Life used to be simple. At least that is the nostalgic nonsense that fills the aging brain pans of those of us over the age of 55. Back in the Good Old days we had the clear enemy of international communism to battle. We used that bullshit bugaboo to justify wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Central America, South America and Afghanistan. As long as we had the implacable foe of international communism poised to take over the world, intent on taking away our choices of ice cream and certain to demand that we worship the memory of Vladimir Lenin, we could justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars on building a massive military and intelligence bureaucracy and equipping them with expensive machines of death and communication.
When the Soviet Union crumbled under the weight of its slavish devotion to Marxian utopian precepts we thought we witnessed the dawn of a new era. And we did. The only problem -- we could not sustain our economy without coming up with a new enemy that would justify the continued spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on technologically sophisticated and grotesquely expense crap that, in the event of a real conventional war, would be impossible to replace in a timely manner and would bankrupt our nation.
We, the United States, drifted from 1992 until 11 September 2001 trying to identify the new enemy. During that 8 year hiatus U.S. defense spending ticked down, both as an absolute number and as a percentage of GDP. There were some isolated international terrorist attacks but nothing so extraordinary to rally the country. Instead, there were weak efforts to build worry about China and to promote missile defense as the latest, greatest technology needed to keep America safe.
The coordinated attacks on 9-11 in 2001 changed all of that and the spending binge was on. Very few challenged the conventional wisdom that more military spending would be an effective remedy for battling a motley collection of radical Islamists who did not have armor, artillery, armies, navies, ballistic missiles nor an air force. That uncomfortable fact did not slow us for a minute in throwing new billions at the military, the defense bureaucracy and the intelligence agencies.
And what did that spending spree earn us? Nothing. Instead of quelling terrorism, terrorism spread. Inspired in large measure by George W. Bush's ill-considered and feckless invasion of Iraq. We disarmed the minority Sunni Baathists, imprisoned and shamed thousands and then were surprised to learn that pissed off people have a tendency to fight back.
But that was not enough for us. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton thought it a dandy idea to back the European play (a thinly veiled effort to gain control of Libyan oil) to oust Libya's quirky, crazy despot, Muammar Qaddafi. That turned out swell. Libya became a new site for civil war as tribes and religious minorities battled each other for control of Libya's oil and natural gas wealth. The United States, with the enthusiastic backing of the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, decided to light a fire in Syria and rid the world of a secular strong man in favor of an unwieldy collection of Sunni Islamic radicals. All of this in the name of trying to contain Iran whose power and influence in the region had grown because we, the United States, got rid of Tehran's nemesis, Saddam Hussein, and replaced him with semi-pliant Shia Iraqis who happened to have close ties with the mullahs and the IRGC in Iran.
Rather than accept blame for our own stupidity, we decided it better to finger Syria's Assad for that faux pas. We helped start and then sustain the secular war that began shredding Syria in 2010.
Before all of this got started, Bill Clinton reneged on promises to Russia to not expand NATO to Russia's western frontier. George W. Bush and Barack Obama continued that policy and spent more money on building up NATO and threatening Russia. Of course, when Russia pushed back against the U.S betrayal on NATO and refused to support U.S. military adventures in the Middle East, the American foreign and national security policy elite began beating the drum portraying Russia as a grave and growing threat.
And you know what the prescription for that is? More cow bell. I mean, more defense spending. Few of the so-called experts want to take the time to point out that Moscow spends 1/10th of what Washington does in building up military capabilities. Virtually no one in America is willing to acknowledge our responsibility for stirring up unrest in Ukraine or carrying out aggressive military exercises on the land and sea borders of Russia. And, instead of publicly welcoming Russia coming to the aid of Syria in fighting off the very kind of radical Islamists who attacked us on 9-11, we condemned them and then doubled down by arming those Islamic extremists.
Now we have Donald Trump and he is genuinely flummoxed. He does not know whether to wipe his nose or scratch his ass. His early attempts to talk sense about Russia earned him a public flogging by the Washington foreign policy establishment who not only accused him of surrendering to communism (ignoring the fact the communists in Russia were vanquished in 1991) but mounted a coordinated disinformation operation that insisted that Russia intervened in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump and that Trump and his team colluded with them in this effort. Not one shred of proof to support this nonsensical claim but the most of the elite and the punditry embraced it as truth and happily spread the lie over TV, the blogs and the archaic pages of major newspapers.
