Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Remind Us How This Ends...

[Boats]

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Remind Us How This Ends...
By: Posted by Danny Sjursen at 7:22AM, April 18, 2017.
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Now, we know. According to Todd Harrison, an expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the replacement cost for the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles recently dumped on an air base in Syria: $89 million. That not-exactly-decisive strike in Washington’s 15 years of war in the ever more chaotic Greater Middle East against... well, you tell me what or whom... was but a drop in the bucket. After all, the cost of those never-ending wars has already reached into the trillions of dollars. And keep in mind that these are wars in which, as U.S. Army major and TomDispatch regular Danny Sjursen suggests today, the most all-American military word around may be “more” -- as in more troops for Syria, more troops for Iraq, more troops for Afghanistan, and of course more missiles, planes, ships, advanced arms, you name it.

In that context, $89 million is a laughably small sum. Still, just for the hell of it, let’s think about what a figure like that might mean if spent domestically rather than on a strike of more or less no significance in Syria. That sum is, for instance, well more than half of the $149 million budget for the National Endowment for the Arts and also of the $149 million budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities, both of which the Trump administration would like to wipe out. It represents one-fifth of the $445 million the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, also on Trump’s chopping block, gets from the federal government. That single strike also represents about a thirtieth of the $2.6 billion his administration wants to cut from the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and about a sixtieth of the $5.8 billion that it plans to excise from the budget of the National Institutes of Health.

So each time those Tomahawks are launched, or American planes or drones take off on their latest missions over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Somalia, or the next batch of U.S. troops heads for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or elsewhere in the Greater Middle East and those millions of dollars start to add up to billions and finally trillions, just think to yourself: that’s the arts, the sciences, public health, and environmental safety that we’re knocking off. Think of that as part of the “collateral damage” produced by our never-ending wars, or take a moment with Major Sjursen and imagine just how Washington might continue to lose those wars in the future with even greater flare and at even greater cost. Tom

How to Lose the Next War in the Middle East
The Short Answer: Fight it!
By Danny Sjursen

Make no mistake: after 15 years of losing wars, spreading terror movements, and multiplying failed states across the Greater Middle East, America will fight the next versions of our ongoing wars. Not that we ever really stopped. Sure, Washington traded in George W. Bush’s expansive, almost messianic attitude toward his Global War on Terror for Barack Obama’s more precise, deliberate, even cautious approach to an unnamed version of the same war for hegemony in the Greater Middle East. Sure, in the process kitted-up 19 year-olds from Iowa became less ubiquitous features on Baghdad’s and Kabul’s busy boulevards, even if that distinction was lost on the real-life targets of America’s wars -- and the bystanders (call them “collateral damage”) scurrying across digital drone display screens.

It’s hardly a brilliant observation to point out that, more than 15 years later, the entire region is a remarkable mess. So much worse off than Washington found it, even if all of that mess can’t simply be blamed on the United States -- at least not directly. It’s too late now, as the Trump administration is discovering, to retreat behind two oceans and cover our collective eyes. And yet, acts that might still do some modest amount of good (resettling refugees, sending aid, brokering truces, anything within reason to limit suffering) don’t seem to be on any American agenda.

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Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Love Trumps Domination (Without the Combover)
Posted by Ira Chernus at 4:03PM, April 16, 2017.
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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I want to remind you that, as President Trump escalates America’s wars in the Greater Middle East, our newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two, only becomes more relevant. In fact, today’s TD author, Ira Chernus, just published a vivid piece on this country's warring state of mind at CommonDreams, focused in part on Dower’s book, which he describes thusly: “It’s a small book; you can read it in one evening. But don’t expect to sleep well that night. Because it’s densely packed with disturbing facts and figures that directly challenge those supposed experts who confidently tell us that murderous wars are becoming a relic of the past.” Remember that you can pick up a copy by clicking here or, by going to the website of Haymarket Books at this link, where it's available at an exclusive TomDispatch discount of 50% off. In either case, you get a remarkable work by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, while offering the crew at TomDispatch support in our modest endeavors to change the way all of us think about our world. Tom]

Recently, historians Samuel Moyn and Stephen Wertheim wrote an interesting New York Times op-ed on why the last 15 years of failed American wars across the Greater Middle East seem to have taught our military and civilian leadership absolutely nothing. Hence, the recent 59-missile strike against a Syrian airfield -- just the latest act that has “this can’t end well” written all over it. One small thing in their essay, however, caught my attention on a personal level. As a point of comparison for America’s twenty-first-century wars, in which lessons were the last thing to be drawn, the authors point to this country’s “long reckoning” with the consequences of the Vietnam War with which they are evidently impressed.

That comment hit a nerve in me, since the “reckoning” was, to my mind, largely one by the military high command, which proceeded to draw the lesson that protesters in arms were not the military force it had in mind and so junked the draft and the concept of a true citizen’s army. Similarly, the Reaganite right redefined Vietnam as a “noble cause” and then went about its war-making business (though -- lessons learned, assumedly -- largely by proxy), while Congress, which did indeed pass the War Powers Act in 1973 before Vietnam was even over, theoretically limiting the scope of presidential war-making powers, thereafter gave up the ghost of its own war powers. As a result, by my calculations, Americans had all of four war-less years (1975-1979) before the Reagan administration started all over again in Afghanistan (and, speaking of lessons unlearned, you know where that led in blowback terms). America’s two Afghan wars -- with just over a decade off between the Soviet withdrawal from that country and 9/11 -- have now lasted almost three decades with no end in sight. Then there were the three Iraq Wars, starting with Desert Storm in 1990-1991. The most recent is still underway. And don't forget the Central American Contra wars of the 1980s, the invasion of Grenada (1983), the intervention in Lebanon (1983), the invasion of Panama (1989-1990), the Bosnian intervention (1992-1995), conflicts in two phases in Somalia (the early 1990s and post-9/11), and of course the present ongoing conflicts in Yemen, Libya, Syria, and so on.

In other words, those four years of “peace” aside, the years from 1975 to 2017 have been a veritable war fest for Washington. So let it not be said that, in the post-Vietnam era, we have ever truly come to grips with war, American-style, and what to make of it, no less what lessons to draw from it.

This came to mind because, in today’s post, TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus plunges into movements past and oh-so-present, including the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, and the degree to which they either have or, in the age of Trump, may come to grips with the deeper maladies of American society. It led me to remember my own experience in those Vietnam years. From perhaps 1968 to 1973 or 1974, I worked incessantly against America's wars in Southeast Asia in a variety of ways. It was an essential part of my life. When Vietnam ended, however, like much of the antiwar movement of that time, I essentially moved on. It’s a great sadness, looking back, to realize that such a large-scale mobilization of the American spirit against the grimmest of wars, a movement whose members plunged deep into questions of American war-making and the nature of a society that could pursue such a conflict, somehow didn’t make it beyond the war years with its conclusions intact and so didn’t help prevent the endless wars to come. In that spirit and in the memory of what wasn’t, I hope Chernus’s piece sparks some thought about what could be. Tom