Trumps goes bonkers; pundits insult Americans' common sense

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic points out the pathetic essence of media coverage of Donald Trump's current mad enthusiasms. Too many commentators assume Trump's outbursts are just fine by the foolish people of this country. Tomasky isn't buying it: 

... I think a lot of pundits, trying to imagine the thoughts and emotional responses of the “normal” Americans they may never have met, assume that people just reflexively fall for tough talk. That tough talk and common sense are the same thing. But they aren’t.

It’s important to understand this, especially this week, because Trump is apparently about to take this country down two very dark and, I suspect, deeply unpopular paths. The first is his thuggishly over-the-top response to the shootings of those two National Guard officers in Washington. The second is this regime-change war we’re evidently about to embark upon against Venezuela.

These are not bold moves that reflect sturdy middle-American common sense. They are desperate acts of a desperate and unpopular man who is surrounded, in his life and news-consumption habits, by a retinue of flunkies—many of them billionaires or Botox junkies or both—who wouldn’t know middle-American common sense if it smacked them in the face.

We know Pete Hegseth, Trump's cosplaying Secretary of Defense, is really just acting out "adolescent bloodlust," when he orders kill shots against some unknown guys in small boats in the Caribbean. And then tries to shove off responsibility onto a military officer.

Over seventy percent of us suspect that, however awful Venezuela's strong man may be, we have no proven cause for a war. Fifty-six percent don't think even making war on Venezuela would reduce the flow of drugs. (That seems wise, since Venezuela is not a major source of drugs to the US market.)

We know the crime of one murdering Afghan guy, exiled to this country because he worked with our military against the Taliban in his homeland, cannot be used to trigger massive exclusions of Black and brown migrants. 

The media owe it to its consumers and customers to tell the truth: Trump is flailing -- losing his marbles -- and trying to save himself by leading this nation to terrible places that suit his broken soul.

It's the week of Passover too

It's the week of Passover too ... to which I have to say ... DUH! 

The Christian story of Jesus' repudiation of and triumph over empire is embedded in the Jewish observance of the people's escape from slavery by the agency of God -- the Passover. 

My friend Emily Simon needed a good old-fashioned Seder meal and gathering this Passover season. She shared a reflection on Facebook which I reproduce here -- this speaks to where many of us are.

These are very hard and painful times in which to be any kind of human, but I have struggled even more than usual with what it means to be a Jew.

It’s Passover, America is being dismantled, and our supposed Holy Land of milk and honey is being run by a monstrous totalitarian right-wing autocrat whose regime gleefully murders other people’s babies in the name of our defense, and we must oppose him with our full chests while standing firm that Palestinians have the right to live freely in peace. Thousands of Israelis routinely take to the streets to say the same thing.

But if you’re Jewish in radical leftist spaces right now and you take to the streets in America, there is a strong chance that the person next to you will open their face like the sun and say “oh I’m so glad you’re one of us, and you accept Khazar theory and agree that Israel should not exist and that the Jews are diabolical white colonizers who have historically and repeatedly brought all violence upon themselves, and really the only way to end all of this is for you guys stop trying to be Jewish while living anywhere at all!”

And then you have to rearrange YOUR face and come up with a plausible excuse to go home.

Meanwhile OUR monstrous wanna-be totalitarian right-wing autocrat claims to be fighting antisemitism, which is a repulsive transparent joke. None of these guys are on the side of our safety and liberation, ever.

Project Esther is an insult to Esther, to any Judaism I’ve ever known, and anything any worship-worthy God could possibly want. It casts most modern Jews as “enemies of the Jews”, which just helps us all keep having to run from country to country and getting killed anyway.

And, also…antisemitism is ancient and violent and virulent and flaring and spreading, and most people who harbor it would absolute swear they don’t WHILE saying antisemitic things to your face, that’s how embedded and insidious this prejudice is, and when Jews talk to each other we often talk about how terrifying this moment is for us, and how that terror complicates the necessary work of getting us all free.

This year I found myself yearning to be at a good old-fashioned radical leftist social-justice-focused Passover seder, so I could stand in the tradition of Jewishness that I honor and treasure. Tikkun Olam. Until we are all free, we are none of us free.