Trump continues to say in one breath that he is not interested in embroiling the United States in another foreign war and then, with a bellicosity that is borderline cartoonish, threatens North Korea and Iran with doom and destruction. As I noted in my previous piece on Iran, this kind of sword rattling makes no sense with respect to Iran. We are the ones who have been funding terrorists and destabilizing the Middle East, not the Iranians.
I am amused by Trump trying to take credit for the collapse of ISIS. It is cute. But the U.S. contribution to this effort pales in comparison to the resources and forces put to the effort by Russia. It is Russia, not Iran, that has led the way in bolstering Syria's ability to fighting the foreign-backed Islamists who were intent on unseating Assad.
Are we now ready to do the right thing in Syria and Iraq? I doubt it. The Neo-Con crowd have done a good job of persuading a lot of Americans that the Kurds are our natural allies. Now that the Iraqi Government, which we also claim to back, is pushing to re-take control of Kurdish controlled parts of Iraq, the chorus is singing with gusto the tune that we must come to their rescue. That means military intervention on our part. While Trump has pooh-poohed that suggestion so far, the chorus is adding a new phrase--i.e., "The Iranian backed regime in Iraq."
Yes sir. We have to fight those dastardly Iranians who are trying to crush the democratic aspirations of the Kurds. If that argument starts to resonate with Trump then his current refusal to get involved is likely to be reversed. Interesting times folks. Very interesting times.
On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a
decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and
said,
Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave… This chamber reeks of blood… It does not take any courage at all for a congressman or a senator or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.
More than six years had passed since Congress all but
rubber-stamped President Lyndon Johnson’s notoriously vague Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which provided what little legal framework there was for U.S. military escalation in Vietnam. Doubts
remained as to the veracity of the supposed North Vietnamese naval attacks on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf that had officially triggered the resolution, or whether the Navy even had cause to venture so close to a sovereign nation’s coastline. No matter. Congress gave the president what he wanted: essentially a blank check to bomb, batter, and occupy South Vietnam. From there it was but a few short steps to nine more years of war,
illegalsecret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, ground invasions of both those countries, and eventually 58,000 American and upwards of three million Vietnamese
deaths.
Leaving aside the rest of this country’s sad chapter in Indochina, let’s just focus for a moment on the role of Congress in that era’s war making. In retrospect, Vietnam emerges as just one more chapter in 70 years of ineptitude and apathy on the part of the Senate and House of Representatives when it comes to their constitutionally granted war powers. Time and again in those years, the legislative branch shirked its historic — and legal —
responsibility under the Constitution to declare (or refuse to declare) war.
And yet, never in those seven decades has the duty of Congress to assert itself in matters of war and peace been quite so vital as it is today, with American troops engaged — and still
dying, even if now in small numbers — in one
undeclared war after another in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and now Niger… and who even knows where else.
Fast forward 53 years from the Tonkin Gulf crisis to Senator Rand Paul’s desperate
attempt this September to force something as simple as a congressional discussion of the legal basis for America’s forever wars, which garnered just 36 votes. It was scuttled by a bipartisan coalition of war hawks. And who even noticed — other than obsessive viewers of C-SPAN who were treated to Paul’s four-hour-long cri de coeur denouncing Congress’s agreement to “unlimited war, anywhere, anytime, anyplace upon the globe”?
The Kentucky senator sought something that should have seemed modest indeed: to end the reliance of one administration after another on the long-outdated
post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) for all of America’s multifaceted and widespread conflicts. He wanted to compel Congress to debate and legally sanction (or not) any future military operations anywhere on Earth. While that may sound reasonable enough, more than 60 senators, Democratic and Republican alike, stymied the effort. In the process, they sanctioned (yet again) their abdication of any role in America’s perpetual state of war — other than, of course, funding it munificently.
