War and Empire Links: June 2018

Trump’s Military Drops a Bomb Every 12 Minutes, and No One Is Talking About It. Lee Camp, TruthDig. June 19, 2018.

We live in a state of perpetual war, and we never feel it. While you get your gelato at the hip place where they put those cute little mint leaves on the side, someone is being bombed in your name. While you argue with the 17-year-old at the movie theater who gave you a small popcorn when you paid for a large, someone is being obliterated in your name. While we sleep and eat and make love and shield our eyes on a sunny day, someone’s home, family, life and body are being blown into a thousand pieces in our names.

Once every 12 minutes.

The United States military drops an explosive with a strength you can hardly comprehend once every 12 minutes. And that’s odd, because we’re technically at war with—let me think—zero countries. So that should mean zero bombs are being dropped, right?

Hell no! You’ve made the common mistake of confusing our world with some sort of rational, cogent world in which our military-industrial complex is under control, the music industry is based on merit and talent, Legos have gently rounded edges (so when you step on them barefoot, it doesn’t feel like an armor-piercing bullet just shot straight up your sphincter), and humans are dealing with climate change like adults rather than burying our heads in the sand while trying to convince ourselves that the sand around our heads isn’t getting really, really hot.

You’re thinking of a rational world. We do not live there.

Instead, we live in a world where the Pentagon is completely and utterly out of control.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the $21 trillion (that’s not a typo) that has gone unaccounted for at the Pentagon. But I didn’t get into the number of bombs that ridiculous amount of money buys us. President George W. Bush’s military dropped 70,000 bombs on five countries. But of that outrageous number, only 57 of those bombs really upset the international community.

Because there were 57 strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen—countries the U.S. was neither at war with nor had ongoing conflicts with. And the world was kind of horrified. There was a lot of talk that went something like, “Wait a second. We’re bombing in countries outside of war zones? Is it possible that’s a slippery slope ending in us just bombing all the goddamn time? (Awkward pause.) … Nah. Whichever president follows Bush will be a normal adult person (with a functional brain stem of some sort) and will therefore stop this madness.”

We were so cute and naive back then, like a kitten when it’s first waking up in the morning.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that under President Barack Obama there were “563 strikes, largely by drones, that targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. …”

It’s not just the fact that bombing outside of a war zone is a horrific violation of international law and global norms. It’s also the morally reprehensible targeting of people for pre-crime, which is what we’re doing and what the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” warned us about. (Humans are very bad at taking the advice of sci-fi dystopias. If we’d listened to “1984,” we wouldn’t have allowed the existence of the National Security Agency. If we listened to “The Terminator,” we wouldn’t have allowed the existence of drone warfare. And if we’d listened to “The Matrix,” we wouldn’t have allowed the vast majority of humans to get lost in a virtual reality of spectacle and vapid nonsense while the oceans die in a swamp of plastic waste. … But you know, who’s counting?)

There was basically a media blackout while Obama was president. You could count on one hand the number of mainstream media reports on the Pentagon’s daily bombing campaigns under Obama. And even when the media did mention it, the underlying sentiment was, “Yeah, but look at how suave Obama is while he’s OK’ing endless destruction. He’s like the Steve McQueen of aerial death.”

And let’s take a moment to wipe away the idea that our “advanced weaponry” hits only the bad guys. As David DeGraw put it, “According to the C.I.A.’s own documents, the people on the ‘kill list,’ who were targeted for ‘death-by-drone,’ accounted for only 2% of the deaths caused by the drone strikes.”

Two percent. Really, Pentagon? You got a two on the test? You get five points just for spelling your name right.

But those 70,000 bombs dropped by Bush—it was child’s play. DeGraw again: “[Obama] dropped 100,000 bombs in seven countries. He out-bombed Bush by 30,000 bombs and 2 countries.”

You have to admit that’s impressively horrific. That puts Obama in a very elite group of Nobel Peace Prize winners who have killed that many innocent civilians. The reunions are mainly just him and Henry Kissinger wearing little hand-drawn name tags and munching on deviled eggs.