No one was inviting me to one, so I threw it myself.

Twenty of Nathan’s and Milo’s and my wonderful goyishe Minnesota sober lefty friends packed my little Saint Paul house (to be clear, 25 people do NOT fit in my house for a sit-down dinner) and I ran them through a 10-minute Haggadah I wrote, stealing from a bunch of sources I’ve been reading to help me find my way.

I asked my spiritual family to show up, and they did.

We celebrated our shared values and commitment, and we ate chopped liver and gefilte fish and matzoh ball soup and a gorgeous brisket one of my friends made. I got to use my mother’s and grandmother’s china and silver, lovingly sent to me last spring by my beautiful cousin.

Why was this night different from all other nights?

Because I did not feel ambivalent and compromised and complicit. I didn’t feel hopeless and discouraged and despairing. I felt firm in my own soul and strengthened by the community of my fellows, full in heart and mind and belly. I was so grateful for every single bit of it, and so freshly determined not to waste the privilege of my own freedom, however it looks, however long it lasts.

I’m putting this here to remind myself that I have a huge, living network of strong-hearted like-minded hard-working fellows, across the world and from all eras of my life, and that so many of you are here right now in this weird digital place.

Next year, who knows where.

In the meantime, thank you.

I hope we keep coming together, in the kitchens and the streets.

The link in Emily's text is my addition -- I didn't have to know what sits behind it. Now I must. The picture is also my addition.

Lebanon on my mind ...

The Post reports:

The exodus from Lebanon began last week after back-to-back assassinations targeted a Hezbollah commander near Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

... Vacations cut short, hurried goodbyes and last-minute flights at exorbitant fares — residents and tourists, heeding warnings of an impending war, are scrambling to leave summertime Lebanon as tensions build between Israel and Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese ally.

Britain has ordered its citizens to “leave Lebanon now,” while Paris is urging French nationals to depart “as soon as possible.” The U.S. Embassy in Beirut, in an alert over the weekend, instructed Americans who wish to leave to “book any ticket available to them.”

At the Beirut airport, passengers waited for delayed flights or for seats to open up, tired children resting against luggage carts piled high with suitcases, their parents sipping coffee out of paper cups. As airlines such as Lufthansa, Air France and Royal Jordanian cancel flights to and from the country, ticket prices have skyrocketed, putting them out of reach for many Lebanese grappling with the effects of an economic crisis, including soaring inflation and a currency that has lost much of its value. ...

Once again, Beirutis have reason to fear their small country is about to devastated by an Israeli attack on Hezbollah. Western media always neglects to mention that Hezbollah, though certainly the most heavily armed faction in this divided country, is also a legitimate part of what passes for government in Lebanon.

We visited in 2006, just prior to the last time Israel blasted the Beirut airport and much of the city to bits. So much has come to pass since then.

This picture of an advertising balloon over the city could not be taken today. Several years later an explosion in the port blew out the windows to the balcony from which I took this shot -- that apartment was no longer habitable.

That was an accident of sorts. But this would be war and retribution, largely striking people who have had no choice but to be in the firing line.

An unwelcome blast from the past

The headline reads: U.S.-Brokered Talks Seek to Ease Tensions on Israel-Lebanon Border. I have no idea whether this is a meaningful development or not. I tend to doubt that the U.S. is a useful interlocutor in talks which, of necessity, must involve dealing with Hezbollah, the Lebanese force which we have designated a "terrorist organization" and a hostile Iranian proxy. Many, but not all, Lebanese think differently, recognizing Hezbollah as one legitimate force among many in a divided country. I claim no expertise.

The immediate focus of the discussions has been to prevent cross-border skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah — fueled by Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza — from escalating into an all-out conflict, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations.

... In addition to its efforts to contain the immediate risk of escalation, the Biden administration has been discussing with the parties the parameters of a longer-term agreement to increase stability along the border so that tens of thousands of displaced civilians in northern Israel and southern Lebanon feel safe enough to return to their homes after the war in Gaza ends.

