#the U.S. Pentagon + the U.S. Military + the U.S. White House Keep Me [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] ECONOMICALLY [JE = JESUS] RICH

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

March 24, 2025,

Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Washington

Trump officials discussed a secret plan to attack Yemen in a group text chat.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed war plans in an encrypted chat group that included a journalist two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, the White House said on Monday, confirming an account in the magazine The Atlantic.

The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote in an article published on Monday that he was mistakenly added to the text chat on the commercial messaging app Signal by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser.

It was an extraordinary breach of American national security intelligence. Not only was the journalist inadvertently included in the group, but the conversation also took place outside of the secure government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning.

Mr. Goldberg said he was able to follow the conversation among senior members of President Trump’s national security team in the two days leading up to the strikes in Yemen. The group also included Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Mr. Goldberg wrote.

At 11:44 a.m. on March 15, Mr. Hegseth posted the “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Mr. Goldberg wrote. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”

In an interview, Mr. Goldberg said that “up until the Hegseth text on Saturday, it was mainly procedural and policy texting. Then it became war plans, and to be honest, that sent a chill down my spine.”

Mr. Goldberg did not publish the details of the war plans in his article.

Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Goldberg wrote, said that “the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. Eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot.”

“If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed,” he added.

At around 1:55, initial airstrikes hit buildings in neighborhoods in and around Sana, Yemen’s capital, that were known Houthi leadership strongholds, according to Pentagon officials and residents. The strikes continued throughout that Saturday and into the next few days.

Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Goldberg wrote, declared to the group — which included the journalist — that steps had been taken to keep the information secret.

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Mr. Hegseth wrote, using the military acronym for operational security.

Several Defense Department officials expressed shock that Mr. Hegseth had put American war plans into a commercial chat group. They said that having this type of conversation in a Signal chat group itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, a law covering the handling of sensitive information.

Revealing operational war plans before planned strikes could also put American troops directly into harm’s way, the officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive national security matter.

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said that the “story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”

“Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion and precision, using approved secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line,” he added.

Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, said that he had no knowledge of the article in The Atlantic. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, adding, “You’re telling me about it for the first time.”

The Pentagon referred questions about the article to the National Security Council. Mr. Hegseth was traveling to Hawaii on Monday, his first stop on a weeklong trip to Asia.

“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Brian Hughes, the National Security Council spokesman, said in an emailed statement. He called the thread “a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”

The State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said at a press briefing that she would not comment on Mr. Rubio’s “deliberative conversations,” and directed further questions to the White House.

During his first term, Mr. Trump repeatedly said Hillary Clinton should have been imprisoned for using a private email server to communicate with her staff and others while she was secretary of state. Mr. Waltz, for his part, posted on social media in June 2023: “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.”

[pipelinelaserraygun]

NOT to be ruled out, recent ✈️ air travel crashes FORCES Christendom 🇺🇸 in America, to consider the worst: Given that current technology ALREADY exists for remote HIJACKING, deep state may be conducting rehearsals for a Presidential assassination attempt, yet AGAIN.

🕎✝️🛐 Father God, keep Christ's Bridal Party 👑💍👰🏽‍♂️ 10 steps ahead of the enemy.

"There are DARK FORCES, Wolverine. Human forces are 👺👹💥 building a weapon that could bring about the 🔚 of 🕎✝️🛐⬅️ OUR kind." --Magneto

Day of RECKONING, 2025‼️

“To see it in REAL TIME, look, let me say this—it’s as if you’re in a MOVIE, but it’s so much MORE important because it ISN’T a movie. It’s NOT special effects,” he explained. “It’s REAL, and American lives are being saved 11 days into the Trump administration. You can think you’re safe, and you can try and build a safe haven in an ungoverned part of the world like northern Somalia, but our capabilities—it’s like the President said,” Gorka said. “You can run, but you’ll only DIE tired. We will find you, but unlike the Biden administration, we’re NOT going to watch you around the clock for four years. 🇺🇸 We are going to kill you if you threaten American lives and that is what the President just proved this morning at 9:50, with his incredible leadership.”

⬆️ 100% MUST ⏰ WATCH: What do you take me for, an idiot? What is it, to be the smartest dummy?

🤯 Don't get OUTSMARTED.

🆓 ENTIRE MOVIE 🍿👽❣️ Spielberg's masterwork of Sci-Fi has 🛸 resurfaced 🛬 in watercooler discussions, because of possible FAA DEI recent horrible mistakes.

Truths are being suppressed. Where do YOU go, 🚖 for the UNFILTERED conversation?

🚕 Cabbie Jimmy Failla is a VERY good resource. He's a host, at Fox News, of a late Saturday night comedy hour.

Challengers of the unknown: God will determine Future outcomes that enemies of Heaven won't be able to stop.

[tieflingkisser]

Why Biden’s Threat to Suspend Arms to Israel Is A Scam

President Joe Biden’s pledge to cut off arms to Israel won’t stop its Rafah offensive, won’t save Palestinian lives, and doesn’t meaningfully address the concerns raised by the student protestors. What it has done is sent the news media into a frenzy of hyperbole about the supposed gravity of the president’s remarks. “If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons,” Biden said in a CNN interview last Wednesday. The statement was confusingly vague — Which weapons specifically? And aren’t the Israelis already in Rafah? But Biden was immediately rewarded with sensational news headlines epitomized by a three-alarm emoji viral post from Axios reporter (and many are saying White House stooge) Barak Ravid. With college protests over the Israel-Hamas war sweeping across the country and a presidential election looming, it’s obvious why Biden might want people to think his warning will influence Israel and protect Palestinian civilian lives in Rafah, where over one million have sought shelter in the last major urban enclave of Gaza. But the significance of his pledge has been wildly overstated, for the following reasons (which I elaborate on below): 

Israel doesn’t need the U.S. weapons to fight in Rafah, 

The arms suspension would take months to be felt,

The deadliest part of the war (for civilians) is already over, and

Israel is already attacking Rafah and has been doing so for weeks.

Israel Isn’t Wanting for Weapons

As to the first point, Israel has made clear that it already has the weapons it needs to conduct military operations in Rafah. “The IDF [Israeli Defense Force] has armaments for the missions it is planning, including missions in Rafah,” said IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari at a press conference on Thursday following Biden’s remarks. “We have what we need.” In fact, since Hamas’s October 7 attack, I can’t find a single example of the IDF saying they’re running out of weapons needed to fight the war. This is not surprising given the over $3 billion per year in military aid the U.S. provides Israel, including via secret weapons stockpiles the U.S. military maintains in the country (see: War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WSRA-I, which I reported on here.) All of this is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to brashly respond to Biden’s warning that Israel would be able to “stand alone” without U.S. support. In fact, Netanyahu has cracked that the effect of the United States not providing “precision” weapons is to increase the prospects of civilian casualties.

Arms Assistance Isn’t Amazon Two-Day Delivery

Even if the Biden administration canceled every arms export to Israel — far beyond what he actually promised, but let’s pretend — their absence would take weeks or even months to affect Israel’s supply of weapons. That’s because foreign military assistance involves a logistics process far more complex than Amazon two-day delivery. As a result, it takes an average of 18 months to award a foreign military sales contract. The lumbering process is so slow the Pentagon convened a “Tiger Team” to help speed up arms exports to Israel, as I reported in December.

[...]

To me, the most ridiculous part of Biden’s pledge is his insistence that Israel isn’t already at war in Rafah, which it has been for weeks and even months. While administration officials usually take care to include qualifiers like that it opposes a “full-scale” invasion of Rafah (whatever that means), Biden forgot to read the fine print during his CNN interview, veering into falsehood.

[harrelltut]

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[theculturedmarxist]

Milley is uttering deluded nonsense.

U.S. Joint Chiefs' Gen. Milley cites Ukrainian counteroffensive 'breakthrough'

Ukraine's soldiers have penetrated the first line of Russian defense in spots along the southern front between the two countries, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley said Friday during a television interview with a Jordanian news outlet. "Specifically on the axes of advance that (Ukrainian forces) are attacking right now, (Ukrainian forces) have attacked through the main defense belt," Milley told Al-Mamlaka Television.

Show me a picture of Ukrainian tanks tackling a dragon's teeth barrier.

You have none? Well, then you haven't even reached the first defense line.

Ukraine has taken Robotyne, a hamlet in ruins that once housed 480 people. It has cost the Ukrainian army at least a full battalion, 500 men and 30 armored vehicles, of its dwindling forces.

The CIA media asset David Ignatius has delivered the latest White House message on Ukraine. It is continuing to push for a fight down to the last Ukrainian:

As Biden administration officials assess Ukraine’s slow progress in this summer’s counteroffensive, they have been candidly discussing with Kyiv what they see as “lessons learned.” The bottom line for the administration is that this war will probably grind into next year — and that the United States and its allies must remain steadfast in helping Ukraine keep pushing forward. I heard this same sentiment across all levels of the U.S. government in recent days. The summer has been frustrating and, in some ways, disappointing for Ukraine and its Western backers. But rather than look for a quick diplomatic exit ramp, most senior U.S. officials appear more convinced than ever of the need to stand fast with Kyiv. The United States, in their view, cannot be seen to abandon its ally.

There is a shimmer of realism breaking through but it is mixed with fantasies about the chances to bog Russia down:

But Ukraine probably won’t deal any decisive blow before year’s end. That means a continuation of this grueling war into 2024 and beyond, and a continuation of the heavy casualties and emotional trauma for both sides. U.S. officials believe strategic patience remains the best weapon against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who still thinks he can outlast Ukraine and the West.

Well, yes, Russia can outlast Ukraine and the West. Just look at the stupid advice the West is giving to Ukraine:

American commanders have long believed that the Ukrainians waste artillery fire in crushing barrages that emulate Soviet tactics. By one U.S. estimate, the Ukrainians have fired about 2 million rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition since the war began, nearly exhausting Western stockpiles. U.S. officials urge Ukraine instead to weight its artillery fires toward the most important targets and use them to advance quickly toward their objectives. Pentagon officials have also urged Ukraine to rely less on drones for battlefield awareness and more on ground reconnaissance forces, which can assess Russian positions better. And they have pressed Kyiv to give junior officers more latitude to exploit opportunities along the sprawling front. On all these points, U.S. officials believe the Ukrainians are responding positively. But the discussion has been prickly in recent weeks.