In June 1970, with 50,000 U.S. troops already dead in Southeast Asia, Congress finally worked up the nerve to
repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a bipartisan effort spearheaded by Senator Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican. As it happens, there are no Bob Doles in today’s Senate. As a result, you hardly have to be a cynic or a Punxsutawney
groundhog to predict six more weeks of winter — that is, endless war.
It’s a remarkably old story actually. Ever since V-J Day in August 1945, Congress has repeatedly ducked its
explicitconstitutional duties when it comes to war, handing over the keys to the eternal use of the U.S. military to an
increasingly imperial presidency. An often deadlocked, ever less
popular Congress has cowered in the shadows for decades as Americans died in undeclared wars. Judging by the
lack of public outrage, perhaps this is how the citizenry, too, prefers it. After all, they themselves are
unlikely to serve. There’s no draft or need to sacrifice anything in or for America’s wars. The public’s only task is to stand for increasingly
militarized pregame sports rituals and to “
thank” any soldier they run into.
Nonetheless, with the quixotic thought that this is not the way things have to be, here’s a brief recounting of Congress’s 70-year romance with cowardice.
...
... Then, in 1973, over President Richard Nixon’s veto, it even passed the War Powers Act. In the future, that bill
stated, only a congressional declaration of war, a national defense emergency, or “statutory authorization” by Congress could legally sanction the deployment of the armed forces to any conflict. Without such sanction, section
4(a)(1) of the bill stipulated that presidential military deployments would be subject to a 60-day limit. That, it was then believed, would forever check the war-making powers of the imperial presidency, which in turn would
prevent “future Vietnams.”
In reality, the War Powers Act proved to be largely toothless legislation. It was never truly accepted by the presidents who followed Nixon, nor did Congress generally have the guts to invoke it in any meaningful manner. Over the last 40 years, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have insisted in one way or another that the War Powers Act was essentially unconstitutional. Rather than fight it out in the courts, however, most administrations simply ignored that law and deployed troops where they wanted anyway or made nice and sort of, kind of, mentioned impending military interventions to Congress.
...
Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, most people in the world agree that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice, without killing many thousands of civilians in the process. But unfortunately, the U.S. military has always accepted massive civilian deaths as part of the cost of war. The military is now poised to kill thousands of foreign civilians, in order to prove that killing U.S. civilians is wrong.
The media has told us repeatedly that some Middle Easterners hate the U.S. only because of our "freedom" and "prosperity." Missing from this explanation is the historical context of the U.S. role in the Middle East, and for that matter in the rest of the world. This basic primer is an attempt to brief readers who have not closely followed the history of U.S. foreign or military affairs, and are perhaps unaware of the background of U.S. military interventions abroad, but are concerned about the direction of our country toward a new war in the name of "freedom" and "protecting civilians."
The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to "protectorates" such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers. Many of the uses of U.S. combat forces are documented in A History of U.S. Military Interventions since 1890:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html
U.S. involvement in World War II (1941-45) was sparked by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and fear of an Axis invasion of North America. Allied bombers attacked fascist military targets, but also fire-bombed German and Japanese cities such as Dresden and Tokyo, party under the assumption that destroying civilian neighborhoods would weaken the resolve of the survivors and turn them against their regimes. Many historians agree that fire- bombing's effect was precisely the opposite--increasing Axis civilian support for homeland defense, and discouraging potential coup attempts. The atomic bombing of Japan at the end of the war was carried out without any kind of advance demonstration or warning that may have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
The war in Korea (1950-53) was marked by widespread atrocities, both by North Korean/Chinese forces, and South Korean/U.S. forces. U.S. troops fired on civilian refugees headed into South Korea, apparently fearing they were northern infiltrators. Bombers attacked North Korean cities, and the U.S. twice threatened to use nuclear weapons. North Korea is under the same Communist government today as when the war began.
During the Middle East crisis of 1958, Marines were deployed to quell a rebellion in Lebanon, and Iraq was threatened with nuclear attack if it invaded Kuwait. This little-known crisis helped set U.S. foreign policy on a collision course with Arab nationalists, often in support of the region's monarchies.