... According to participants in the talks, Israeli officials have sent mixed messages about the distance Hezbollah fighters would have to move north of the border to allow Israeli civilians to return to their communities in northern Israel. One Israeli proposal called for Hezbollah forces to move at least five kilometers, or about three miles, north of the Israeli-Lebanese border — to reduce the chances that the group could follow Hamas’s example and send large numbers of fighters into Israel to kill and kidnap Israeli civilians. Another called for them to move eight kilometers.

The discussion -- the sort of matter about which I tend to believe nothing until something concrete occurs -- reminds me that I had the privilege of being driven through that border area in an ostensibly peaceful interlude in 2006. Such beauty, so much history.

 

The remains of a Crusader castle, Beaufort Chateau, sat on a ridge.

 

Yes, that is the Hezbollah flag flying proudly.

 

On the Lebanese side of the ridge, the village of Arnoun.

 

To the south, an Israeli settlement.

I have no idea how much of what is pictured is still there. Less than a month after I took these pictures, the 2006 Israel/Hezbollah War washed over this border area. Israel also bombed civilian infrastructure throughout Lebanon. Hezbollah survived, was able to use Iranian contributions to rebuild southern towns, and matured into a party within the Lebanese government, though remaining a non-state military force apart from the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Hezbollah and Israel have continued to lob missiles at each other sporadically ever since.

Let us hope Israel's Gaza retaliation for 10/7 doesn't not spread to Lebanon.

Let's not take up the next war ...

While the many of us were looking elsewhere, Republicans have normalized the idea of the U.S. bombing Mexico. No, really. Trump claims he'll do it if elected in 2024.

Mexico City: independencia and global commerce

It is true that the fentanyl deaths all around us in the United States are the consequence of a kind of quadrilateral trade whose end product is murder. The precursor chemicals to the drug enter Mexico from China. Inside our southern neighbor, the drug cartels manufacture the addictive poison and from there ship it to our abundant population of American users. With the proceeds, the cartels arm themselves with military quality guns which travel in the reverse direction. In Mexico, the cartels subvert and battle the government for unfettered power; 30,000 Mexicans are killed in Mexico annually by the drug cartel conflict.

Adam Tooze lays out the frightening contours in a long Substack post, "So far from god" ... friend-shoring and the debate in Washington over whether to bomb Mexico". This begins with a concise survey of Mexico's fraught history with its imperial neighbor (that's us), looks at Mexico's current relationships with Latin America and China -- and then takes up the crisis looming over the drug trade. His conclusions are terrifying and should be demanding of those of us who don't want to compound the drug war with an international atrocity.

The problem for those favoring restraint is that the situation is truly disastrous, they have no good alternatives to offer and America’s planetary conception of its own security provides no official with any wiggle-room. It is their duty to protect Americans everywhere from every threat and to use the tools at their disposal to do so.

So in March 2021, Head of U.S. Northern Command General Glen VanHerck stated that 30%-35% of Mexico constitutes an “ungoverned space”, which as he warns opens the door to cartels and their foreign friends. That then raises the question of how any American President could stand by and allow a lethal threat to America to develop on its border without acting. As the explosive memo to a putative President Trump highlighted by Rolling Stone, remarks: “It is vital that Mexico not be led to believe that they have veto power to prevent the US from taking the actions necessary to secure its borders and people.”

... At one level this is an outrageous carte blanche for an infringement of Mexican sovereignty and a forever war on drugs. At another level it is merely the assertion of the basic principle of self-defense in the face of an unregulated transnational threat on America’s borders. America’s sovereignty and the paramountcy of its own interests means that Mexico can have no veto. To concede anything less is tantamount to treason. ...

Tooze is not arguing for a new (renewed?) Mexican War. But he has made the threat implicit in the current situation real. Those of us who find military action against Mexico unthinkable and absurd should take notice. This is not just habitual Republican posturing, bellicosity, and racism. 

As in so many arenas, the Biden administration is struggling to manage the complicated, ugly, multilayered challenges which confront a country learning to live as one fish (a big one) among many. If we care about peace and justice, Tooze has convinced me that this is a vital direction in which to be paying attention.

Rumors of war

The sun is shining; the sky is clear; and for many, it's a U.S. holiday.

Yet today the world totters on the brink of a major European war -- or maybe nothing will happen ...