The above is not sound military advice but an acknowledgement that the West can not produce enough artillery ammunition and drones for Ukraine to proceed:

A recent Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report estimates that Russia fired 12 million artillery shells in 2022 and estimated the military would discharge seven million in 2023. This could indicate that Soviet-era stockpiles are thinning out. Still, the report notes that Russia is producing 2.5 million shells a year, in addition to munitions imports from North Korea and Iran. In stark contrast, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated in January that the United States could only produce 93,000 155mm shells a year, all of which go to training exercises. If the military achieves an accelerated production schedule, it will produce 240,000 shells yearly, still less than 10 percent of Russia’s current production. Ukrainian artillery fires 8,000 rounds daily, consuming an entire month of current U.S. munitions production. Even if the Pentagon achieves its stated goal of manufacturing 90,000 shells a month by FY 2025, it still is only half of Russia’s current production level.

That lack of production capability is being covered up by a 'send anything we have, no matter how useful' attitude:

As Biden administration officials assess the likelihood that the war will continue into next year and perhaps beyond, they’re considering several important new augmentations of Western support. There’s growing backing in Washington for providing rocket-launched cluster munitions, for example, which could strike deeper than the artillery-fired versions the United States began supplying last month.

The White House also wants Ukraine to increase its terror attacks on Russian ground:

With Ukrainian forces stymied on the ground, U.S. officials believe that President Volodymyr Zelensky will take the fight increasingly to Russian territory and occupied Crimea. Friday’s reported Ukrainian attacks — with 42 drones launched at Crimea and a missile aimed at Moscow, according to Russian reports — is a foretaste of what’s ahead. The Biden administration’s position is that it doesn’t encourage or enable Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, but officials do expect more.

They try to play innocent but in reality, as the Economist reports, the targeting of those attacks is done by Western intelligence:

Russia’s extensive air-defence and electronic-warfare capacity means that any Ukrainian attack requires meticulous planning. Ukraine has developed algorithms that appear to work. Operators launch in the early morning (when defenders’ concentration might be lapsing) and use an order of attack designed to keep air defences busy. They gather intelligence (often from Western partners) about radars, electronic warfare and air-defence assets.

Those are diversion attacks, not stuff that will decide the war.

The strategic advantage is clearly on the Russian side:

Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the military architect of German unification and one of history’s most famed soldiers, would instantly grasp the state of affairs in this summer of Ukrainian discontent. After Kiev and its Western backers hyped the prospects for the spring counteroffensive against Russia, the counteroffensive has posted fitful progress to date. Moltke would ascribe the disappointing results to the fact that the Ukrainian military confronts a foe waging the strongest form of warfare. Strategic offense coupled with tactical defense.  Moltke lays out the logic succinctly: “The tactical defense is the stronger [form of war], the strategic offensive the more effective form—and the only one that leads to the goal.” In other words, the contender that seizes or occupies some object or parcel of territory, then defends it tactically, primes itself for strategic and ultimately political success. In colloquial terms: grab something and hold it, and dare your enemy to come and take it back while fighting at a daunting disadvantage. For the German sage, in short, waging offense through defense blazes a path to triumph. Advantage: Russia.

Tactical defense is what Russia has been doing over the last months. It has ground down the attacking Ukrainian forces by all means  available to it. When they are done with it the Russian forces will launch their strategic offensive campaign. They are then likely to rapidly progress through thinned out Ukrainian lines.

No illegal rocket-launched cluster munitions, no F-16, no terror attack on Russia, can prevent that.

The Ukrainians are simply fighting the wrong war, for the wrong cause:

Ivan Katchanovski @I_Katchanovski - 14:49 UTC · Aug 27, 2023 Commander in Chief of Ukrainian Forces & popular Ukrainian writer pose with red & black flag & popular Ukrainian newspaper propagates this. This was flag of far-right OUN & UPA which collaborated with Nazi Germany & was involved in mass murder of Jews, Poles & Ukrainians. This flag was used by far-right Right Sector. Mainstreaming & whitewashing of OUN & UPA symbols, such as their flag & their "Glory to Ukraine & Glory to the Heroes" greeting, continues. https://life.pravda.com.ua/culture/2023/08/27/256152/

That flag, and the mindset behind it, is why Russia will not allow the Ukraine, and the U.S., to win.

[zee-man-chatter]

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

By William J. Astore

June 08, 2023: Information Clearing House --All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)

Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.

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In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.

Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)

Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

Lessons from History on Imperial Decline

I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.

And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.

As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.

As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.

For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.

That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.

Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.

Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?

Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.

Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.

The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.

History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.

What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is Bracing Views.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 3, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

One of my children asked me once if people living through the Great Depression understood just how bad their era would look to historians. I answered that, on the whole, I thought not. People are focused on what’s in front of them: finding work, feeding their kids, trying to keep it together, making it through the day. It’s only when historians look back to gauge an era that they put the full picture together.

So for those who cannot see it: we are in one of the most profound crises of American history.

We are in the midst of a vicious pandemic that is killing us at an astounding rate while the administration ignores it or, worse, exacerbates it by encouraging our neighbors to think that wearing masks and social distancing to protect lives is somehow a political statement they must resist. Cases of coronavirus are spiking across the country. Hospitals are overwhelmed and health care workers exhausted. More than 14 million Americans have been infected with the virus and more than 276,000 of us have died of it. Today saw over 211,762 new cases and 2,858 deaths. Tomorrow will likely be worse.

The pandemic has crippled our economy. After a brief recovery this summer, it is faltering again. More than 20 million Americans are receiving some sort of jobless benefits. Pressure is building for some sort of federal aid package to provide relief and stimulate the economy to bridge us over the next months as vaccines are distributed. But until that happens, people need to work to keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads, so they cannot lock down to stop the spread of the disease.

The president of the United States is ignoring the pandemic, instead spending his time fighting against the results of last month’s election. The president’s opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, won the election handily, by close to 7 million votes and by a majority of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. But Trump, supported by loyalists, continues to insist he has won, even though the states he claims will swing the Electoral College behind him have already certified their votes for Biden.

The attack of a president on the outcome of an election is unprecedented. Four times in American history, a candidate who has won the popular vote has lost in the Electoral College but the loser has bowed to our system, even though, curiously, it has always been a Republican who won under such circumstances and never a Democrat—indeed, Trump won in 2016 under just such a scenario.

In this instance, though, there is no misalignment between the popular vote and the Electoral College. Biden has won both, handily. And yet, the president is actively attacking the results and the underlying democratic system that produced them. His supporters are asking him to declare martial law and seize power, although the military has denounced this idea and those supporting it are making such increasingly wild claims that at some point they simply must fall apart. Indeed, there is reason to believe Trump's claims of fraud are simply a grift: his campaign was effectively broke before the election and he has raised more than $207 million since it. But, money grab or not, this is an unprecedented assault on our democracy.

There are, though, signs that change is in the wind. For all his drama, Trump is losing relevance. Today Congress finalized its draft of the defense authorization bill, and in it members of both parties pushed back on Trump’s demands. They refused to reduce the number of troops in Germany and South Korea, as he announced he would do in what appeared to be an attempt to weaken U.S. ties to Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), our military alliance there. Congress also ignored Trump’s demands to strip technology companies of liability protections (apparently he is angry when insulting names for him trend on Twitter) and his insistence that he would veto any measure that called for renaming military bases currently named for Confederate generals, a plan endorsed by members of both parties.

The measure also more directly rebukes Trump for things he either has already done or hasn’t done and should have. It orders the Secretary of Defense to report on Russian bounties offered to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for killing U.S. troops, limits how much military funding the president can move to domestic projects—as Trump tried to do for his border wall—and requires that federal law enforcement officers “visibly display” their names and the names of their agency when engaged in public responses. This summer, the officers dispatched to the streets of Washington, D.C., and other cities could not be identified. In another rebuke to the summer’s police violence, the measure also prohibits the Pentagon from handing off bayonets, certain combat vehicles, and weaponized drones to state and local law enforcement.

It is not just Congress that is pushing back on the president. Today the Associated Press broke the story that within the last two weeks, a political operative Trump had installed at the Department of Justice has actually been banned from the building after pressuring staffers to give her information about investigations, including those about the 2020 election. Heidi Stirrup, the appointee, is an ally of Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Today Trump appointed her to the board of visitors of the Air Force Academy. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes that it’s unlikely a Trump ally would have been physically removed from the Justice Department in the days before the election turned Trump into a lame duck.

In the first interview President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris have given since the election, aired tonight on CNN, they reiterated their support for all Americans and their determination to combat the coronavirus pandemic, saying they would ask everyone to commit to wearing a mask for the first 100 days of their administration. Harris told journalist Jake Tapper: “There couldn't be a more extreme exercise in stark contrast between the current occupant of the White House and the next occupant of the White House,” and the country will be better for the change, she said.

But it was CNN journalist Don Lemon who summed up this changing moment best. He told Tapper: “[I]t feels like we are watching ... a president-elect and a president who are on Earth One and Earth Two. And at this particular Earth that is in reality, it was very normal, very sedate. And it was welcoming news. It was good to watch. It was good to actually get content. We heard no fake news. We heard no conspiracy theories. We heard no personal grievances. We heard a President-Elect and a vice president who want to work with the other side.”

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[96thdayofrage]

WAR DAY 7️⃣1️⃣0️⃣3️⃣ 🍵 "Secretary of State Anthony Blinken might have been 'outraged' by a rocket attack on a U.S. base in northern Iraq – that killed a foreign contractor and wounded an American service member and several other contractors – but he shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, it’s the muddled US military mission and on-going troop presence itself that creates nearly all the conditions for current crisis. That this particular truth tablet might be rather uncomfortable to swallow doesn’t make it any less so.

"If Blinken’s boss needs proof, he might consider applying what we could call his very own 'Biden Rule:' that staffers should avoid overly academic or elitist language in memos or policy papers. 'Pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me,' he reportedly tells aides – 'If she understands, we can keep talking.' Well, does Joe really think most American mothers, or fathers, or other lay citizens, could honestly explain just what the heck US troops are doing – and may well die doing – in Iraq, almost 18 years after George W. Bush’s initial invasion? Give us a break! All that Washington wish-wash about avoiding ISIS-resurgence, 'building partner capacity,' and balancing Iran, is liable to get even a hometown boy like Biden laughed out of a Scranton pub.

"Nevertheless, such attacks could very well derail Biden’s announced intent to reestablish Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, or even lead to a military escalation. After all, earlier this week, NATO agreed to an eight-fold increase in troops for its training and advisory mission in Iraq, and Secretary Blinken has himself begun a review America’s Iraq policy – to include feedback from the Pentagon – which may reach the White House as early as next month.

"There’ve actually been three separate rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq over the last week, one targeting each of country’s distinct communal regions – Erbil in semi-autonomous Kurdistan, another on Balad in mostly Sunni Salah al-Din Province, and lastly on the Green Zone in Shia-heavy (especially since the 2005-08 civil war’s ethnic cleansings) Baghdad. It seems American troops and – more on this soon – contractors still aren’t safe anywhere inside Iraq.