However, we now know that Donald Trump’s administration puts all previous presidents to shame. The Pentagon’s numbers show that during George W. Bush’s eight years he averaged 24 bombs dropped per day, which is 8,750 per year. Over the course of Obama’s time in office, his military dropped 34 bombs per day, 12,500 per year. And in Trump’s first year in office, he averaged 121 bombs dropped per day, for an annual total of 44,096.

Trump’s military dropped 44,000 bombs in his first year in office.

He has basically taken the gloves off the Pentagon, taken the leash off an already rabid dog. So the end result is a military that’s behaving like Lil Wayne crossed with Conor McGregor. You look away for one minute, look back, and are like, “What the fuck did you just do? I was gone for like, a second!”

Under Trump, five bombs are dropped per hour—every hour of every day. That averages out to a bomb every 12 minutes.

And which is more outrageous—the crazy amount of death and destruction we are creating around the world, or the fact that your mainstream corporate media basically NEVER investigates it? They talk about Trump’s flaws. They say he’s a racist, bulbous-headed, self-centered idiot (which is totally accurate)—but they don’t criticize the perpetual Amityville massacre our military perpetrates by dropping a bomb every 12 minutes, most of them killing 98 percent non-targets.

When you have a Department of War with a completely unaccountable budget—as we saw with the $21 trillion—and you have a president with no interest in overseeing how much death the Department of War is responsible for, then you end up dropping so many bombs that the Pentagon has reported we are running out of bombs.

Oh, dear God. If we run out of our bombs, then how will we stop all those innocent civilians from … farming? Think of all the goats that will be allowed to go about their days.

And, as with the $21 trillion, the theme seems to be “unaccountable.”

Journalist Witney Webb wrote in February, “Shockingly, more than 80 percent of those killed have never even been identified and the C.I.A.’s own documents have shown that they are not even aware of who they are killing—avoiding the issue of reporting civilian deaths simply by naming all those in the strike zone as enemy combatants.”

That’s right. We kill only enemy combatants. How do we know they’re enemy combatants? Because they were in our strike zone. How did we know it was a strike zone? Because there were enemy combatants there. How did we find out they were enemy combatants? Because they were in the strike zone. … Want me to keep going, or do you get the point? I have all day.

This is not about Trump, even though he’s a maniac. It’s not about Obama, even though he’s a war criminal. It’s not about Bush, even though he has the intelligence of boiled cabbage. (I haven’t told a Bush joke in about eight years. Felt kind of good. Maybe I’ll get back into that.)

This is about a runaway military-industrial complex that our ruling elite are more than happy to let loose. Almost no one in Congress or the presidency tries to restrain our 121 bombs a day. Almost no one in a mainstream outlet tries to get people to care about this.

Recently, the hashtag #21Trillion for the unaccounted Pentagon money has gained some traction. Let’s get another one started: #121BombsADay.

One every 12 minutes.

Do you know where they’re hitting? Who they’re murdering? Why? One hundred and twenty-one bombs a day rip apart the lives of families a world away—in your name and my name and the name of the kid doling out the wrong size popcorn at the movie theater.

We are a rogue nation with a rogue military and a completely unaccountable ruling elite.  

The government and military you and I support by being a part of this society are murdering people every 12 minutes, and in response, there’s nothing but a ghostly silence. It is beneath us as a people and a species to give this topic nothing but silence.  

It is a crime against humanity.

The Yemeni Holocaust. Ian Welsh. Jun. 4, 2018.

We often ask, what would we do if there was another Holocaust? Surely we would do something? Surely, at least, we would not be complicit? 

The question might have been answered in Rwanda, where the UN commander begged the UN for orders to intervene, orders which never came. The general, Romeo Dallaire, has spent the rest of his life curled around his failure to act despite orders. 