Most of the world is a mystery to us here, sitting oblivious on our huge continent, separated by oceans from most other centers of humanity. Unless we actively trace our origins to some former homeland across the seas, we usually know little of the wide world -- and don't have to. (In this, we are somewhat like China through most of its history.)

We don't even nod toward understanding that mysterious land called Ukraine. For most people in the United States -- for my generation -- the area it encompasses went dark for us during the last 45 years of the Soviet Union. It just wasn't there, except perhaps in a few enclaves in U.S. cities where refugees landed. (Buffalo, where I grew up, was one of those, but that doesn't mean I knew anything about Ukraine.)

Professor Timothy Snyder has put his life into studying the formation of modern eastern Europe. He has written a very short pre-primer on the history of Ukraine in broad strokes for the previously uninformed. It is an ancient, tangled story. Here's a teaser:

The histories of Ukraine and Russia are of course related, via the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, and via Orthodox religion, and much else. The modern Ukrainian and Russian nations are both still in formation, and entanglements between them are to be expected, now and into the future.

But Russia is, in its early expansion and contemporary geography, a country deeply connected to Asia; this is not true of Ukraine.

The history of Kyiv and surrounding lands embraces certain European trends that are less pronounced in Russia. 

Poland and Lithuania and the Jews are indispensable referents for any account of the Ukrainian past. 

Ukraine cannot be understood without the European factors of expansive Lithuania and Poland, of renaissance, of reformation, of national revival, of attempts at national statehood.  The landmarks of the world wars are planted deeply in both countries, but especially so in Ukraine. 

... The myth of eternal brotherhood, now offered in bad faith by the Russian president, must be understood in the categories of politics rather than history.  But a little bit of history can help us to see the bad faith, and to understand the politics.

I hope this sharing link works to Snyder's simple, brief essay: Kviv's Ancient Normality. You want to read it and it won't overwhelm.

Our country is enmeshed in what may be a further bloody conflict in yet another place about which we are largely uninformed. Yes, Joe Biden says he won't send in the Marines -- and I believe he believes himself. But it seems folly to remain unconcerned.

That democracy which so many of us feel we are fighting to preserve is eroded when ignorance forces us to acquiesce without reflection on the decisions of leaders and security spooks. Snyder's short essay is one gateway to more responsible citizenship.

A Never Again memory for the United States

This is the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which led to the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, including approximately 80,000 American citizens. 

The photographer Dorothea Lange captured this shameful episode:

After Pearl Harbor, it was not crazy to be afraid. But this travesty should remind us that even well-grounded fears can render us monsters.

Ukraine: let's not do this again ...

Finally somebody has said something I find sensible about the multi-faceted crisis that goes by label "Ukraine." I could have said "Russian imperialism," or "post-Soviet nationalism," or "European Union growing pains," or "Autocracy v. Liberal Democracy," or "U.S. imperial decline," but for now I'll stick with simply with one word: Ukraine. There's a lot to understand and unpack there, and it's far beyond my knowledge.

But I resonate with much of what Michael Tomasky offered in in The New Republic [my emphasis]:

... while there’s a lot we don’t yet know, a clear bottom line for the Biden administration has been etched: Don’t go to war. Period. 

If today’s news turns out to be a temporary respite—or a trick—and Russia does invade, cable news will be a nonstop source of images of the invasion for a few days at least. Russian atrocities and deaths of Ukrainian civilians will be emphasized. American neocons and certain Senate front men thereof, notably Democrat Robert Menendez and Republican Marco Rubio—who’s pushing aggression when he’s not apologizing for Donald Trump’s crimes—will get a lot of air time. This last point, incidentally, is one of the key ways in which the mainstream media are failing democracy: If a person can give good blather on foreign policy, TV will anoint that person as an expert, even if he’s gotten everything wrong for a decade or two. ... 

... history records no [U.S. military interventions that were] smashing successes that I can remember. There were, instead, the disastrous quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq. And even most of the interventions that were “successes” from a military or intelligence point of view turned out to be disastrous in a broader sense. We engineered a quick coup in Iran in 1954; what happened next? We installed a ruthless pro-American regime that the people finally expelled in 1979, which was replaced in turn with a ruthless anti-American regime that neocon belligerence has helped to transform into a regional, if not global, power—perhaps soon with nuclear weapons capability. ... 