"Odd, that, since I recall plenty past (premature) pronouncements that 'the surge worked,' and that 'we have defeated ISIS.' Well, the first [surge success] bit was always a farce, and, while the second suggestion is basically true – despite mop-up-ops that Iraqi and invested regional forces can handle – it ain’t ISIS that’s set to take the blame for the recently raining rockets. No, that supervillain stature shall – as ever – belong to Iran."

Bogus Boogyman Iran

"Iranophobia and Tehran-alarmism are gifts that keep on giving – if mostly to the likes of Lockheed and Raytheon – in Washington. Only there’s hardly any basis to the threat. The whole thing’s political theater, a false binary blame game meant for domestic consumption and signal-sending to America’s Israeli and Gulf Monarchy mates. Thing is, real people die behind such drama.

"It all starts with what should be suspicious certainty of bipartisan policymakers and media pundits that Tehran’s tugging all the rocket-flingers’ strings. Take Ned Price, spokesman for Biden’s polite liberal State Department. He said, after Monday’s attack on Baghdad’s Green Zone that the US holds Iran responsible for the recent rocket spurt. Then there’s Trump’s former assistant secretary of state for Middle East policy, David Schenker, who was sure – after the initial Erbil attack – that: 'Ultimately, this is all about Iran – the missiles, the weaponry, the funding, the direction all comes from Tehran.' Then again, it’s always worth considering the source. In this case, Mr. Schenker is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy – which is known for its fiercely and uncritically pro-Israel stance, and was initially funded by the Israel Lobby-top dog AIPAC’s donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and originally located just one door away from AIPAC’s D.C. headquarters.

"Then throw in Douglas Silliman, formerly US ambassador to Iraq from 2016 to 2019, who asserted after the Erbil attack: 'I have no doubt who’s behind it. It is the Iranian-supported Iraqi Shia militias who are behind this.' Only here again an astute observer must channel the street-wisdom of Queens’ own rapper 50 Cent and thus – 'step up in' the Washington 'club' and ask 'Who you wit?' In Silliman’s case, it isn’t 'G-Unit' but the Arab Gulf States Institute that’s now his post-government service 'clique.' In fact, he’s president of the damn thing. Keep an eye on that, it might matter – seeing as from the think tank’s 2015 inception, it was funded entirely by UAE and Saudi sources. You know, it’s enough to make you wonder whether Silliman’s Gulf autocrat paymasters – locked as they are in perennial quasi-war with Iran – might have some investment (pun intended) in having ol' Doug pin the latest bombs-over-Baghdad squarely on Tehran.

"Still, setting such conflicts of interest aside for the sake of argument, both Schenker’s and Silliman’s Iran-the-omniscient assertions strike as just a little too neat, too convenient for Washington’s hovering hawks. Maybe these specific guns did flow from Iran; maybe they didn’t. However, Tehran’s aren’t the only tools available. Iraq has long been awash with weapons, as anyone who ever walked a Baghdad beat – or frightened a few families with aggressive late-night house searches – knows all too well.

"Furthermore, despite Washington’s bipartisan propensity to 'create the enemies it needs' [in order to reap profits and power, that is] – by fabricating foes that seem ten-feet-tall and bulletproof – the truth is Iran hasn’t half the armed strength, or clear control over Iraqi proxies, as the hawks would have you believe. On the military side, Tehran’s mostly weak and unable to project any real power very far at all. Furthermore, as I noted in a 2019 Defense Priorities analysis, Iran’s American-allied regional antagonists – Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE, for example – militarily outspend Tehran by a factor of ten!

"As for Iran’s ostensibly ironclad grip on the Iraqi militias allegedly launching all them rockets – if not exactly a mirage, the situation is definitely far more complex and ambiguous than all that. This much even some senior military officers occasionally admit. For example, after the Erbil attack, the U.S.-led coalition’s counter-ISIS mission deputy commander for strategy, British Army Major General Kevin Copsey, surmised that the fusillade was likely the work of an offshoot, not the core, of the mainline militias typically linked to Tehran. He also noted the crucial – if oft-ignored – concept of local agency: that paramilitaries and their associated politicians pursue personal motives and interests when deciding whether to take violent action.

"Copsey described it thus: 'You have your main militia groups, which arguably have their influence back into Tehran, and then you have these splinter groups that are self-interested. And they’re unpredictable and they’re out of control.' Allow me to surmise that the key words there are 'arguably,' 'self-interested,' and 'unpredictable.' In rebellions, proxy conflicts, and civil wars, matters are rarely clear, and always contingent.

"Here’s the basic rub: The ill-advised and illegal 2003 US military invasion caused most of the current madness; Trump’s 'maximum pressure' sanctions and saber-rattling predictably and demonstrably backfired; Iran’s offensive military capacity is actually rather limited and wildly exaggerated. Yet the one weapon it does have – as do the militias Tehran may or may not have sway over – are several variants of ballistic and cruise missiles.

"To review, then: America’s murky, no-exit, mission plays right into Tehran’s only viable military hands – not only strengthening the hardliners in their government, but turning our ever-adulated soldiers into little more than bewildered rocket-magnets."

Context Counts

"If Biden bolsters the US military’s anti-Iran proxy combat mission – which masquerades as ISIS-elimination – it will, by my count, constitute the fifth phase of America’s 30+ year war on or in Iraq. Call it Iraq War IV. Kind of has a nice ring to it, and ask any movie producer – sequels sell, even if they usually make for awful art (Godfather II aside, naturally). The cost of the running franchise has been fatal for some 2.5 million Iraqis – bombed, shot, starved, or diseased – over those three old school-imperial decades.

"Here on the tail end, in January 2020, the Iraqi government’s American friends went so far as to assassinate the top Iranian political and military figure Qasem Suleimani – on Iraqi soil, without informing the Baghdad government – thereby challenging and insulting Iraqi sovereignty. This triggered (imagine that) a not yet broken wave of political fury within both neighboring countries. In response, the Iraqi parliament voted to require the government to 'end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil and prevent the use of Iraqi airspace, soil and water for any reason' by foreign troops.

"Washington promptly ignored the democratic will of the Iraqi democracy it claimed to have built via its absurdly titled 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' 2003 invasion. There may (for now) be only 2,500 uniformed Americans in country, but these days, a big part of what’s long-bothered average Iraqis is Washington’s use of sundry – and often unhinged – civilian security contractors to do much of the occupying."

Mercenary Camouflage

"Given the tortured track record of America’s mercenary misadventures, perhaps Iraqis can be forgiven their frustration with the ongoing US presence in their country. Anger tends to come in waves and flared again last month, when dear Donald pardoned four American security contractors – from the infamous Blackwater outfit – for their roles in massacring 17 Iraqi civilians around Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. I was in town for that sick show, and we in uniform sure felt some of the understandable blowback. Clearly, American policymakers aren’t exactly known for their self-awareness. Still, it hardly seems as outrageous as Secretary Blinken claimed that some locals might fling a few rockets at a few foreigner bases – and many more countrymen view it as legitimate resistance – when their own government’s Washingtonian 'friends' just let four Iraqi-child-killers off the hook. I don’t know, call me crazy.

"Either way, all this raises the not-so-minor matter of America’s shadowy security contracting apparatus in Iraq – an occupation-outsourcing as old as the adventure itself. The combat and logistics privatization factor is exposed in the composition of casualties in these ubiquitous rocket attacks. Over the last few years, more often than not the majority of the dead and injured have been contractors. For example, Saturday night’s strike on Balad airbase reportedly wounded a South African – I know, a bit on the nose for the mercenary game – employee of the US defense company Sallyport.

"This subsidiary of Caliburn International LLC – which has no less than five retired generals and admirals on its board, including former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly and former Bush-era CIA director Michael Hayden – had been contracted to provide base services supporting Iraq’s F-16 fighter program. Caliburn is perhaps better known for another of its subsidiaries operating America’s largest facility for unaccompanied migrant children. However, as of 2018, the US government had reportedly paid Sallyport itself over $1 billion since 2014 to provide security, life support, and various training at Balad Air Base.

"There, Sallyport has been mired in past scandal. In 2019, a Daily Beast report indicated that The Department of Justice was investigating the company’s earlier alleged role in bribing Iraqi government officials in exchange for contracts costing American taxpayers billions. The Daily Beast’s earlier 2017 investigation also exposed that a clique of white South African security guards – the very nationality of the employee reportedly wounded in the recent rocket strike – had been promoting apartheid and abusing Sallyport’s minority members (along, apparently, with the base’s local dogs). By the way, the irony of Washington – amidst an era of renewed racial turmoil at home – hiring thousands of ex-apartheid soldiers to man its conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa: well, it almost defies imagination.

"So sure, there are key – if rarely reported – contractor connections to the recent rocket attacks. Yet, widening the aperture reveals far the broader and systemic mercenary madness masking – and underpinning – America’s entire enterprise in Iraq and the Greater Middle East. And unless Status Quo Joe, and a largely bought & sold (by defense industry campaign contributions) Congress, address this invisible enemy, then messing at the margins with uniformed boots-on-the-ground counts won’t measurably alter America’s two-decade-old regional adventure-fiasco. Oh, and speaking of those masters of the military-industrial complex contributions to the very congressmen with the power to end this entire hopeless crusade – recall that the F-16s Sallyport secures for the Iraqi Air Force are produced by Lockheed Martin. In the 2018 midterm elections alone, Lockheed bestowed $2,865,014 in blood money on the Capitol Hill crew.

"Only that ain’t the half of it. Consider the scale of the US contractor apparatus, by-the-numbers: In 2019, the Pentagon spent $370 billion on contracting – in other words, more than half its total discretionary spending. By the DOD’s own reckoning – during 1st quarter of FY21 – that translates to 38,164 contractor personnel supporting Pentagon operations in just the US Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility (AOR – from essentially Egypt to Afghanistan). That includes 4,677 in the Iraq-Syria sub-theater – 2,300 of them American citizens. Which is to say, contractors now maintain more than a 2 to 1 ratio over US military members in the CENTCOM sphere.

"There’s a design, and a cost, to all this. According to her June 2020 report, what Heidi Peltier of Brown University’s Cost of War Initiative called the contracting 'Camo Economy,' has been used by the US government to conceal the costs – in cash, killing, and American blood – of its endless, meandering, military missions. The proof is in the mortality pudding: since 2001, some 8,000 US contractors have died in America’s Greater Mideast adventures – that’s actually more than the Pentagon’s official tally of 7,056 uniformed troop deaths.