Meanwhile, we have the blockade of Yemen, which despite claims, continues: 

Mark Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, expressed his concern regarding the “recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports” — adding that, if conditions do not improve, the number of Yemenis at the brink of starvation would rise from the current figure of 8.4 million to 18.4 million by this December. Given that there are approximately 28 million people in Yemen, a continuation of the Saudi-led blockade would mean that nearly two-thirds of the entire country’s population will soon face starvation. 

Not sure how many of those who face starvation will starve to death, rather than simply sit on the edge of death, but millions of lives are at risk, this is deliberate, it is happening in slow motion, and the rest of the world is doing nothing. 

Well, if they aren’t helping the mass murder, like America (and America was helping under Obama, so no, this isn’t a partisan issue.) 

America could stop Saudi Arabia cold if it wanted to; and it certainly could at least not participate. 

But, of course, we all know that in the run up to World War II no one cared what was happening to the Jews: we refused to let in Jewish refugee ships, after all. If all Hitler had done was the Holocaust, no one would have gone to war with him over that. 

Not that the US needs to go to war; the simple credible threat of sanctions would bring Saudi Arabia to its knees. Nor does the US, post shale oil, need Saudi Arabia’s oil, but the Saudis, in any case, are no longer in a position to not sell. Their own society would implode in months. 

Europe could do this too: SWIFT is located in Europe and subject to European law. Apparently Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program, which Netanyahu has stated was 5 years from a nuclear bomb since the early nineties, was worth Europeans forcing SWIFT to cut them off (SWIFT objected), but not millions of Yemeni deaths. 

Since Europe = Germany (no, don’t pretend, if Germany wants it, it happens), that means the Germans, having done the Holocaust are now sitting aside when they could stop millions of deaths, and doing nothing. 

Lovely. 

Well, I guess we’ll just watch.

The War Nerd: Anglo-American Media’s Complicity in Yemen’s Genocide. Gary Brecher, via nakedcapitalism. Jun. 11, 2018.

We’re living through a massive artificial famine, right now. In NW Yemen, home of the Yemeni Shia who’ve fought off a Saudi-financed invasion, the “coalition” of invaders has settled on a slower, more effective strategy: artificial famine and blockade. This is how you kill off a troublesome population, not with bombs and guns alone. Hunger and disease are much better mass killers than firearms and bombs. 

NW Yemen has been blockaded for years now. And the Saudi strategy is working well. Yemen has had up to a million cases of cholera, an illness unheard of in countries with modern antibiotics. Untreated cholera is fatal in about half of all cases (versus 1% when normal treatment is available). Since medical supplies are being blockaded (with the help of the US Navy), and few journalists have made much effort to find out what has been going on in the blockaded areas, we may be dealing with an unreported death toll of half a million people, most of them children.

So the situation is lining up very nicely, militarily, for the UAE, Saudi, and their friends in D.C. and London. All you need to tighten the noose at this point in a campaign of extermination by famine/blockade is the silent collusion of world media. 

And Lord, how happy the Anglo media have been to supply that last necessary element! Compare this silence to alleged starvation stories from Sunni regions of Syria.

If there was even a rumor that Sunni Syrians might be going hungry, every mainstream media outlet was all over the story. If their CIA-funded shills from the White Helmets made ridiculous claims of massacres and giant famines, later disproved, you could count on everyone from BBC to CNN to blast them over every TV in the Anglosphere. 

But the hundreds of thousands of verified, real famine and epidemic cases in Yemen get very little coverage. There’s nothing subtle about why not.

Yemen - U.S. Grants Approval For Genocide. Moon of Alabama. Jun. 11, 2018.












The Chomsky Challenge for Americans. Paul Street, TruthDig. June 13, 2018.

It’s no wonder that most Americans are clueless about why “their” country is feared and hated the world over. It remains unthinkable to this day, for example, that any respectable “mainstream” U.S. media outlet would tell the truth about why the United States atom-bombed the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Gar Alperovitz and other historians have shown, Washington knew that Japan was defeated and ready to surrender at the end of World War II. The ghastly atomic attacks were meant to send a signal to Soviet Russia about the post-WWII world: “We run the world. What we say goes.” 