In the early 1960s, the U.S. returned to its pre-World War II interventionary role in the Caribbean, directing the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs exile invasion of Cuba, and the 1965 bombing and Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic during an election campaign. The CIA trained and harbored Cuban exile groups in Miami, which launched terrorist attacks on Cuba, including the 1976 downing of a Cuban civilian jetliner near Barbados. During the Cold War, the CIA would also help to support or install pro-U.S. dictatorships in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and many other countries around the world.
The U.S. war in Indochina (1960-75) pit U.S. forces against North Vietnam, and Communist rebels fighting to overthrow pro-U.S. dictatorships in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. U.S. war planners made little or no distinction between attacking civilians and guerrillas in rebel-held zones, and U.S. "carpet-bombing" of the countryside and cities swelled the ranks of the ultimately victorious revolutionaries. Over two million people were killed in the war, including 55,000 U.S. troops. Less than a dozen U.S. citizens were killed on U.S. soil, in National Guard shootings or antiwar bombings. In Cambodia, the bombings drove the Khmer Rouge rebels toward fanatical leaders, who launched a murderous rampage when they took power in 1975.
Echoes of Vietnam reverberated in Central America during the 1980s, when the Reagan administration strongly backed the pro-U.S. regime in El Salvador, and right-wing exile forces fighting the new leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Rightist death squads slaughtered Salvadoran civilians who questioned the concentration of power and wealth in a few hands. CIA-trained Nicaraguan Contra rebels launched terrorist attacks against civilian clinics and schools run by the Sandinista government, and mined Nicaraguan harbors. U.S. troops also invaded the island nation of Grenada in 1983, to oust a new military regime, attacking Cuban civilian workers (even though Cuba had backed the leftist government deposed in the coup), and accidentally bombing a hospital.
The U.S. returned in force to the Middle East in 1980, after the Shi'ite Muslim revolution in Iran against Shah Pahlevi's pro-U.S. dictatorship. A troop and bombing raid to free U.S. Embassy hostages held in downtown Tehran had to be aborted in the Iranian desert. After the 1982 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, U.S. Marines were deployed in a neutral "peacekeeping" operation. They instead took the side of Lebanon's pro-Israel Christian government against Muslim rebels, and U.S. Navy ships rained enormous shells on Muslim civilian villages. Embittered Shi'ite Muslim rebels responded with a suicide bomb attack on Marine barracks, and for years seized U.S. hostages in the country. In retaliation, the CIA set off car bombs to assassinate Shi'ite Muslim leaders. Syria and the Muslim rebels emerged victorious in Lebanon.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the U.S. launched a 1986 bombing raid on Libya, which it accused of sponsoring a terrorist bombing later tied to Syria. The bombing raid killed civilians, and may have led to the later revenge bombing of a U.S. jet over Scotland. Libya's Arab nationalist leader Muammar Qaddafi remained in power. The U.S. Navy also intervened against Iran during its war against Iraq in 1987-88, sinking Iranian ships and "accidentally" shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner.
U.S. forces invaded Panama in 1989 to oust the nationalist regime of Manuel Noriega. The U.S. accused its former ally of allowing drug-running in the country, though the drug trade actually increased after his capture. U.S. bombing raids on Panama City ignited a conflagration in a civilian neighborhood, fed by stove gas tanks. Over 2,000 Panamanians were killed in the invasion to capture one leader.
The following year, the U.S. deployed forces in the Persian Gulf after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which turned Washington against its former Iraqi ally Saddam Hussein. U.S. supported the Kuwaiti monarchy and the Muslim fundamentalist monarchy in neighboring Saudi Arabia against the secular nationalist Iraq regime. In January 1991, the U.S..and its allies unleashed a massive bombing assault against Iraqi government and military targets, in an intensity beyond the raids of World War II and Vietnam. Up to 200,000 Iraqis were killed in the war and its imemdiate aftermath of rebellion and disease, including many civilians who died in their villages, neighborhoods, and bomb shelters. The U.S. continued economic sanctions that denied health and energy to Iraqi civilians, who died by the hundreds of thousands, according to United Nations agencies. The U.S. also instituted "no-fly zones" and virtually continuous bombing raids, yet Saddam was politically bolstered as he was militarily weakened.
