in Nice an Islamic terrorist? Was he a lone wolf with psychological issues? We assume he is a terrorist because of his Arab name. Many terrorists conform to the Islamic narrative – think about the Orlando shooter, or the Muslim couple in San Bernardino. This assumption also shapes attitudes and policy responses of governments when they respond to mass killings. Our first thought is always Islamic terrorism, as in the initial response to the Dallas shooter when we heard his middle initial was “X”.

Our two flawed presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are evenly matched on protecting us: Clinton wants to push out the Assad government, in part by using ISIS mercenaries as proxies, plus US drones and bombing. Meanwhile, The Donald wants to fight an all-out war on ISIS and Islamic ‘terrorism’ in whatever shape. GW Bush anyone?

The US is now facing the consequences of our simplistic knowledge of the Middle East. We are stuck in the 1950s, a time when we could impose regime change in disobedient countries. Today, we drone them, and they kill a few of our citizens every few months. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

When will we ask the presidential candidates how long we have to put up with this steady stream of death and pain? What do they propose to do to tackle the terror problem at its roots? Anger, square-jawed determination, serial incompetence, and heavy-handed, counter-productive militarized policies are signs of cumulative failure.

Can we ask for a more serious response after Nice? Or, do we wait for a few more attacks, and ask then?

  • The Rio Olympics are starting in less than three weeks; the long list of concerns surrounding the games continues to grow.
  • The US military is eyeing a potential increase in troop engagement in Yemen to confront threats by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Why?

Our domestic terror victims are collateral damage of the decisions by the Powers That Be to support using extremists as a weapon. What we see today is not unforeseen blowback, it was knowable.

The entire world needs a wake-up. How should we answer the threat of the TerrorDome?

Here is Steel Pulse to get us going with “Find it Quick” from their 1982 album, “True Democracy”. You weren’t paying attention, but Mr. Obama said something in Dallas to the effect of “those in authority reject the cries of want” which comes from “Find it Quick“:

Sample Lyrics:

We got to find this love oh
Oh help us Jah above yeh come on
We got to find this love
Those in authority reject the cries of want
Those in power corrupt and weak in heart
This world don’t you know that
Hatred has grown
Love fly gone out through the window
We’ve got to find it we got to find it
Love fly gone out through the window
We’ve got to find it

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Zogby: ISIS is The Problem and Nobody in the Middle East Wants America to Solve It

A new survey of eight Middle East countries finds consensus on two issues — that Daesh (ISIS) is the major threat, and that the US’ role in countering it is “extremely negative” in the region. The survey was conducted by Zogby Research Services, (Zogby). They conducted face-to-face surveys with 7,400 adults in six Arab states, plus Turkey and Iran, in September. (This was prior to the terror attacks in France and San Bernardino.) Interestingly, the poll found considerable agreement about the causes for Islamic extremism, with majorities blaming:

Corrupt, repressive and unrepresentative governments [and] religious figures and groups promoting extremist ideas and/or incorrect religious interpretations.

Some key findings:

Groups promoting extremism: Respondents in all eight countries were asked about four groups: Daesh (ISIS), the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and militias and groups supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They were asked to rate how serious a problem each of these groups is on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “a serious problem” and 5 is “no problem at all.” The table below shows the percentages of respondents who selected 1 or 2 (“problem”) and 4 or 5 (“not a problem”) for each group, as well as a ranking of how problematic the four groups are from the perspective of respondents in each of the eight countries.

Zogby Extermeism by group-page-0How best to defeat extremism? Respondents in every country said:

Changing the political and social realities that cause young people to be attracted to extremist ideas [followed by] countering the messages and ideas of extremist groups.

Countries combating extremism: When asked which countries were effective at combating sectarian violence, the US was ranked worst by all eight countries while Iran was ranked second-worst, with six countries rating them poorly:

Zogby Role of Countries in combating extremeism-page-0• Surprisingly to people in the US, Turkey gets the most consistently positive reviews for its role in combating extremist sectarian violence, including majorities in Jordan (74%), UAE (63%), Saudi Arabia (59%), and Egypt (53%).
• Saudi Arabia and the UAE are viewed positively by wide margins in some countries. Saudi Arabia’s top ratings come from Egypt (92%), UAE (91%), and Turkey (84%), and a majority in Jordan (68%). The UAE’s top ratings come from Egypt (86%), Saudi Arabia (79%), and Jordan (60%), while 39% of Lebanese and fewer than one-quarter of respondents in Iraq (25%), Turkey (16%), and Iran (15%) see the UAE as playing a positive role in combating extremist sectarian violence.
• In Jordan, 31% of respondents view the US’ role as positive.
• With respect to Iran, Lebanese opinion is evenly split between positive and negative. In Iraq, 36% view Iran’s role as positive, while less than one-quarter of respondents in the other countries surveyed agreed.