... Getting militarily involved in Ukraine means getting into a war with Russia, crossing the uncrossable Cold War lines that threatened nuclear annihilation. Maybe Putin will back down. But even if he doesn’t, the fight here is solely economic. If Biden once aspired to bring Ukraine into NATO, he gets the situation now. If Putin does go in, and the war caucus starts trying to whip the country into a frenzy, [Biden] had better stick to his nonguns.

Biden has been around enough ugly blocks to know that he can't expect any lasting popular support at home for getting into a direct military confrontation in Eastern Europe. 

It's not hard to be sympathetic toward those Ukrainians who urgently want to become more European. And the U.S. probably owes them at least some reparations for afflicting them with that sleazy, used political consultant, Paul Manafort, whose wiles helped to impose a Russian puppet back in 2010. And there was much to admire (and some things to fear) in the Maidan uprising that tossed that strongman back to Moscow in 2014, leading to the current government structure. But hey, Ukrainians and Europeans are going to have to untangle this as best they can. 

It's unlikely that deep U.S. involvement here can do good. Our track record stinks.

Stop them, before someone sets them loose ...

Erudite Partner investigated some of the latest in military artificial intelligence threats. 

Here’s a scenario to consider: a military force has purchased a million cheap, disposable flying drones each the size of a deck of cards, each capable of carrying three grams of explosives — enough to kill a single person or, in a “shaped charge,” pierce a steel wall. They’ve been programmed to seek out and “engage” (kill) certain human beings, based on specific “signature” characteristics like carrying a weapon, say, or having a particular skin color. They fit in a single shipping container and can be deployed remotely. Once launched, they will fly and kill autonomously without any further human action.

Science fiction? Not really. It could happen tomorrow. The technology already exists. ...

The Rise of the Murderbots is not some dystopian fantasy. It's here and humans have choices.

A little Cassandra-ing of my own: war with China?

Every obituary for recently deceased General Colin Powell leads with his recognition that, at the pinnacle of a stellar career, he lent his prestige to the catastrophe which was the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  He called his war advocacy "a blot" which "will always be part of my record." Indeed.

A whole lot of U.S. foreign policy sages (and old guys who play them on TV) seem to be seeking resurrection after the War on Terror's collapse by once again looking abroad for "monsters to destroy."

And this time, if they don't manage to conduct some deft diplomacy, they could very well lead us into mass casualties and even a nuclear exchange -- as well as losing the war.

Journalist Peter Beinart was a sucker for the Iraq war, but he's not going there again. He warns against a developing bipartisan call for the U.S. to declare our willingness to fight to preserve the independence of Taiwan from China as crazy dangerous.

Since the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I’ve often wondered how much US foreign policymakers have learned from the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq. This week offered fresh evidence that, when it comes to US policy toward China, the answer is: not nearly enough. 

In the months before America overthrew Saddam Hussein’s government, America’s leaders recklessly downplayed the war’s potential costs. ... Prominent figures, including prominent Democrats, are doing the same thing today. They’re downplaying the potential costs of an even more dangerous war, this time over Taiwan. ... 

Representative Elaine Luria ... wants to proactively give Biden, and all future presidents ... [authority for] war with China over Taiwan.  

What might such a war entail? For one thing, the US would likely lose. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, “The Pentagon has reportedly enacted 18 war games against China over Taiwan, and China has prevailed in every one.” ... The US could lose as many troops in the first few days of a war over Taiwan as it lost in the entirety of the Afghan and Iraq Wars. There’s also a genuine risk of nuclear war. ...

As was true after 9/11, the U.S. is profoundly ignorant of the passions that our big-footing about in someone else's complex historical context could (and does) evoke. China is an emerging military and economic superpower, the equal to anything we've got, in the grip of intense nationalism. To the great advantage of its current authoritarian leader, masses of Chinese appear to be very ready to subsume any domestic grievances to repudiate the "century of humiliation," the exploitative encounter with the West -- that means us. Chinese genuinely consider Taiwan merely a secessionist province, a relic of the Chinese civil war of the late 1940s, which should rightly be reabsorbed by the mainland.