However, as far as most Americans who even care to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki know, the Japanese cities were nuked to save American lives certain to be lost in a U.S. invasion required to force Japan’s surrender. This false rationalization was reproduced in the “The War,” the widely viewed 2007 PBS miniseries on World War II from celebrated liberal documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. 

An early challenge to Uncle Sam’s purported right to manage postwar world affairs from the banks of the Potomac came in 1950. Korean forces, joined by Chinese troops, pushed back against the United States’ invasion of North Korea. Washington responded with a merciless bombing campaign that flattened all of North Korea’s cities and towns. U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay boasted that “we burned down every town in North Korea” and proudly guessed that Uncle Sam’s gruesome air campaign, replete with napalm and chemical weapons, murdered 20 percent of North Korea’s population. This and more was recounted without a hint of shame—with pride, in fact—in the leading public U.S. military journals of the time. As Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading intellectual, explained five years ago, the U.S. was not content just to demolish the country’s urban zones: 

Since everything in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was then sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the nation’s water supply—a war crime for which people had been hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals … talk[ed] excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys and the ‘Asians’ scurrying around trying to survive. The journals exulted in what this meant to those Asians—horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation. How magnificent! 

The United States’ monstrous massive crimes against North Korea during the early 1950s went down George Orwell’s “memory hole” even as they took place. To the American public they never occurred—and therefore hold no relevance to current U.S.-North Korean tensions and negotiations as far as most good Americans know. 

Things are different in North Korea, where every schoolchild learns about the epic, mass-murderous wrongdoings of the U.S. “imperialist aggressor” from the early 1950s.

“Just imagine ourselves in their position,” Chomsky writes. “Imagine what it meant … for your country to be totally levelled—everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.” 

That ugly history rarely makes its way into the “mainstream” U.S. understanding of why North Korea behaves in “bizarre” and “paranoid” ways toward the U.S. 

Outside the “radical” margins where people read left critics and chroniclers of “U.S. foreign policy” (a mild euphemism for American imperialism), Americans still can’t grapple with the monumental and arch-imperialist crime that was “the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s term at the time) between 1962 and 1975. 

Contrary to the conventional U.S. wisdom, there was no “Vietnam War.” What really occurred was a U.S. War on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—a giant and prolonged, multi-pronged and imperial assault that murdered 5 million southeast Asians along with 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Just one U.S. torture program alone—the CIA’s Operation Phoenix—killed more than two-thirds as many Vietnamese as the total U.S. body count. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the widely publicized My Lai atrocity was just one of countless mass racist killings of Vietnamese villagers carried out by U.S. troops during the crucifixion. Vietnam struggles with an epidemic of birth defects created by U.S. chemical warfare to this day. 

America’s savage saturation bombing of Cambodia (meant to cut off supply lines to Vietnamese independence fighters) created the devastation out of which arose the mass-exterminating Khmer Rouge regime, which Washington later backed against Vietnam.

... 

Thanks to its poor fit with American exceptionalist doctrine—according to which Uncle Sam always tries to do the morally right thing, even if it sometimes goes too far in overzealous pursuits of its consistently good intentions—this gruesome imperial crime was only a minor story in U.S. “mainstream” media. The same was true three years earlier when the American battleship USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians on a clearly marked commercial jet in Iranian air space over the Persian Gulf. (Two years later, the Vincennes’ commander and his chief air-war artillery officer were given medals for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” during this heroic slaughter of harmless innocents.)

Imagine the U.S. response if, say, a Chinese navy ship had shot down an American Airlines flight in U.S. airspace over San Francisco Bay.

The U.S. shootdown of Flight 655 is well remembered in Iran. Not so in the United States of Imperial Amnesia, where official doctrine holds that, in Albright’s words, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”

...