In the 1990s, the U.S. military led a series of what it termed "humanitarian interventions" it claimed would safeguard civilians. Foremost among them was the 1992 deployment in the African nation of Somalia, torn by famine and a civil war between clan warlords. Instead of remaining neutral, U.S. forces took the side of one faction against another faction, and bombed a Mogadishu neighborhood. Enraged crowds, backed by foreign Arab mercenaries, killed 18 U.S. soldiers, forcing a withdrawal from the country.
Other so-called "humanitarian interventions" were centered in the Balkan region of Europe, after the 1992 breakup of the multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia. The U.S. watched for three years as Serb forces killed Muslim civilians in Bosnia, before its launched decisive bombing raids in 1995. Even then, it never intervened to stop atrocities by Croatian forces against Muslim and Serb civilians, because those forces were aided by the U.S. In 1999, the U.S. bombed Serbia to force President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw forces from the ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, which was torn a brutal ethnic war. The bombing intensified Serbian expulsions and killings of Albanian civilians from Kosovo, and caused the deaths of thousands of Serbian civilians, even in cities that had voted strongly against Milosevic. When a NATO occupation force enabled Albanians to move back, U.S. forces did little or nothing to prevent similar atrocities against Serb and other non-Albanian civilians. The U.S. was viewed as a biased player, even by the Serbian democratic opposition that overthrew Milosevic the following year.
Even when the U.S. military had apparently defensive motives, it ended up attacking the wrong targets. After the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, the U.S. "retaliated" not only against Osama Bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan, but a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was mistakenly said to be a chemical warfare installation. Bin Laden retaliated by attacking a U.S. Navy ship docked in Yemen in 2000. After the 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the U.S. military is poised to again bomb Afghanistan, and possibly move against other states it accuses of promoting anti-U.S. "terrorism," such as Iraq and Sudan. Such a campaign will certainly ratchet up the cycle of violence, in an escalating series of retaliations that is the hallmark of Middle East conflicts. Afghanistan, like Yugoslavia, is a multiethnic state that could easily break apart in a new catastrophic regional war. Almost certainly
more civilians would lose their lives in this tit-for-tat war on "terrorism" than the 3,000 civilians who died on September 11.
COMMON THEMES
Some common themes can be seen in many of these U.S. military interventions.
First, they were explained to the U.S. public as defending the lives and rights of civilian populations. Yet the military tactics employed often left behind massive civilian "collateral damage." War planners made little distinction between rebels and the civilians who lived in rebel zones of control, or between military assets and civilian infrastructure, such as train lines, water plants, agricultural factories, medicine supplies, etc. The U.S. public always believe that in the next war, new military technologies will avoid civilian casualties on the other side. Yet when the inevitable civilian deaths occur, they are always explained away as "accidental" or "unavoidable."
Second, although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites. Whether in Vietnam, Central America, or the Persian Gulf, the U.S. was not defending "freedom" but an ideological agenda (such as defending capitalism) or an economic agenda (such as protecting oil company investments). In the few cases when U.S. military forces toppled a dictatorship--such as in Grenada or Panama--they did so in a way that prevented the country's people from overthrowing their own dictator first, and installing a new democratic government more to their liking.
Third, the U.S. always attacked violence by its opponents as "terrorism," "atrocities against civilians," or "ethnic cleansing," but minimized or defended the same actions by the U.S. or its allies. If a country has the right to "end" a state that trains or harbors terrorists, would Cuba or Nicaragua have had the right to launch defensive bombing raids on U.S. targets to take out exile terrorists? Washington's double standard maintains that an U.S. ally's action by definition "defensive," but that an enemy's retaliation is by definition "offensive."
Fourth, the U.S. often portrays itself as a neutral peacekeeper, with nothing but the purest humanitarian motives. After deploying forces in a country, however, it quickly divides the country or region into "friends" and "foes," and takes one side against another. This strategy tends to enflame rather than dampen a war or civil conflict, as shown in the cases of Somalia and Bosnia, and deepens resentment of the U.S. role.