"That few people know this, exposes its enduring political utility. A one minute Google search offers precise, to-a-man and up-to-date, statistics on US military deaths – but I wouldn’t wish the required Department of Labor archive-mining to find contractor casualty details on my worst enemy. Take it from me, it’s a maddening enough rabbit-hole-spiral to garner a grin from Kafka. And, as matters now stand, more deaths of those once invisible contractors could end up pulling the US into yet another phase of hopeless, wasteful war in Iraq. Now that’d deserve the American foreign policy tragicomedy award for 2021.

"Look, I like context and nuance as much as the next guy, but sometimes the simplicity of 'Sutton’s Law' – a medical mantra that, when diagnosing, one should first test for the obvious – is the best policy prescription. The dictate derives from real-life famed criminal folk hero Willie Sutton, who when asked why he robbed banks, replied – perhaps apocryphally – 'Because that’s where the money is!' It’s a hell of a story, the sort Biden’s sure to like.

"And in a sense, it tracks today’s mess. Ask an ayatollah or a local militiaman why he allegedly attacks US bases in Iraq – and a clever one might accurately quip: 'Because that’s where the Americans are!'

"In other words…because we’re there."

###

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP), contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and director of the new Eisenhower Media Network (EMN). His work has appeared in the NY Times, LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, The American Conservative, Mother Jones, Scheer Post and Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge, and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War. Along with fellow vet Chris "Henri" Henriksen, he co-hosts the podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet and on his website for media requests and past publications.

_____

🍵 All Risk, No Reward: The Perils and Absurdity of Iraq War 4.0. By Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.), Antiwar.com, Feb. 25, 2021.

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2021/02/24/all-risk-no-reward-the-perils-and-absurdity-of-iraq-war-4-0/?fbclid=IwAR0URXJQNDvEP5zpVqk6hlEiAGapknSZ6vhg5jHMZ_1nI-Zg7Y0h3uyuRjk

[yobaba30]

Save the date: Economic Shutdown and Protest 3/2/ 2020

  The late French President Charles de Gaulle, once said (paraphrasing) that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was one of the most amazing military strategists in history and that if Lee had had.access to goods and services on par with the North, the South would have won the Civil War. Thank God the South lost. Donald Trump, his criminal family & administration led by AG William Barr, & the Republican politicians across the country led by GOP Senator Mitch McConnell, have declared war against the American people. There are two things driving this, money and racism. They are systematically destroying everything on which our country is founded, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Rule of Law while stealing taxpayer dollars, depriving Americans of basic necessities such as health care, senior citizen’s social security, medicare and more. Why? Because of their fear of losing their place at the top of the food chain and minorities.

There is only one way to stop the carnage these anti-American criminals are   subjecting the people to and ‘you and I’ can’t do this alone. We need to stage a full economic and nonviolent shutdown of the United States of America. Super Tuesday for the 2020 elections is March 3rd. The most effective date for the shutdown would be Monday, March 2, 2020. 

 An economic shutdown entails acquiring enough food, water and gasoline to last three days for yourself and your families. Then on March 2nd, we do not go to work, school, shopping (even on line) and we stage mass protests throughout the country with particular emphasis on the  White House, the US Capitol, the Pentagon, Joint Base Andrews, Trump Tower in New York, Maralago in Florida (all of Trump’s properties) and the offices and homes of all Republican politicians including their state offices and homes. We include all modes of transportation,  airports, railways, vehicle crossings and seaports. We spend absolutely no money on March 2nd. The only exceptions are emergency services.Then on March 3rd, we all go vote before we resume our normal lives and we vote against every single Republican politician in the country.

  We’re sending them a message, clean up your act, remove the illegally elected President, work for the people or we will do the same thing in November 2020.

This is our country, we have shed the blood of millions of Americans to keep it and under no circumstances will We the People allow a malignant narcissistic degenerate sociopath and his criminal enterprise to take away our America. If you are with me, please RT and help organize your community and state.

The purpose of an economic shutdown is to demonstrate in real time that Trump & GOP cannot function without the people. The American people are the economic engine of the entire world. We have the power & if we do not act NOW we will lose it. We're going on offense. History matters. Think of this as our French Revolution, except instead of using weapons, we're going to use the one thing Trump & the GOP covet:

$$ Money $$

We're going to take away their money. It's OUR country; it was built with our blood. We're Americans and we can do this. Don't let the pundits misdirect you. We cannot put our economic shutdown off. Here's why:

About voting. March 2nd is strategic, because it is the day before we vote on SUPER TUESDAY. Fifteen jurisdictions and the Democrats Abroad are expected to hold a primary event on Super Tuesday --> Alabama, American, Samoa, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.  With both California and Texas—the two most populous states in the United States—holding their primaries on Super Tuesday, more than one third of the U.S. population is expected to vote on March 3.

We want tRUmp & his Cabal to understand the connection between the economic shutdown and the election. If you're worried, request an absentee ballot. The big challenge is getting the word out & achieving critical mass for this to work.

Someone: Call publicists for celebs against Trump like Robert Reich, Sarah Silverman, Bette Midler, Dan Rather, Stephen King, etc.

[klbmsw]

“Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified’

By Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris and Josh Dawsey October 4, 2019 at 7:19 PM EDT nytimes.com

“In one of his first calls with a head of state, President Trump fawned over Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling the man who ordered interference in America’s 2016 election that he was a great leader and apologizing profusely for not calling him sooner.”

He pledged to Saudi officials in another call that he would help the monarchy enter the elite Group of Seven, an alliance of the world’s leading democratic economies.”

“He promised the president of Peru that he would deliver to his country a C-130 military cargo plane overnight, a logistical nightmare that set off a herculean scramble in the West Wing and Pentagon.”

“And in a later call with Putin, Trump asked the former KGB officer for his guidance in forging a friendship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — a fellow authoritarian hostile to the United States.”

“Starting long before revelations about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president rocked Washington, Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials. They worried that Trump would make promises he shouldn’t keep, endorse policies the United States long opposed, commit a diplomatic blunder that jeopardized a critical alliance or simply pressure a counterpart for a personal favor.”

“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”

“But Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went beyond whether the leader of the free world had committed a faux pas, and into grave concerns, he had engaged in a possible crime or impeachable offense. The release last week of a whistleblower complaint alleging Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals as well as the release of a rough transcript of the July call led to House Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump.”

“The Ukraine controversy has put a renewed focus on Trump’s un­or­tho­dox way of interacting with fellow world leaders in diplomatic calls. Critics, including some former administration officials, contend that Trump’s behavior on calls with foreign leaders has at times created unneeded tensions with allies and sent troubling signals to adversaries or authoritarians that the United States supports or at least does not care about human rights or their aggressive behavior elsewhere in the world.”

“Joel Willett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, said he was concerned both by the descriptions of a president winging it, and the realization that the president’s behavior disturbs and frightens career civil servants.”

“What a burden it must be to be stuck between your position of trust in the White House and another obligation you may feel to the American people to say something,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday or Friday.”

“Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the president speaks his mind and diverges from other presidents who follow protocol. Graham said he saw nothing distressing in the president’s July 25 call with Zelensky and said he expected it to be worse, partially given his own experience with Trump on the phone.”

“If you take half of my phone calls with him, it wouldn’t read as cleanly and nicely,” he said, adding that the president sounded like a “normal person.”

“This story is based on interviews with 12 former or current officials with knowledge of the president’s foreign calls. These officials had direct involvement in the calls, were briefed on them or read the transcripts afterward. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s private conversations with world leaders.”

“The first call Trump made that set off alarm bells came less than two weeks after his inauguration. On Jan. 28, Trump called Putin for what should have been a routine formality: accepting a foreign leader’s congratulations. Former White House officials described Trump as “obsequious” and “fawning,” but said he also rambled off into different topics without any clear point, while Putin appeared to stick to formal talking points for a first official exchange.”

“He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my people didn’t tell me you wanted to talk to me,’ ” said one person with direct knowledge of the call.”

“Trump has been consistently cozy with authoritarian leaders, sparking anxiety among aides about the solicitous tones he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin.”

“We couldn’t figure out early on why he was being so nice to Russia,” one former senior administration official said. H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, launched an internal campaign to get Trump to be more skeptical of the Russians. Officials expressed surprise in both of his early Putin calls at why he was so friendly.”

  “In another call, in April 2017, Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had overseen a brutal campaign that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers, that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

“Trump’s personal goals seeped into calls. He pestered Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for help in recommending him for a Nobel Prize, according to an official familiar with the call. “People who could do things for him — he was nice too,” said one former security official. “Leaders with trade deficits, strong female leaders, members of NATO — those tended to go badly.”

“Aides bristled at the dismissive way he sometimes addressed longtime U.S. allies, especially women. In a summer 2018 call with Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump harangued the British leader about her country’s contribution to NATO. He then disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder and poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.”

“Trump was totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning,” said one person briefed on the call. “A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it’s highly likely and him saying he’s not sure.”

“Trump would sometimes make commitments to foreign leaders that flew in the face of U.S. policy and international agreements, as when he told a Saudi royal that he would support their country’s entry into the G-7.”

“The G-7 is supposed to be the allies with whom we share the most common values and the deepest commitment to upholding the rules-based order,” the former official said.”

“Russia was kicked out of the group in 2014 for violating international law when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Trump has publicly advocated for Russia to be allowed back in. Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and has a record of human rights abuses, wasn’t a fit candidate for membership, the former official said.”

“Saudi Arabia was not admitted to the group. Calls with foreign leaders have often been highly orchestrated events in past administrations.”

“When I was at the White House, there was a very deliberative process of the president absorbing information from people who had deep substantive knowledge of the countries and relationships with these leaders. Preparation for these calls was taken very seriously,” Willett said. “It appears to be freestyle and ad-libbed now.”

“Trump has rejected much of the protocol and preparation associated with foreign calls, even as his national security team tried to establish goals for each conversation.”

“Instead, Trump often sought to use calls as a way to befriend whoever he was talking to, one current senior administration official said, defending the president. “So he might say something that sounds terrible to the outside, but in his mind, he’s trying to build a relationship with that person and sees flattery as the way to do it.”

“The president resisted long briefings before calls or reading in preparation, several former officials said. McMaster, who preferred providing the president with the information he could use to make decisions, resigned himself to giving Trump small notecards with bulleted highlights and talking points.”

“You had two to three minutes max,” said one former senior administration official. “And then he was still usually going to say whatever he wanted to say.”

“As a result, staff fretted that Trump came across ill-informed in some calls, and even oafish. In a conversation with China’s Xi, Trump repeated numerous times how much he liked a kind of chocolate cake, one former official said. The president publicly described the dessert the two had in April 2017 when Trump and Xi met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen.”