Perhaps these results support what most people in the US think:

• ISIS is a big problem and,
• Nobody wants us to solve it.

But, we keep trying to solve it, so the real question for Americans is: “What is in it for us to fight ISIS?”

If you watched the Republican debate in Las Vegas, you saw nine GOP candidates, all of whom avoided military service, bluster about how tough they’ll be on ISIS, using the kids of other Americans as fodder.

What is amazing is, all of these open-carry advocates talk about provoking, disrespecting and punching a guy (Putin) who openly carries an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

And we would provoke him why? Because ISIS is a huge threat to us? Or, because Putin wants to keep Syria’s Assad in power? Or, because it polls well with the fringe of very conservative Republicans who know nothing about military tactics?

Or, is it because the countries in the region really, really want us there?

Zogby (and the people they polled) say, “Not so much.”

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Reframing Jeb’s “He Kept Us Safe” Framing

This week, Jeb Bush said that his brother George W. had “kept us safe” when he was president. And given opportunities to walk that back, he doubled-down on the message. Donald Trump didn’t let him get away with that. Paul Campos at Salon:

For years, W. got a pass from his party. Questioning him meant questioning our foreign policy. Those days are over.

Campos asks us to imagine that the Republican presidential primary race is a Thanksgiving dinner, and that Donald Trump is the crazy old uncle who says outrageous things that embarrass everyone at the table. Sometimes those things are embarrassing because they are not true.

But occasionally, Uncle says something that’s embarrassing, precisely because it’s true.

The Donald’s tweaking of Jeb Bush’s W. kept us safe claim falls into the latter category. Trump’s mockery is justified. On its face, Jeb’s claim about W. is analogous to Exxon boasting about its record of keeping the Alaskan coastline “mostly free” from oil spills.

The meme of “he kept us safe” uses the technique that sociologists call “framing.” Wikipedia calls framing a process of selective influence over the individual’s perception of the meanings attributed to words, phrases or memories.

The cultural frame that the Republican Party has so successfully managed to build up since the days of Ronald Reagan says that Democrats are weak-kneed appeasers and pacifists, while the GOP is the party of Big, Bad, War Daddy figures, who deal with foreign threats with realism and ruthlessness.

You might think it would be impossible to fold the 9/11 terrorist attacks to this frame, but you would be wrong. Such is the power of this pre-ordained narrative that, when America suffered a terrorist attack under a Republican president, this inconvenient fact was magically disappeared down a collective memory hole for huge numbers of Americans.

Jeb’s defense of his brother repeats years of GOP messaging. The idea that George W. Bush kept the nation safe from terrorism is something that Republicans repeated constantly when he was in office, and since. The core of the argument was that W. shouldn’t be held responsible for the terrorist attack, even though his administration was warned about it in advance, because he only had nine months to do something about it, and al Qaeda was already around at the time he took office, (i.e. al Qaeda should have been taken care of by Clinton).

The power of this frame is evident if we use a thought experiment: Imagine that the 9/11 attacks happened during Obama’s first term. If 3,000 Americans had been murdered on US soil by foreign terrorists nine months into the Obama administration, no one would claim that Mr. Obama had “kept us safe,” because the claim wouldn’t be supported by any equally powerful Democratic cultural framing. Instead, the political fallout would have been Benghazi x 750!

Or, you could imagine Mr. Obama sending US troops into a civil war in Lebanon, and 241 of them being killed in a terrorist bombing ordered by Iran. And, imagine if a few years later, that it was senior members of Obama’s administration, not that of Ronald Regan, who were discovered sending Iran weapons in exchange for hostages. Democrats would still be paying for that at the polls.

Framing explains why Republicans give Jeb’s older brother a mulligan on terrorism, to the point where it was their family member Crazy Uncle Donald who had to state the obvious.

It’s understandable that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, almost no one wanted to consider assigning responsibility for the attack. Fourteen years later, we no longer have an excuse not to, and that applies especially to today’s GOP presidential candidates, including Jeb Bush.

Now, everyone is ducking and covering. To assign some responsibility to the Bush administration for letting 9/11 happen could lead to uncomfortable questions of what we knew, when we knew it, and what we did with that knowledge.

Undressing the 50 year Big, Bad, War Daddy perception that supports/excuses W.’s Iraq adventure could represent an existential threat to the GOP in 2016, particularly if the attack comes from the Right instead of the Left.