Fifth, U.S. military intervention is often counterproductive even if one accepts U.S. goals and rationales. Rather than solving the root political or economic roots of the conflict, it tends to polarize factions and further destabilize the country. The same countries tend to reappear again and again on the list of 20th century interventions.
Sixth, U.S. demonization of an enemy leader, or military action against him, tends to strengthen rather than weaken his hold on power. Take the list of current regimes most singled out for U.S. attack, and put it alongside of the list of regimes that have had the longest hold on power, and you will find they have the same names. Qaddafi, Castro, Saddam, Kim, and others may have faced greater internal criticism if they could not portray themselves as Davids standing up to the American Goliath, and (accurately) blaming many of their countries' internal problems on U.S. economic sanctions.
One of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century was that "people like us" could not commit atrocities against civilians.
- German and Japanese citizens believed it, but their militaries slaughtered millions of people.
- British and French citizens believed it, but their militaries fought brutal colonial wars in Africa and Asia.
- Russian citizens believed it, but their armies murdered civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
- Israeli citizens believed it, but their army mowed down Palestinians and Lebanese.
- Arabs believed it, but suicide bombers and hijackers targeted U.S. and Israeli civilians.
- U.S. citizens believed it, but their military killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Every country, every ethnicity, every religion, contains within it the capability for extreme violence. Every group contains a faction that is intolerant of other groups, and actively seeks to exclude or even kill them. War fever tends to encourage the intolerant faction, but the faction only succeeds in its goals if the rest of the group acquiesces or remains silent. The attacks of September 11 were not only a test for U.S. citizens attitudes' toward minority ethnic/racial groups in their own country, but a test for our relationship with the rest of the world. We must begin not by lashing out at civilians in Muslim countries, but by taking responsibility for our own history and our own actions, and how they have fed the cycle of violence.
... To sum up the current state of affairs I would say that the fact that the US armed forces are in a grave state of decay is not as amazing by itself as is the fact that this almost impossible to hide fact is almost universally ignored. So let’s separate the two into “what happened” and “why nobody seems to be aware of it”.
What happened
Let’s begin at the beginning: the US armed forces were never the invincible military force the US propaganda (including Hollywood) would have you believe they have been. I looked into the topic of the role of the western Allies in my “
Letter to my American friend” and I won’t repeat it all here. Let’s just say that the biggest advantage the USA had over everybody else during WWII is a completely untouched industrial base which made it possible to produce fantastic numbers of weapon systems and equipment in close to ideal conditions. Some, shall we kindly say, “patriotic” US Americans have interpreted that as a sign of the “vigor” and “superiority” of the Capitalist economic organization while, in reality, this simply was a direct result of the fact that the USA was protected by two huge oceans (the Soviets, in contrast, had to move their entire industrial base to the Urals and beyond, as for the Germans, they had to produce under a relentless bombing campaign). The bottom line was this: US forces were better equipped (quantitatively and, sometimes, even qualitatively) than the others and they could muster firepower in amounts difficult to achieve for their enemies. And, yes, this did give a strong advantage to US forces, but hardly made them in any way “better” by themselves.
After WWII the USA was the only major industrialized country on the planet whose industry had not been blown to smithereens and for the next couple of decades the USA enjoyed a situation to quasi total monopoly. That, again, hugely benefited the US armed forces but it soon became clear that in Korea and Vietnam that advantage, while real, did not necessarily result in any US victory. Following Vietnam, US politicians basically limited their aggression to much smaller countries who had no chance at all to meaningfully resist, nevermind prevail. If we look at the list of US military aggressions after Vietnam (see
here or
here) we can clearly see that the US military specialized in attacking defenseless countries.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War and the Global War on Terror when US politicians clearly believed in their own propaganda about being the “sole superpower” or a “hyperpower” and they engaged in potentially much more complex military attacks including the full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars will go down in history as case studies of what happens when politicians believe their own propaganda. While Dubya declared victory as soon as the invasion was completed, it soon became clear to everybody that this war was a disaster from which the USA has proved completely unable to extricate themselves (even the Soviets connected the dots and withdrew from Afghanistan faster than the US Americans!). So what does all this tell us about the US armed forces: (in no special order)
They are big, way bigger than any other
They have unmatched (worldwide) power projection (mobility) capabilities
They are high-tech heavy which gives them a big advantage in some type of conflicts
They have the means (nukes) to wipe-off any country off the face of the earth
They control the oceans and strategic chokepoints
Is that enough to win a war?