“Trump preferred to make calls from the residence, which frustrated some NSC staff and West Wing aides who wanted to be on hand to give the president real-time advice. If he held the call in the Oval Office, aides would gather around the desk and pass him notes to try to keep the calls on point. On a few occasions, then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly muted the call to try to get the president back on track, two officials said.”

“Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, and critic, said the calls fit Trump’s style as a business leader. “When he had to get on calls with investors on a publicly-traded company, they had to worry that he would break securities laws and lie about the company’s profits,” O’Brien said. “When he would go and meet with regulators with the casino control commission, his lawyers were always worried under oath, in a public setting, that he would say something that would be legally damaging.”

“Though calls with foreign leaders are routinely planned in advance, Trump a few times called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron unannounced as if they were friends, a former administration official said.”

“After some early summaries of Trump calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia leaked to the press in 2017, the White House tightened restrictions on who could access the transcripts and kept better track of who had custody of copies. For example, Vice President Pence still received a courtesy copy of any foreign-leader call, but his staff now had to sign off when they transported it to his office and also sign off when they returned or destroyed the document.”

“Some former officials said that over time staff became used to the oddity of some calls even if they still found them troubling.”

“People had gotten really numb to him blurting out something he shouldn’t have,” one former national security staffer remarked.”

“But officials who had served in the White House through the end of 2018 were still shocked by the whistleblower complaint about the effort to “lockdown” records of Trump’s July 25 call. The complaint said White House officials ordered the transcript moved into a highly secure computer system, known as NICE, which is normally reserved only for information about the most sensitive code-word-level intelligence programs.”

“Unheard of,” said one former official who handled foreign calls. “That just blew me away.”

nytimes.com

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[bountyofbeads]

With Trump as President, the World Is Spiraling Into Chaos https://nyti.ms/305ERbG

With Trump as President, the World Is Spiraling Into Chaos

Trump torched America’s foreign policy infrastructure. The results are becoming clear.

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist | Published August 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

Earlier this week, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Asad Majeed Khan, visited The New York Times editorial board, and I asked him about the threat of armed conflict between his country and India over Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over the Himalayan territory, which both countries claim, and which is mostly divided between them. India recently revoked the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the part of Kashmir it controls and put nearly seven million people there under virtual house arrest. Pakistan’s prime minister  compared India’s leaders to Nazis and warned that they’ll target Pakistan next. It seems like there’s potential for humanitarian and geopolitical horror.

Khan’s answer was not comforting. “We are two big countries with very large militaries with nuclear capability and a history of conflict,” he said. “So I would not like to burden your imagination on that one, but obviously if things get worse, then things get worse.”

All over the world, things are getting worse. China appears to be weighing a Tiananmen Square-like crackdown in Hong Kong. After I spoke to Khan, hostilities between India and Pakistan ratcheted up further; on Thursday, fighting across the border in Kashmir left three Pakistani soldiers dead. (Pakistan also claimed that five Indian soldiers were killed, but India denied it.) Turkey is threatening to invade Northeast Syria to go after America’s Kurdish allies there, and it’s not clear if an American agreement meant to prevent such an incursion will hold.

North Korea’s nuclear program and ballistic missile testing continue apace. The prospect of a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine is more remote than it’s been in decades. Tensions between America and Iran keep escalating. Relations between Japan and South Korea have broken down. A Pentagon report warns that ISIS is “re-surging” in Syria. The U.K. could see food shortages if the country’s Trumpish prime minister, Boris Johnson, follows through on his promise to crash out of the European Union without an agreement in place for the aftermath. Oh, and the globe may be lurching towards recession.

In a world spiraling towards chaos, we can begin to see the fruits of Donald Trump’s erratic, amoral and incompetent foreign policy, his systematic undermining of alliances and hollowing out of America’s diplomatic and national security architecture. Over the last two and a half years, Trump has been playing Jenga with the world order, pulling out once piece after another. For a while, things more or less held up. But now the whole structure is teetering.

To be sure, most of these crises have causes other than Trump. Even competent American administrations can’t dictate policy to other countries, particularly powerful ones like India and China. But in one flashpoint after another, the Trump administration has either failed to act appropriately, or acted in ways that have made things worse. “Almost everything they do is the wrong move,” said Susan Thornton, who until last year was the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, America’s top diplomat for Asia.

Consider Trump’s role in the Kashmir crisis. In July, during a White House visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Trump offered to mediate India and Pakistan’s long-running conflict over Kashmir, even suggesting that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him to do so. Modi’s government quickly denied this, and Trump’s words reportedly alarmed India, which has long resisted outside involvement in Kashmir. Two weeks later, India sent troops to lock Kashmir down, then stripped it of its autonomy.

Americans have grown used to ignoring Trump’s casual lies and verbal incontinence, but people in other countries have not. Thornton thinks the president’s comments were a “precipitating factor” in Modi’s decision to annex Kashmir. By blundering into the conflict, she suggested, Trump put the Indian prime minister on the defensive before his Hindu nationalist constituency. “He might not have had to do that,” she said of Modi’s Kashmir takeover, “but he would have had to do something. And this was the thing he was looking to do anyway.”

At the same time, Modi can be confident that Trump, unlike previous American presidents, won’t even pretend to care about democratic backsliding or human rights abuses, particularly against Muslims. “There’s a cost-benefit analysis that any political leader makes,” said Ben Rhodes, a former top Obama national security aide. “If the leader of India felt like he was going to face public criticism, potential scrutiny at the United Nations,” or damage to the bilateral relationship with the United States, “that might affect his cost-benefit analysis.” Trump’s instinctive sympathy for authoritarian leaders empowers them diplomatically.

Obviously, India and Pakistan still have every interest in avoiding a nuclear holocaust. China may show restraint on Hong Kong. Wary of starting a war before the 2020 election, Trump might make a deal with Iran, though probably a worse one than the Obama agreement that he jettisoned. The global economy could slow down but not seize up. We could get through the next 17 months with a world that still looks basically recognizable.

Even then, America will emerge with a desiccated diplomatic corps, strained alliances, and a tattered reputation. It will never again play the same leadership role internationally that it did before Trump.

And that’s the best-case scenario. The most powerful country in the world is being run by a sundowning demagogue whose oceanic ignorance is matched only by his gargantuan ego. The United States has been lucky that things have hung together as much as they have, save the odd government shutdown or white nationalist terrorist attack. But now, in foreign affairs as in the economy, the consequences of not having a functioning American administration are coming into focus. “No U.S. leadership is leaving a vacuum,” said Thornton. We’ll see what gets sucked into it.

If You Think Trump Is Helping Israel, You’re a Fool

By barring Representatives Omar and Tlaib, Netanyahu made the president happy. But he has poisoned relations with America.

By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist | Published Aug. 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

I am going to say this as simply and clearly as I can: If you’re an American Jew and you’re planning on voting for Donald Trump because you think he is pro-Israel, you’re a damn fool.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Trump has said and done many things that are in the interests of the current Israeli government — and have been widely appreciated by the Israeli public. To deny that would be to deny the obvious. But here’s what’s also obvious. Trump’s way of — and motivation for — expressing his affection for Israel is guided by his political desire to improve his re-election chances by depicting the entire Republican Party as pro-Israel and the entire Democratic Party as anti-Israel.

As a result, Trump — with the knowing help of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — is doing something no American president and Israeli prime minister have done before: They’re making support for Israel a wedge issue in American politics.

Few things are more dangerous to Israel’s long-term interests than its becoming a partisan matter in America, which is Israel’s vital political, military and economic backer in the world.

As Dore Gold, the right-wing former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and once a very close adviser to Netanyahu, warned in a dialogue at the Hudson Institute on Nov. 27, 2018: “You reach out to Democrats, and you reach out to Republicans. And you don’t get caught playing partisan politics in the United States.’’

Trump’s campaign to tar the entire Democratic Party with some of the hostile views toward Israel of a few of its newly elected congresswomen — and Netanyahu’s careless willingness to concede to Trump’s demand and bar two of them, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, from visiting Israel and the West Bank — is part of a process that will do huge, long-term damage to Israel’s interests and support in America.

Netanyahu later relented and granted a visa to Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, for a private, “humanitarian’’ visit to see her 90-year-old grandmother — provided she agree in writing not to advocate the boycott of Israel while there. At first Tlaib agreed, but then decided that she would not come under such conditions.

Excuse me, but when did powerful Israel — a noisy, boisterous democracy where Israeli Arabs in its parliament say all kinds of wild and crazy things — get so frightened by what a couple of visiting freshman American congresswomen might see or say? When did Israel get so afraid of saying to them: “Come, visit, go anywhere you want! We’ve got our warts and we’ve got our good stuff. We’d just like you to visit both. But if you don’t, we’ll live with that too. We’re pretty tough.’’

It’s too late for that now. The damage of what Trump and Bibi have been up to — formally making Israel a wedge issue in American politics — is already done. Do not be fooled: Netanyahu, through his machinations with Senate Republicans, can get the United States Congress to give him an audience anytime he wants. But Bibi could not speak on any major American college campus today without massive police protection. The protests would be huge.

And listen now to some of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — you can hear how unhappy they are with the behavior of this Israeli government and its continued occupation of the West Bank. And they are not afraid to say so anymore. As The Jerusalem Post reported on July 11, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose presidential candidacy has rallied in recent weeks, told two Jewish anti-occupation activists ‘yes’ when they asked her for support.’’

But who can blame them? Trump is equating the entire Democratic Party with hatred for Israel, while equating support for Netanyahu — who leads the most extreme, far-right government that Israel has ever had, who is facing indictment on three counts of corruption and whose top priority is getting re-elected so that he can have the Israeli Knesset overrule its justice system and keep him out of court — with loving Israel.

How many young Americans want to buy into that narrative? If Bibi wins, he plans to pass a law banning his own indictment on corruption, and then, when Israel’s Supreme Court strikes down that law as illegal, he plans to get the Knesset to pass another law making the Supreme Court subservient to his parliament. I am not making this up. Israel will become a Jewish banana republic.

If and when that happens, every synagogue, every campus Hillel, every Jewish institution, every friend of Israel will have to ask: Can I support such an Israel? It will tear apart the entire pro-Israel community and every synagogue and Jewish Federation.

Then add another factor. By moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — and turning that embassy, led by a Trump crony, Ambassador David Friedman, into an outpost for advancing the interests of Israeli Jewish settlers, not American interests — Trump has essentially greenlighted the Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

Again, should Netanyahu remain prime minister — which is possible only if he puts together a ruling coalition made up of far-right parties that want to absorb the West Bank and its 2.5 million Palestinians into Israel — Israel will be on its way to becoming either a binational state of Arabs and Jews or a state that systematically deprives a large and growing segment of its population of the democratic right to vote. Neither will be a Jewish democracy, the dream of Israel’s founders and still the defining, but endangered, political characteristic of the state.