That is why it’s a strategic imperative for them to pursue Benghazi-gate to the end, even if it’s off a cliff.

If the War Daddy framing is lost, they could be left touting Reagan’s winning in Grenada.

And how would Republicans spin THAT as this country’s finest hour?

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Did 9/11 Change Everything?

“He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.” –Hubert Selby Jr.

The Wrongologist has changed the blog’s “Quotes We Like” sidebar to add the quote above.  The quote is from Selby’s Requiem for a Dream. He also wrote Last Exit To Brooklyn. These are two gritty American novels of their time and place. Exit was published in 1964 and presents a view of 1950’s Brooklyn NY. Requiem was published in 1978. Both were made into movies. Selby died in 2004.

In a Salon article in 2000, Selby is quoted about Requiem:

The dream I’m referring to in the book, of course, is the great American dream: prosperity, property, prestige, etc. And the fact that it’ll kill you dead. Striving for it is a disaster. Attaining it is a killer. It takes many forms, and the results are not happy. It’s not a feel-good thing

Selby continues:

‘Requiem’ is about the cancer of that dream…Of course, there are a lot of people who are successful who work very hard. They’re not all George W. Bush. But the point is they’re misguided. That’s not what life is about. We believe, probably more than anywhere, that life is getting all this material stuff. It’s a case of misguided ambition and desire

We can take this further. Today, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that it can’t cope, that there are things happening that are beyond our control or comprehension:
• We can no longer solve our domestic problems
• We are powerless to deal with the Malaysian airline disaster in Ukraine
• We can’t resolve the tri-partite struggle in Iraq
• We can no longer restrain Israel in its non-proportional response to Hamas
• We are no longer on the same side as our long-term Middle East allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
• We can’t figure out a non-military response for China’s initiatives throughout Asia

In fact, we no longer have a non-military response to any foreign problem. The power strategies that we employed throughout the 1950’s, continuing down to the end of the Soviet Union no longer work. Back then, we played chess, moving pieces across the board. We used whichever proxies or allies were at hand, we overthrew elected governments, thereby violating our own ideology. We supported and installed dictatorial governments. We promised freedom and prosperity, while helping to deliver hegemony, based on our military intervention, or the threat of it.

Today, we have no answers, only posturing from all of our leaders. We have become the kind of people who criticize, not the kind of people who can solve problems.

We are no longer king-makers in the third world, the neo-conservative approach of use of military power cannot stand in the face of asymmetric warfare and the devastating superiority of IEDs to up-armored military vehicles.

From Ian Welsh:

Deny the fruits of western ideology to those who reach for them, and of course they will turn against you. Pervert them even within your own countries by undermining your own democratic principles and by concentrating wealth and income in the hands of a few, while impoverishing the many; make it clear that modern neo-liberal capitalism doesn’t spread prosperity to even the core nations, and you have set up one of the preconditions of not just hegemonic collapse, but of internal collapse of a civilization

And here is Welsh’s money quote:

People who do not believe in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, hardly fight for it at all

That is what we see in Iraq. More importantly, that is what we see in America. Today, no one believes in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, be they job-hunting Millennials, unreconstructed 1960’s liberals, or today’s money-grubbing Republican and Democrat politicians.

When you no longer know how to solve problems, you turn to what is easy. You buy the next shiny object, you live through the lives of the rich and famous. Snark and incivility replace facts and discussion.

There was a display in the 9/11 Museum that showed a piece of debris about 3’ high by 6’ wide and 12’ long. It was rusty and seemed to be sedimentary in nature, visibly comprised of metal, concrete, and wires. It is actually part of 5 floors of the Trade Center, compressed by weight and softened by intense heat. Nothing of the desks, computers, phones and people are distinguishable in this artifact. The Museum calls it a “composite”. It brings home the destructive power of the falling towers on 9/11:

WTC Collapsed floor

Photo is from before the “composite” went on display

After the Towers’ fall, the news media said that 9/11 changed everything, and we believed it. But changes to our view of the world, and its view of us, had started long before that. We stopped learning about geopolitics in the 1960’s, substituting false analogies and military aid to local strongmen for true knowledge of how to change the world.

Since then, we have been compressed by the heat and weight of events we cannot understand. If you think about it, our decline after 9/11 came because we panicked, spent all of our money on pointless wars, and gave up our core values in the name of an illusion of safety, and pure vengeance.

So, yes, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that there are things happening that are beyond its control or comprehension.

But these things are knowable, and fixable. Hopefully, by Americans.

 

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