Here's the best I can do for an analogy: Think how we'd react if a bunch of right wingers forcibly took over the state of Hawaii, repressed the present Hawaiian population, and then thumbed their noses at the U.S. mainland. And if, from across the Pacific Ocean, China backed up the wingers now ruling Hawaii. I suspect we'd have feelings.

A significant difference is that Taiwan is only 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, not 2500 miles.

And another difference is that the Taiwanese managed to claw their way to building their own vibrant economy and an enviable liberal democratic state since breaking off from the mainland. Modern Taiwan is a success for that rule-of-law idea we claim to aspire to. This seems to be a desirable outcome to most Taiwanese. China, on the other hand, seems to be getting more oppressive by the day. If mainland China gets its way, Taiwan would go the way of Hong Kong, its freedoms eviscerated and its distinctiveness erased.

Former U.S. foreign service officer Chas Freeman, who happened to be serving as an interpreter on President Nixon's ground-breaking trip to China, offers his nuanced account of the tangled U.S. commitments and interests in Taiwan and China in the linked article. We have not been sure-footed and if we are to avoid war, we will need to be. And Taiwan looks to be in very rough seas.

Beinart begs for more U.S. sophistication before we let our leaders take us into another "dumb war, a rash war."

... through many Afghan or Chinese eyes, the US doesn’t look like a champion of freedom at all. It looks like the most recent foreign power seeking to violently subjugate their nation.

In official Washington, in fact, the legacy of Western imperialism is even more absent from discussions of China than from discussions of Afghanistan, where people at least occasionally trot out cliches about the Hindu Kush being a “graveyard of empire.”  

... But without discussing China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of Britain, France, Japan and yes, the US—which dated from roughly the First Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s—it’s hard to understand why the CCP can convince many of its constituents that America’s rhetoric about democracy, economic fairness, and the “rules-based order” is a smokescreen for its efforts to keep China subservient and divided. “Every schoolchild in China and every educated Chinese person knows about the ‘century of humiliation,’” the historian Stephen R. Platt told The New York Times a couple of years ago. Has a top Biden administration official ever publicly used the phrase?

So here we are again. Are the people of the U.S. ready to be led into a war on the other side of the Pacific in circumstances about which most of us know exactly nothing?

We have built up some resistance. By 2008, most of us knew Iraq and probably Afghanistan were futile adventures, more crimes than mistakes. So we elected Obama and discovered how little power politicians have to overcome the inertia of wars once they get underway. (Kudos to Joe Biden for cutting the cord on Afghanistan.)

But as was true after a similar popular evolution from jingoism to revulsion about the Vietnam war, enough time has passed so we're looking inward, not outward. Once again, our leaders threaten to get us embroiled in a context about which we are ignorant. Once again, as in 2001, there's no popular organized mass peace movement. Maybe we could start early this time -- inform ourselves as best we can -- and let the powers-that-be know we want them to navigate these shoals without war!

Afghanistan on my mind

I suppose I should write about the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. I must have written some 100 posts in some way about that imperial adventure. The topic leaves me sad and weary and glad to see it go.

Early on, I harbored some slight hope that, with Osama bin Laden chased into Pakistan along with his Taliban hosts, the U.S. could declare victory and leave the Afghans to sort themselves out. This would be hard on Afghan women (and on the hopes of modernizing Afghans like San Francisco's Tamim Ansary) but there never seemed any prospect our incursion could do much good.

The war led to some insightful books. I think particularly of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan and Sarah Chayes' Thieves of State. Those should endure, though they may seem obscure today.

The Afghanistan war provoked many heated and smart conversations among the U.S. troops who had to die and fight in it. Here's a sample, yanked from military correspondent Thomas Rick's blog.

But mostly, the war became no more than intra-Afghan death and dying, with some Pakistani and U.S. and E.U. interlopers swept into the chaotic carnage. Serious observers understood this by the beginning of Obama's presidency in 2009, but somehow U.S. military and politicians couldn't let go their clusterfuck in someone else's country.

My belief was always that our invasion should never have happened: al-Qaeda was a problem for the International Criminal Court for whom we could have provided some muscle. But that's not how my country -- that in those days was confidently the world's superpower -- chose to play its hand.