Actually, no, it is not. All it takes to nullify these advantages is an enemy who is aware of them and who refuses to fight what I call the “American type of war” (on this concept, see
here). The recent wars in Lebanon, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq have clearly shown that well-adapted tactics mostly deny the US armed forces the advantages listed above or, at the very least, make them irrelevant.
If we accept Clausewitz’s thesis that “war is the continuation of politics by other means” then it becomes clear that the US has not won a real war in a long long time and that the list of countries willing to openly defy Uncle Sam is steadily growing (and now includes not only Iran and the DPRK, but also Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela and even Russia and China). This means that there is an emerging consensus amongst the countries which the USA tries to threaten and bully into submission that for all the threats and propaganda the USA is not nearly as formidable enemy as some would have you believe.
Why nobody seems to be aware of it
The paradoxical thing is that while this is clearly well understood in the countries which the USA is currently trying to threaten and bully into submission, this is also completely ignored and overlooked inside the United States themselves. Most Americans, including very well informed ones, sincerelybelieve that their armed forces are “second to none” and that the USA could crush any enemy which would dare disobey or otherwise defy the AngloZionist Empire. Typically, when presented with evidence that the USAF, USN and NATO could not even defeat the Serbian Army Corps in Kosovo or that in Afghanistan the US military performance is very substantially inferior to what the 40th Soviet Army achieved (with mostly conscripts!), my interlocutors always reply the same thing: “yeah, maybe, but if we wanted we could nuke them!“. This is both true and false. Potential nuclear target countries for the USA can be subdivided into three categories:
Countries who, if nuked themselves, could wipe the USA off the face of the earth completely (Russia) or, at least, inflict immense damage upon the USA (China).
Those countries which the USA could nuke without fearing retaliation in kind, but which still could inflict huge conventional and asymmetric damage on the USA and its allies (Iran, DPRK).
Those countries which the USA could nuke with relative impunity but which the USA could also crush with conventional forces making the use of nukes pointless (Venezuela, Cuba).
And, of course, in all these cases the first use of nukes by the USA would result in a fantastic political backlash with completely unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences. For example, I personally believe that using nukes on Iran would mark the end of NATO in Europe as such an action would irreparably damage EU-US relations. Likewise, using nukes on the DPRK would result in a huge crisis in Asia with, potentially, the closure of US bases in Korea and Japan. Others would, no doubt, disagree :-)
The bottom line: US nukes are only useful as a deterrent against other nuclear powers; for all other roles they are basically useless. And since neither Russia or China would ever contemplate a first-strike against the USA, you could say that they are almost totally useless (I say almost, because in the real world the USA cannot simply rely on the mental sanity and goodwill of other nations; so, in reality, the US nuclear arsenal is truly a vital component of US national security).
Which leaves the Navy and the Army. The USN still controls the high seas and strategic choke points, but this is becoming increasingly irrelevant, especially in the context of local wars. Besides, the USN is still stubbornly carrier-centric, which just goes to show that strategic vision comes a distant second behind bureaucratic and institutional inertia. As for the US Army, it has long become a kind of support force for Special Operations and Marines, something which makes sense in tiny wars (Panama, maybe Venezuela) but which is completely inadequate for medium to large wars.
What about the fact that the USA spends more of “defense” (read “wars of aggression”) than the rest of the planet combined? Surely that counts for something?
Actually, no, it does not. First, because most of that money is spent on greasing the pockets of an entire class of MIC-parasites which make billions of dollars in the free for all “bonanza” provided by that ridiculously bloated “defense” budget. The never mentioned reality is that compared to the USA, even the Ukrainian military establishment looks as only “moderately corrupt”!