Don’t get me wrong. I strongly oppose the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — which Representatives Omar and Tlaib have embraced — because it wants to erase the possibility of a two-state solution. And I am particularly unhappy with Representative Omar.

I know a lot about her home district in Minnesota, because I grew up in it, in St. Louis Park. Omar represents the biggest concentration of Jews and Muslims living together in one district in the Upper Midwest. She was perfectly placed to be a bridge builder between Muslims and Jews. Instead, sadly, she has been a bridge destroyer between the two since she came to Washington. But anytime she is legitimately criticized, Democrats automatically scream “Islamophobia’’ and defend her. That’s as disturbing as Trump.

I know that more than a few Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, who face so many challenges — from gang violence to unemployment — are asking why is Omar spending time on the West Bank of the Jordan and not on the West Bank of the Mississippi?

I love Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs — but God save me from some of their American friends. So many of them just want to exploit this problem to advance themselves politically, get attention, raise money or delegitimize their opponents.

In that, Trump is not alone — he’s just the worst of the worst.

[harrelltut]

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[theculturedmarxist]

My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.

The year 1929 brought the Great Depression and lean times. My father’s father had left the family, so my dad, then 12, had to pitch in. He got a newspaper route, which he kept for four years, quitting high school after tenth grade so he could earn money for the family. In 1935, like millions of other young men of that era, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a creation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that offered work on environmental projects of many kinds. He battled forest fires in Oregon for two years before returning to his family and factory work. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army, going back to a factory job when World War II ended. Times grew a little less lean in 1951 when he became a firefighter, after which he felt he could afford to buy a house and start a family.

I’m offering all this personal history as the context for a prediction of my dad’s that, for obvious reasons, came to my mind again recently. When I was a teenager, he liked to tell me: “I had it tough in the beginning and easy in the end. You, Willy, have had it easy in the beginning, but will likely have it tough in the end.” His prophecy stayed with me, perhaps because even then, somewhere deep down, I already suspected that my dad was right.

The COVID-19 pandemic is now grabbing the headlines, all of them, and a global recession, if not a depression, seems like a near-certainty. The stock market has been tanking and people’s lives are being disrupted in fundamental and scary ways. My dad knew the experience of losing a loved one to disease, of working hard to make ends meet during times of great scarcity, of sacrificing for the good of one’s family. Compared to him, it’s true that, so far, I’ve had an easier life as an officer in the Air Force and then a college teacher and historian. But at age 57, am I finally ready for the hard times to come? Are any of us?

And keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Climate change (recall Australia’s recent and massive wildfires) promises yet more upheavals, more chaos, more diseases. America’s wanton militarism and lying politicians promise more wars. What’s to be done to avert or at least attenuate the tough times to come, assuming my dad’s prediction is indeed now coming true? What can we do?

It’s Time to Reimagine America

Here’s the one thing about major disruptions to normalcy: they can create opportunities for dramatic change. (Disaster capitalists know this, too, unfortunately.) President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this in the 1930s and orchestrated his New Deal to revive the economy and put Americans like my dad back to work.

In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney capitalized on the shock-and-awe disruption of the 9/11 attacks to inflict on the world their vision of a Pax Americana, effectively a militarized imperium justified (falsely) as enabling greater freedom for all. The inherent contradiction in such a dreamscape was so absurd as to make future calamity inevitable. Recall what an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scribbled down, only hours after the attack on the Pentagon and the collapse of the Twin Towers, as his boss’s instructions (especially when it came to looking for evidence of Iraqi involvement): “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” And indeed they would do just that, with an emphasis on the “not,” including, of course, the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

To progressive-minded people thinking about this moment of crisis, what kind of opportunities might open to us when (or rather if) Donald Trump is gone from the White House? Perhaps this coronaviral moment is the perfect time to consider what it would mean for us to go truly big, but without the usual hubris or those disastrous invasions of foreign countries. To respond to COVID-19, climate change, and the staggering wealth inequities in this country that, when combined, will cause unbelievable levels of needless suffering, what’s needed is a drastic reordering of our national priorities.

Remember, the Fed’s first move was to inject $1.5 trillion into the stock market. (That would have been enough to forgive all current student debt.) The Trump administration has also promised to help airlines, hotels, and above all oil companies and the fracking industry, a perfect storm when it comes to trying to sustain and enrich those upholding a kleptocratic and amoral status quo.

This should be a time for a genuinely new approach, one fit for a world of rising disruption and disaster, one that would define a new, more democratic, less bellicose America. To that end, here are seven suggestions, focusing — since I’m a retired military officer — mainly on the U.S. military, a subject that continues to preoccupy me, especially since, at present, that military and the rest of the national security state swallow up roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending:

1. If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. There was never, for example, any sense in investing up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal. (Why are new weapons needed to exterminate humanity when the “old” ones still work just fine?) Hundreds of stealth fighters and bombers — it’s estimated that Lockheed Martin’s disappointing F-35 jet fighter alone will cost $1.5 trillion over its life span — do nothing to secure us from pandemics, the devastating effects of climate change, or other all-too-pressing threats. Such weaponry only emboldens a militaristic and chauvinistic foreign policy that will facilitate yet more wars and blowback problems of every sort. And speaking of wars, isn’t it finally time to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? More than $6 trillion has already been wasted on those wars and, in this time of global peril, even more is being wasted on this country’s forever conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (Roughly $4 billion a month continues to be spent on Afghanistan alone, despite all the talk about “peace” there.)

2. Along with ending profligate weapons programs and quagmire wars, isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? Roughly 800 U.S. military bases circle the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion at a yearly cost somewhere north of $100 billion. Cutting such numbers in half over the next decade would be a more than achievable goal. Permanently cutting provocative “war games” in South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere would be no less sensible. Are North Korea and Russia truly deterred by such dramatic displays of destructive military might?

3. Come to think of it, why does the U.S. need the immediate military capacity to fight two major foreign wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon continues to insist we do and plan for, in the name of “defending” our country? Here’s a radical proposal: if you add 70,000 Special Operations forces to 186,000 Marine Corps personnel, the U.S. already possesses a potent quick-strike force of roughly 250,000 troops. Now, add in the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. What you have is more than enough military power to provide for America’s actual national security. All other Army divisions could be reduced to cadres, expandable only if our borders are directly threatened by war. Similarly, restructure the Air Force and Navy to de-emphasize the present “global strike” vision of those services, while getting rid of Donald Trump’s newest service, the Space Force, and the absurdist idea of taking war into low earth orbit. Doesn’t America already have enough war here on this small planet of ours?

4. Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. It’s time for a new Civilian Conservation Corps focused on fostering a Green New Deal. It’s time for a new Works Progress Administration to rebuild America’s infrastructure and reinvigorate our culture, as that organization did in the Great Depression years. It’s time to engage young people in service to this country. Tackling COVID-19 or future pandemics would be far easier if there were quickly trained medical aides who could help free doctors and nurses to focus on the more difficult cases. Tackling climate change will likely require more young men and women fighting forest fires on the west coast, as my dad did while in the CCC — and in a climate-changing world there will be no shortage of other necessary projects to save our planet. Isn’t it time America’s youth answered a call to service? Better yet, isn’t it time we offered them the opportunity to truly put America, rather than themselves, first?

5. And speaking of “America First,” that eternal Trumpian catch-phrase, isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism, not to speak of politics that divide, distract, and keep so many down? President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that only Americans can truly hurt America, but there’s a corollary to that: only Americans can truly save America — by uniting, focusing on our common problems, and uplifting one another. To do so, it’s vitally necessary to put an end to fear-mongering (and warmongering). As President Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear inhibits our ability to think clearly, to cooperate fully, to change things radically as a community.

6. To cite Yoda, the Jedi master, we must unlearn what we have learned. For example, America’s real heroes shouldn’t be “warriors” who kill or sports stars who throw footballs and dunk basketballs. We’re witnessing our true heroes in action right now: our doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, together with our first responders, and those workers who stay in grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like and continue to serve us all despite the danger of contracting the coronavirus from customers. They are all selflessly resisting a threat too many of us either didn’t foresee or refused to treat seriously, most notably, of course, President Donald Trump: a pandemic that transcends borders and boundaries. But can Americans transcend the increasingly harsh and divisive borders and boundaries of our own minds? Can we come to work selflessly to save and improve the lives of others? Can we become, in a sense, lovers of humanity?

7. Finally, we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet. For if we keep treating our lands, our waters, and our skies like a set of trash cans and garbage bins, our children and their children will inherit far harder times than the present moment, hard as it may be.

What these seven suggestions really amount to is rejecting a militarized mindset of aggression and a corporate mindset of exploitation for one that sees humanity and this planet more holistically. Isn’t it time to regain that vision of the earth we shared collectively during the Apollo moon missions: a fragile blue sanctuary floating in the velvety darkness of space, an irreplaceable home to be cared for and respected since there’s no other place for us to go? Otherwise, I fear that my father’s prediction will come true not just for me, but for generations to come and in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined.

[xtruss]

Afghanistan and the Haunting Questions of Blame

In Senate testimony, the generals acknowledged America’s “strategic failure” in its longest war, and their differences with Biden.

— By Robin Wright | September 30, 2021

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the end of the war in Afghanistan.Photograph by Patrick Semansky / Getty

After the First World War, a conspiracy theory dubbed Dolchstosslegende—or “being stabbed in the back”— was popularized in Germany to explain its historic military defeat. The myth claimed that the war had actually been lost by weak civilians who had caved to the enemy, signed an armistice, and stabbed in the back a brave German military that would otherwise have won.

“There were echoes of that after the war in Vietnam,” Stephen Biddle, a Columbia University professor and the author of “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” told me this week, as top U.S. military leaders testified about America’s defeat in its longest war. “The loss in Vietnam was all President Lyndon Johnson and the feckless civilians who wouldn’t let us do it right.” Donald Trump invoked the same conspiratorial idea to explain just about everything that went wrong during his Administration, including his election loss. “Stab-in-the-back myths can be poisonous in all sorts of ways,” Biddle warned.

A month after the Biden Administration completed the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington is struggling to understand how its vast human, military, financial, and diplomatic investment, made over two decades, simply collapsed, with the Taliban sweeping back into power and the United States scrambling to get out. The rancorous debate over blame threatens to further divide the nation. In two days of testy and occasionally snarky questions, members of the Senate and House challenged the three men who oversaw the war’s end to explain it. They were painfully candid. And there were plenty of mea culpas.