So, after 20 years of futility, we're getting out. Let's hope we can stay out and not revive this shit show. 

Normalization

I'm not willing to pretend that this was lawful.

Last week our new President delivered a 500 pound bomb "message."

Biden launched an air strike against the facilities of Iran-backed militias in Syria that have been launching rocket attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq. When asked today what message he was sending, he said: “You can’t act with impunity. Be careful.”

Uncharacteristically, a smidgen of me is sympathetic to what Biden claims to be doing here: he's emphasizing that, though he intends to put all he can into resurrecting the Obama-era "deal" that constrained Iranian development of a nuclear weapon, he's not taking lightly any adjacent provocations, especially threats to U.S. troops. Curbing an Iranian push for nukes is a good idea. And after a president who wouldn't do anything to respond Russia's putting a bounty out for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. president might need to take a stand. 

But it remains worth mentioning that if U.S. troops weren't blundering about in tangled conflicts in other people's countries, there would be less need for such a show of force.

And there doesn't seem much doubt that Biden is continuing one of the worst features of a lawless chief executive: presidents aren't supposed to make war without authorization from Congress. Senators know this and also have mixed feelings.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Friday that Congress "must be fully briefed on this matter expeditiously," noting that "offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances."

Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations committee with Kaine, said that the recent strikes by Iranian-backed militias on Iraq bases were "unacceptable" and that he inherently trusts Biden's national security decision making ability. But he added that retaliatory strikes that are not necessary to "prevent an imminent threat, must fall within the definition of an existing" authorization for use of military force. 

"Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria, where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action," said Murphy.

California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna reacted more bluntly.

"This makes President Biden the seventh consecutive US president to order strikes in the Middle East. ... There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization."

Here in the U.S. we don't think much about this (comes of being an empire) but this airstrike violated international law. So explains Rutgers Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque at Just Security:

The U.S. airstrikes almost certainly violated international law, for two basic reasons. The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time ... And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor (or two, or more)... These two reasons, combined, are decisive. It cannot be lawful to use armed force on the territory of another State when it is clear that no armed attack by a non-State actor is ongoing or even imminent.

It's very difficult for this country to understand that we can't claim to be essential pillars of "the international liberal order" if we ignore the legal apparatus that order has fostered when we find it convenient.

An appointment

No, not Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's V.P. I'll get to that I'm sure.

Rather, it's seems worth noting that the Trump regime has moved that nasty old cold warrior Elliott Abrams from its project of overthrowing Venezuela's government to its project of overthrowing Iran's government. 

Abrams should feel right at home working with and against Iran. In the late 1980's he was knee deep in the Reagan Administration's illegal plot to trade arms to Iran in return for cash to pay a right wing force to attack Nicaragua's then-leftist elected government. (Confusingly, Nicaragua now has an oppressive regime headed by the same tinpot caudillo, but that was then and this is now and Nicaragua remains on the USA's enemy list.) Abrams was convicted for lying to Congress; this country used to penalize its crooks. The crackpot Iran-Contra scheme was a foreshadowing of the private dealing and grifting that Republicans substitute for government when they get the power to do so.

Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post who knows more than a thing or two about Iran, having been held hostage in Iranian prisons for a couple of years during the Obama administration. He has a conclusion about U.S. policy toward Iran under Trump -- and also some suggestions should the world be so fortunate as to win a Biden administration. 

After decades of punitive measures directed at Iran under the still unfulfilled promise of defanging the Islamic Republic, the Iranian people deserve better from the U.S. government. And so do Americans. ... [Trump's last envoy] managed to play a role in worsening the lives of average Iranians, in part by promoting measures such as indiscriminate economic sanctions and travel bans. ...

If former vice president Joe Biden wins in November, he will have a chance to alter our current collision course with Iran. Biden would inherit a situation in which the United States enjoys significant leverage over Tehran, and he will have foreign policy advisers with years of experience working on these issues. He should take advantage of both, conditioning any concessions on real change that improves the lots of average Iranians. After all the harm we have caused them with nothing positive to show for it, the United States owes that to the Iranian people. ...