[Sidebar: you think I am exaggerating? Ask yourself a simple question: why does the USA need
17 intelligence agencies while the rest of the world usually need from 2 to 5? Do you really, sincerely, believe that this has anything to do with national security? If you do, please email me, I got a few bridges to sell to you at great prices! Seriously, just the fact that the USA has about 5 times more “intelligence” agencies than the rest of the planet is a clear symptom of the the truly astronomical level of corruption of the US “national security state”]
Weapons system after weapons system we see cases in which the overriding number one priority is to spend as much money as possible as opposed to deliver a weapon system soldiers could actually fight with. When these systems are engaged, they are typically engaged against adversaries which are two to three generations behind the USA, and that makes them look formidable. Not only that, but in each case the US has a huge numerical advantage (hence the choice of small country to attack). But I assure you that for real military specialists the case for the superiority of US weapons systems in a joke. For example, French systems (such as the Rafale or the Leclerc MBT) are often both better and cheaper than there US equivalents, hence the need for major bribes and major “
offset agreements“.
The Russian military budget is tiny, at least compared to the US one. But, as
William Engdal,
Dmitrii Orlov and others have observed, the Russians get a much bigger bang for the buck. Not only are Russian weapon systems designed by soldiers for soldiers (as opposed to by engineers for bureaucrats), but the Russian military is far less corrupt than the US one, at least when mega-bucks sums are concerned (for petty sums of money the Russians are still much worse than the Americans). At the end of the day, you get the kind of F-35 vs SU-35/T-50 or, even more relevantly, the kind of mean time between failure or man-hours to flight hour ratios we have seen from the US and Russian forces over Syria recently. Suffice to say that the Americans could not even begin to contemplate to execute the number of sorties the tiny Russian Aerospace task force in Syria achieved. Still, the fact remains that if the US Americans wanted it they could keep hundred of aircraft in the skies above Syria whereas the tiny Russian Russian Aerospace task never had more than 35 combat aircraft at any one time: the current state of the Russian military industry simply does not allow for the production of the number of systems Russia would need (but things are slowly getting better).
So here we have it: the Americans are hands down the leaders in quantitative terms; but in qualitative terms they are already behind the Russians and falling back faster and faster with each passing day.
Do the US military commanders know that?
Of course they do.
But remember what happened to Trump when he mentioned serious problems in the US military? The Clinton propaganda machine instantly attacked him for being non-patriotic, for “not supporting the troops”, for not repeating the politically obligatory mantra about “we’re number one, second to none” and all the infantile nonsense the US propaganda machine feeds those who still own a TV at home. To bluntly and honestly speak about the very real problems of the US armed forces is much more likely to be a career-ending exercise than a way to reform a hopelessly corrupt system.
There is one more thing. Not to further dwell on my thesis that most US Americans are not educated enough to understand basic Marxist theory, but the fact is that most of them know nothing about Hegelian dialectics. They, therefore, view things in a static way, not as processes. For example, when they compliment themselves on having “the most powerful and capable military in the history of mankind” (they love that kind of language), they don’t even realize that this alleged superiority will inevitably generate its own contradiction and that this strength would therefore also produce its own weakness. Well-read US American officers, and there are plenty of those, do understand that, but their influence is almost negligible when compared to the multi-billion dollar and massively corrupt superstructure they are immersed in. Furthermore, I am absolutely convinced that this state of affairs is unsustainable and that sooner or later there will appear a military or political leader which will have the courage to address these problems frontally and try to reform a currently petrified system. But the prerequisite for that will probably have to be a massive and immensely embarrassing military defeat for the USA. I can easily imagine that happening in case of a US attack on Iran or the DPRK. I can guarantee it if the US leadership grows delusional enough to try to strike at Russia or China.
But for the time being its all gonna be “red, white and blue” and Paul Craig Roberts will remain a lone voice crying in the desert. He will be ignored, yes. But that does not change the fact that he is right.
The Saker
PS: As for myself, I want to dedicate
this song by Vladimir Vysotskii to Paul Craig Roberts and to all the other “Cassandras” who have the ability to see the future and the courage to warn us about it. They usually end up paying a high price for their honesty and courage.