It is unthinkable that anyone in the reigning American exceptionalist U.S. media-politics-and-culture complex would raise the question of the denuclearization of the United States. It’s no small matter. The world’s only superpower, the only nation to ever attack civilians with nuclear weapons, is embarking on a super-expensive top-to-bottom overhaul of a U.S. nuclear arsenal that already houses 5,500 weapons with enough menacing power between them to blow the world up five times over. This $1.7 trillion rebuild includes the creation of provocative new first-strike weapons systems likely to escalate the risks of nuclear exchanges with Russia and/or China. Everyday Americans could have opportunities to more than just imagine what the innocents of Nagasaki experienced in August 1945.

But don’t blame Donald Trump. Our current reality was initiated under Obama, leader of a party that is positioning itself as the real and anti-Russian and CIA-backed party of empire in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.

This extraordinarily costly retooling heightens prospects for human self-extermination in a world in dire need of public investment to end poverty (half the world’s population “lives” on less than $2.50 a day), to replace fossil fuels with clean energy (we are marching to the fatal mark of 500 carbon parts per atmospheric million by 2050—if not sooner), and to clean up the titanic environmental mess we’ve made of our planet.

The perverted national priorities reflected in such appalling, Darth Vader-esque “public investment”—a giant windfall for the high-tech U.S. weapons-industrial complex—are symptoms of the moral collapse that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned the United States about in the famous anti-war speech he gave one year to the day before his assassination (or execution). “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” King said, “is approaching spiritual death.”

That spiritual death is well underway. Material and physical death for the species is not far off on America’s eco- and nuclear-exterminating path, led in no small part by a dominant U.S. media that obsesses over everything Trump and Russia while the underlying bipartisan institutions of imperial U.S. oligarchy lead humanity over the cliff. Americans might want to learn how to take Chomsky’s challenge—imagine ourselves in others’ situation—before it’s too late to imagine anything at all.

There Are No War Heroes. There Are Only War Victims. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Jun. 9, 2018.

The US servicemen and women who have fought and died in America’s nonstop acts of military expansionism and wars of aggression are not heroes. They are victims. They are victims of a sociopathic power establishment which does not care about them, and never has. 

If what I just wrote bothered you, it is because you have been conditioned to oppose such ideas by generations of war propaganda. If you believe that US soldiers are heroes, it means that you believe that they are fighting and dying for a noble cause; for your freedom, for democracy, for the good and the just. It turns the deaths of the fallen into a tragic but noble sacrifice in your eyes, which keeps you from realizing that they have actually been dying for the profit margins of war plutocrats, land and resource assets, and the neoconservative agenda to secure control of the planet.

There is nothing heroic about being thrown into the gears of the war machine and having one’s body and mind ripped apart for the advancement of plutocratic interests. But if your rulers can trick you into thinking that dead US soldiers died for something worth dying for, you won’t turn around and lay the blame on the war profiteers and ambitious sociopaths who are truly responsible for their deaths.

So they lie to you. Constantly.

How To Support Our Troops. Chuck Baldwin, via PCR. June 20, 2018.

“If we truly want to support our troops and honor our men and women in uniform, we would stop requiring them to have their limbs blown off, their bodies paralyzed, their eyes blinded, their minds destroyed and their lives lost for wars that have NOTHING to do with protecting America and EVERYTHING to do with enriching globalists, bankers, politicians, and war profiteers. 

“We would stop using them for political nation-building, regime change and drug dealing. We would stop using them as global cops. And we would especially stop using them to fight perpetual wars of aggression for Zionist Israel. 

“Short of the above, all of the hype about “supporting our troops” is just so much hot air. No! It’s even worse than that: It’s pure propaganda for the sake of benefiting the merciless, murderous war merchants and heads of state who profit off of the sacrifices of their country’s sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and husbands and wives. 

“The best way to ‘support our troops’ is to BRING THEM HOME.”