“We helped build a state,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a Senate panel on Tuesday. “But we could not forge a nation.” He questioned whether the United States ever even had the right strategy—or, over two decades, whether it had “perhaps too many strategies?” The United States now has to acknowledge uncomfortable truths, he said. “The fact that the Afghan Army that we and our partners trained simply melted away—in many cases without firing a shot—took us all by surprise. And it would be dishonest to claim otherwise.” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s most senior military officer, bluntly conceded failure at an “incredible” cost. “Strategically the war was lost,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The enemy is in Kabul.”

The testimony revealed a chasm between what President Biden claimed came out of a lengthy consultation with his generals and what the Pentagon advised. The military recommended keeping a residual force of twenty-five hundred U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, testified. The goal was to prop up—psychologically even more than militarily—President Ashraf Ghani’s fragile government and Afghan security forces to allow more time for elected leaders in Kabul to negotiate with the Taliban on the makeup of a transitional government. The rivals had been talking since last September, and the Taliban had refused to make major concessions. Under the plan, U.S.-led nato forces would have been able to hold Bagram (a strategic air base that provided air support to Afghan forces; it was abandoned during the U.S troop drawdown). The timing of a future withdrawal would then depend on conditions, such as a successfully brokered peace, and not tied to an arbitrary date.

The sworn testimony was in stark contrast to the version Biden has offered the American public. Last month, the President claimed that the military never advised him to stay. In an interview, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked him, “So no one told—your military advisers did not tell you, ‘No, we should just keep twenty-five hundred troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that’?” Biden replied, “No. No one said that to me that I can recall.” The White House has been scrambling to rectify the discrepancies. “These conversations don’t happen in black-and-white, like you’re in the middle of a movie,” the White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. Pressed by Republicans about their conversations with Biden, the Pentagon leaders declined to criticize him. “I was present when that discussion occurred and I am confident that the President heard all the recommendations and listened to them very thoughtfully,” McKenzie testified. “That’s all any commander can ask.”

Other themes emerged from the testimony that may prove more important in understanding the scope and consequences of an epic failure by the world’s most powerful nation against a guerrilla insurgency that lacked both armor and air power. The fallout will extend well beyond South Asia. “Our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go,” Milley told the Senate committee. “I think that ‘damage’ is one word that could be used, yes.”

A deeper assessment of America’s mistakes, which were many, is still to come. “This is a twenty-year war,” Milley told the House committee on Wednesday. “It wasn’t lost in the last twenty days, or even twenty months, for that matter. There is a cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions that go way back.”

Milley cited many decisive factors and pivots: he noted the problem of Pakistan offering sanctuary (There were NO SANCTUARIES. These people live on the both sides of the borders. IT’S ALL BULLSHIT. They cross borders freely without any restrictions.) —for decades, and continuing to this day—to the Taliban’s fighters and leadership. The U.S. military was just a thousand metres from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Tora Bora in the first two months of the U.S. intervention in 2001; the Al Qaeda leader slipped away into Pakistan, where he hid for another decade.The general didn’t get into politics or diplomacy, but none of the four Presidents who waged the war was able to get Pakistan, a nuclear power which sees the Taliban as an ally against its archrival, India, to contain the extremist movement. Did he know why? Because Fascist Terrorist India is an ally of the US now to contain China. It’s quite sure that both India and the United States can’t F*** with China. China will beat the S*** of them and that’s for sure. US abandoned it’s old ally Pakistan because of India. The Pentagon leaders admitted to other mistakes: poor U.S. intelligence; endemic Afghan corruption exacerbated as the U.S. poured billions of dollars into the country; the Doha agreement negotiated between the Trump Administration and the Taliban that excluded the elected Afghan government; and especially the U.S. military’s fundamental misreading of the Afghan military’s lack of leadership, morale, and will. Here Braindead General failed to mention the hidden agendas and dirty tricks of the United States’ “FAKE WAR ON TERRORISM” in the region. Well equipped with modern warfare machineries, WAR CRIMINAL United States and its War Criminal puppets, UK, FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, AUSTRALIA and the WEST still got the well deserved deep f*** by the native WARRIORS, THE TALIBAN, and YET BLAMING PAKISTAN for their failure of NON WINNABLE FAKE WAR ON TERRORISM. WTF? Pakistan absolutely did the right thing to take care of it’s own interest first. Pakistan don’t give a damn f*** to the ‘Invader War Criminal United States’ and or to it’s ‘War Criminal Puppet Allies’ when it’s comes to the SOVEREIGNTY of PAKISTAN.

Austin, a former four-star general who served in Afghanistan, was explicit in a stream-of-consciousness list of the mistakes the U.S. made in simply misunderstanding Afghanistan. “That we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in their senior ranks,” he said, “that we did not grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders, that we did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that Taliban commanders struck with local leaders in the wake of the Doha agreement, that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers, and that we failed to fully grasp that there was only so much for which—and for whom—many of the Afghan forces would fight.” A fatal flaw in U.S. strategy, the Pentagon officials said, was trying to create a military that was a “mirror image” of the sophisticated U.S. military in a poor South Asian nation with limited literacy. It was costliest for Afghans. Somewhere between sixty thousand and seventy thousand members of the Afghan security forces died in the twenty-year war, compared to more than twenty-four hundred U.S. service members. An estimated forty-six thousand Afghan civilians perished, too. The United States had the technology to track the Afghan military in its fight with the Taliban, Milley said, but failed to grasp how its pullout would affect Afghan morale. “You can’t measure the human heart with a machine,” he said.

Given past claims by both Republican and Democratic Administrations, the testimony was chilling and will offer fodder for historians for decades. The Pentagon spent eighty-three billion dollars to train and outfit the Afghan security forces. Eight hundred thousand Americans in various branches of the U.S. military rotated in and out of Afghanistan, some multiple times. For two decades, top generals repeatedly reported that progress was being made. This week, they acknowledged that it had not. “You wish you’d seen that kind of candor during the war,” Christine Fair, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, told me. “Why were you wrong about ninety-nine things if you’re honest about the hundredth?” McKenzie acknowledged that U.S. military leaders may not have listened to warnings from more junior U.S. service members working day to day with Afghan forces. “I think that’s a reasonable criticism,” he testified. “I’ll be very candid with you.”

The most alarming conclusions from the hearings were about the future of the jihadist threat broadly and Al Qaeda specifically. On the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Milley acknowledged, jihadism got a “shot of adrenaline” from the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power. American credibility was badly damaged. “It’s a big morale boost,” he said. The prospect of a future attack is “a very real possibility.” One of the seven conditions that the Taliban never met, as part of its deal with the Trump Administration, was to renounce Al Qaeda. Under the Taliban, Al Qaeda may be able to reconstitute in as little as six to twelve months and then, again, threaten the U.S. homeland, the Pentagon officials warned. Without U.S. troops on the ground or in neighboring countries, it will now be far harder to track Al Qaeda, isis-Khorasan, or other extremist cells in Afghanistan.

The most unnerving aspect of the two-day hearing, though, was the rank partisan politicizing of a war waged by two Republican and two Democratic Presidents with the goal, in theory, of safeguarding all Americans. Republicans on both the Senate and House committees called on Milley, who was stoic and stone-faced throughout, to resign. “This country doesn’t want generals figuring out what orders we are going to accept and do or not,” Milley shot back at the Republican Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas. The Republican tirades were often ill-informed and politically self-serving. In the House, Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, called the criticism of the military by opportunistic fellow-Republicans “despicable.”

The testimony appeared to signify that the long de-facto alignment between Republicans and the U.S. military is over, Biddle told me: “The Republican Party is turning on them. That’s a tectonic shift.” As the U.S. looks ahead, the threats to national security and democracy will be the rise of hyper-partisanship and the erosion of public trust in government institutions, a trend exacerbated during the Trump Presidency. “The military may be the next institution that gets the rug pulled out from under them,” Biddle said. The Pentagon leaders’ testimony this week—which at times bordered on being a confessional—was striking, but may not be enough, Michael O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, told me. “At some level, it’s inspiring, but anyone who is fair-minded would have to say the ending was catastrophic,” he said. “We’re all still in a state of shock about what happened.” Defeat is defeat. And the judgments and relentless pursuit of political advantage are only beginning.

[vvvveta]

WHO LOST AFGHANISTAN?

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of 9/11, Americans were braying for war. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 90 percent of Americans approved of the United States attacking Afghanistan, while 65 percent of the public was comfortable with the prospect of Afghan civilians being killed. Only 22 percent thought that the war would last more than two years.

Americans wanted blood, and they got it. The United States invaded Afghanistan and spent the next 20 years making war there and beyond: in Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Iraq; Libya; Niger; the Philippines; Somalia; Syria; Tunisia; and Yemen, among other places. More than 770,000 people have since died violent deaths in America’s wars and interventions, including more than 312,000 civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Of the 10 percent of Americans who thought that war was not the answer, a small number demonstrated against the impending conflict. They marched in Austin, Texas; New York City; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and elsewhere. It took courage to speak out against “indiscriminate retribution,” to assert that it was ludicrous to attack a country for a crime carried out by a small group of terrorists, and to suggest that the repercussions might echo for decades. They were mocked, screamed at, called scum and traitors, and worse.

Those who got it right in September 2001 have long since been forgotten. The White House, the Pentagon, and the media never sought the dissenters out for advice, comment, or counsel as the war in Afghanistan went off the rails, ending with the chaotic collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government on Sunday. Instead, those who got it wrong have consistently held sway in the halls of power. “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” President Joe Biden, who voted for military action in 2001, admitted yesterday. “[Former Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.” Ghani was hardly alone. Biden and countless other Americans played key roles in a 20-year road to defeat that began with the United States toppling the Taliban from power in 2001 and ended with the Taliban installing themselves in the presidential palace in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, this week.

Journalist Craig Whitlock’s new book, “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” will help ensure that no one forgets the harm America’s civilian and military leaders did, the lies they told, and the war they lost.

Synthesizing more than 1,000 interviews and 10,000 pages of documents, Whitlock provides a stunning study of failure and mendacity, an irrefutable account of the U.S.’s ignoble defeat in the words of those who — from the battlefield to NATO headquarters in Kabul and from the Pentagon to the White House — got it so wrong for so long, papered their failures over with falsehoods, and sought to avoid even an ounce of accountability.

“People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’” President George W. Bush said on October 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing Afghanistan. “This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring Al Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”

More than a decade later, the U.S. still hadn’t won the war, and an obscure government agency, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, sought to figure out why. The result was more than 400 “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted with mostly American (but also Afghan and NATO) officials as well as other experts, aid workers, and consultants. Their assessments were candid, often damning, and the government sought to keep them under wraps.

But the indefatigable Whitlock and his employer, the Washington Post, via two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, forced the government to turn over the files. These records became the foundation of an award-winning series for the Post; now, combined with several troves of documents from various public collections, these files make “The Afghanistan Papers” the most comprehensive American accounting of the conflict and help explain, better than any book yet, why so many of those who planned, guided, and fought the war failed so spectacularly.

Deftly assembling accounts thematically and chronologically, Whitlock allows America’s war managers to hang themselves with their own quotes, offering an encyclopedic catalogue of lies and ineptitude, delusion and denial, incompetence and corruption, and, most of all, rank cowardice. Again and again, Whitlock presents the pessimistic assessments and harsh judgments of officials who believed that their remarks would never become public — war makers who could have spoken out publicly but too often kept their appraisals under wraps or voiced them when it was too late to matter.

“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House war czar under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, the Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.

“There was a tremendous … dysfunctionality in unity of command inside of Afghanistan, inside the military,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, an early Afghanistan War commander.

“There was no campaign plan,” confessed Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the top commander in Afghanistan under Bush. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”

These and hundreds of other officials, military officers, diplomats, and analysts could have leveled with the American people immediately or at any time in the last 20 years. Had they done so, perhaps the war in Afghanistan could have been shortened by a decade or more; perhaps following conflicts wouldn’t have been so easy to start or proved so difficult to end; perhaps more than 770,000 people wouldn’t be dead and up to 59 million forced from their homes by America’s post-9/11 wars.

Instead, Americans muddled through the conflict in Afghanistan, unsure what they were there to accomplish, why they were doing it, who they were fighting, and what they were fighting for. “What were we actually doing in that country?” asked a U.S. official who served with the NATO senior civilian representative to Afghanistan. “We went in after 9/11 to defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the mission became blurred.”

To call it confusion is the kindest possible assessment. Another is that, as Whitlock writes, the government was peddling pablum “so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.”

WHITLOCK DOES A masterful job of mining the hard-won SIGAR synopses and archived interviews to juxtapose private judgments with public comments. Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently died of multiple myeloma, but Whitlock ably demonstrates that shame ought to have taken him years earlier. Of all the craven war managers who take their star turn in “The Afghanistan Papers,” Rumsfeld may come off worst. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” the late defense secretary wrote in an internal memo almost two years into the war. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”

Rumsfeld never shared his pessimism with the American public. Instead, for years, he took the press to task for pushback while publicly crowing about signs of progress and corners turned. In 2003, Rumsfeld announced that the Taliban was finished. “To the extent that they assemble in anything more than ones and twos … they’ll be killed or captured,” he boasted. If there’s any justice, Rumsfeld is currently being grilled in the afterlife about whether it’s one or two Taliban fighters who are now overrunning cities and districts across Afghanistan.

So much in “The Afghanistan Papers” reads like an unsettling echo of the American war in Vietnam. During that conflict, the South Vietnamese military that was built, trained, armed, and funded by Americans was regularly (and not always unfairly) disparaged for its cowardice and incompetence. In the end, U.S. officials couldn’t understand how a 1 million-person army with billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons and equipment collapsed in 1975. In “The Afghanistan Papers,” Americans similarly disparage the Afghan military they built or make excuses for its weakness and ineptitude. How could the U.S. be at fault when its Afghan charges couldn’t read, write, or identify colors; mistook urinals for drinking fountains; couldn’t learn basic tactics or manage to shoot straight; and were both lazy and corrupt? Left unexamined is just why a rag-tag, under-armed, underfunded insurgency drawn from the same population, without an air force or superpower backing, was able to exist, much less make consistent progress, over 20 years, ending with a blitzkrieg that took one major city after another, including Kabul, in a matter of days.

Opium is another key overlap. During the Vietnam War, as heroin use among U.S. troops soared, Air America, a company run by the CIA, transported opium harvested by farmers in Laos who were also serving as soldiers in the agency’s secret army. Following its defeat in Southeast Asia, the United States sought to entangle the Soviet Union in its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan, where, as the New York Times reported, “opium production flourished … with the involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.” By the time Americans were fighting against some of those same mujahideen and their sons in the 2000s, the United States had turned against drug production and devoted billions to eradicating poppies, but Afghanistan nonetheless became the world’s top narco-state.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

 LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 6, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

In the past three years, it has so often felt like things were reaching the breaking point. But the image of Trump on the balcony of the White House last night, defiantly taking off his mask as he gasped for breath, truly looked to me like the beginning of the final chapter.

Today coronavirus infections continued to mount in the vicinity of the White House. At least 34 people near Trump have contracted the virus in the past few days. The press corps near the White House is down to a skeleton crew as the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and four press aides have tested positive. So have top aide Stephen Miller and Admiral Charles Ray, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral.

Along with other military leaders, Ray attended an event celebrating Gold Star families last Sunday at the White House. That event included some of the same people who had been at the event the previous day in honor of Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump nominated to take the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Those who attended both events included Trump and the First Lady.

Senior military leaders attended meetings with Ray last week in a secure room at the Pentagon, and now are self-quarantining. They include the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley; the Vice Chairman; the Army chief of staff; the Naval Operations Chief; the Air Force chief of staff; the CyberCom Commander; the SpaceForce operations chief; the director of the U.S. National Security Agency, Gen. Paul Nakasone; the Chief of the National Guard, Gen. Daniel Hokanson; and the deputy commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Gary Thomas.

The White House has apparently not done any contact tracing, and it declined the help of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to do it.

The administration appears to be committed to a strategy of community spread, rejecting the use of masks and of distancing. Deputy press secretary Brian Morganstern told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly that the White House still does not require masks because “everyone needs to take personal responsibility.”

That the White House appears to be the center of a coronavirus hotspot has hurt Trump’s reelection campaign. The infections in the face of the fact that the administration refused to take the virus seriously, the ride around the hospital to wave at supporters while endangering Secret Service agents, the struggle to the balcony in a strongman scene, all appear to have demonstrated not Trump’s strength, but his weakness.

His behavior today has reinforced that sense. Trump left the hospital last night and returned to a locked-down White House. The few aides who met with him were dressed in PPE, while the West Wing is virtually abandoned as people have decamped to work from home. Trump has been on a Twitter spree today, tweeting and retweeting his old material, “the Russia Hoax” and Hillary Clinton’s emails, which now feel like ancient history, disconnected from today’s pressing crisis. Tonight, he tweeted: “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” He hit the same points again in another tweet: “All Russia Hoax Scandal information was Declassified by me long ago. Unfortunately for our Country, people have acted very slowly, especially since it is perhaps the biggest political crime in the history of our Country. Act!!!”

He sounds desperate. And on the heels of his tweets, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) tweeted to the Justice Department “Per the President’s orders, can you please provide the [House Judiciary] Committee the full unredacted Mueller Report immediately? Thank you.”

Other dropping stories make it look like the tide is running against Trump.

Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis, Missouri, couple who held guns on protesters in June, were indicted today by a grand jury on charges of exhibiting guns and tampering with evidence. Trump invited the McCloskeys to speak at the Republican National Convention. “What you are witnessing here is just an opportunity for the government, the leftist, democrat government of the City of St. Louis to persecute us for doing no more than exercising our Second Amendment rights,” McCloskey said.

Two weeks ago, the administration blocked strict guidelines for a coronavirus vaccine, but today the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released those guidelines over White House objections. This will make a vaccine before the election unlikely. Trump tweeted “New F.D.A. Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day. Just another political hit job!”

Today, the New York Times revealed the findings of an internal investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general Michael Horowitz into the policy of separating children from their parents at our southern border. The policy was engineered by Stephen Miller, but the Justice Department has tended to blame then-Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen for the policy. Horowitz’s investigation has established that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were far keener on the policy than she was. In a sign of changing times, a 32-page response to the Horowitz’s investigation, written by Miller’s ally Gene Hamilton, said that Justice Department officials had simply followed orders from the president.

Facebook, too, sees the writing on the wall, and has announced that it will ban all QAnon conspiracy theory accounts. These accounts spread disinformation, including the idea that a heroic Trump is secretly leading an effort to round up a ring of pedophiles and cannibals based in the nation’s entertainment and political elites. The ban is one of the broadest Facebook has ever enacted.

Today, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that a new coronavirus relief bill is imperative, but just hours later, Trump announced on Twitter that he was cancelling further talks between the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Stocks dropped 600 points, and vulnerable Republican senators panicked. Biden released a statement including a pithy condemnation: “Make no mistake: if you are out of work, if your business is closed, if your child’s school is shut down, if you are seeing layoffs in your community, Donald Trump decided today that none of that — none of it — matters to him. There will be no help from Washington for the foreseeable future. Instead, he wants the Senate to use its time to confirm his Supreme Court Justice nominee before the election, in a mad dash to make sure that the Court takes away your health care coverage as quickly as possible.” A few hours later, Trump changed his tune.

Today both the New York Times and the Boston Globe endorsed Biden, and General Michael Hayden, the retired four-star general who served as the Director of the CIA under President George W. Bush, released a video not just endorsing Biden, but also warning that "If there is another term for Trump, I don't know what happens to America." “Biden is a good man,” Hayden says. “Trump is not.”

Financial services company Goldman Sachs today forecast that the Democrats will take both the White House and the Senate, and said a Democratic sweep would mean a faster recovery and thus would be good for the economy. Moody’s Analytics, a subsidiary of another financial services company, recently found that Biden’s plans would add 7.4 million more jobs to the economy than Trump’s would.

Today in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a town hallowed by history, Biden gave a blockbuster speech calling for the nation to put aside division and come together. He talked about race: “Think about what it takes for a Black person to love America. That is a deep love for this country that for far too long we have never fully recognized.” He talked about disparities of wealth: “Working people and their kids deserve an opportunity.”

And he talked about Lincoln, and how, at Gettysburg, he called for Americans to dedicate themselves to a “new birth of freedom” so that the men who had died for that cause “shall not have died in vain.”

“Today we are engaged once again in a battle for the soul of the nation,” Biden said. “After all that America has accomplished, after all the years we have stood as a beacon of light to the world, it cannot be that here and now, in 2020, we will allow government of the people, by the people, and for the people to perish from this earth.

“You and I are part of a great covenant, a common story of divisions overcome and of hope renewed," he said. "If we do our part, if we stand together, if we keep faith with the past and with each other, then the divisions of our time can give way to the dreams of a brighter, better, future.”

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Heather Cox Richardson