Not surprisingly, Rezaian also thinks a better U.S. government could do better at aiding any of our citizens so unfortunate as to be imprisoned in Iran.

Historical farce

Once upon a time, there was a Kennedy who "advised American families to build bomb shelters to protect them from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange ..." That dangerous farce was 60 years ago.

Now we have a Republican Kennedy who argues again for bomb shelters.

“Well, the [former] vice president says he will transform America. He will. And the American people will pay a fearsome price. [Biden's] foreign policy is hugs and hot cocoa for America’s enemies. If he’s elected, my advice to you is to build a fallout shelter,” the Louisiana senator exclaimed, prompting [Sean] Hannity to do a double take.

“Build a fallout shelter,” Kennedy reiterated. “You’ll need it. ...”

Daily Beast

Pretty stupid argument for his party's President who has abrogated, ended, or broken every agreement restraining nuclear danger that he could get his mitts on: the multilateral agreement with Iran to halt their nuclear bomb development; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) first signed by Ronald Reagan; and the Open Skies Treaty which allows the U.S. and Russia to fly over each other's territory to verify arms control agreements. And this Kennedy's current president seemingly aims to kill off the New START treaty with Russia which limits how many nuclear missiles each country can deploy.

Fallout shelters never were going to save anyone; the very real Cuban Missile crisis which nearly led to mass annihilation taught that first Kennedy that nukes were nothing to play games with. Of this, as of most everything but gilded gewgaws, this President knows nothing. Arms control treaties bring adversaries together to, at minimum, keep the talk going instead of the shooting. We need more, not less of them. This is something I do trust that Joe Biden knows.

Here we go again, inflating enemies

If this NY Times headline gives you the shivers, it just proves you were a conscious human in the run up in 2002-3 to the Iraq war. Our "leaders" are at it again, ginning up enemies for fun and profit -- then to try to grab the oil; now to try to save Trump's sorry ass from the whupping that voters aggrieved about dead grandmothers and lost paychecks are going to give him in November.

And as in 2003, too many Democrats are suckers for making China the designated enemy of the day. Come on Joe Biden -- you fell for non-existent weapons of mass destruction last time. This time, can you just recognize that natural disasters happen, that animal bugs sometimes jump to humans?

Sure, China did a lousy job controlling the epidemic at first -- but neither Europe nor the USA has anything to brag about. China is often a bad actor in the world, oppressing its Muslim minority and repressing its ethnic citizens. But picking a dumb fight will only make bad worse -- there and here. And again, we've got nothing to crow about as Trump dumps international agreements on nukes and climate that he obviously neither read nor understood.

This image seems to fit Trump's apparent decision to declare the COVID-19 emergency over:

Growing up in a cage

This book came to me literally as a found item. While Walking San Francisco, I happened upon the San Francisco Public Library mobile tech classroom. Somebody had set outside a carton of books the library was "de-accessioning" -- getting rid of -- for free. I couldn't go by without looking and picked up this title: Gaijin: American Prisoner of War.

What a find! Graphic novelist Matt Faulkner has adopted experiences from his own family history to draw the story of the coming of age of a mixed Japanese-American San Francisco teenage boy, Koji Miyamoto, after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. His father was traveling in Japan at the time; U.S. authorities find that suspicious. His schoolmates call him "Jap" and beat him up; when internment is ordered, his white mother chooses to go with him to the holding camp set up on Alameda island. There, a gang of "pure" Japanese boys taunt him as a "gaijin" -- outside person. They claim his white mother is making nice with the white solider jailers. This insult leaves him furious and confused. He dreams that his father is a Japanese aviator bombing American enemies. He becomes more and more lost in violent fantasies and tries to join up with the camp's bullies who have been abusing him.

Fortunately an older male internee who had employed his father, Mr. Yoshi Asai, befriends the increasingly disturbed boy-child. Luck and dignified compassion enable Mr. Yoshi to keep Koji from being caught stealing food and from being treated as a criminal. Eventually all 8000 northern Californian internees from Alameda are driven off to Camp Agua Dulce in the mountains above Santa Clarita.

The novel jumps to the war's aftermath and then to a mature Koji's reunion in postwar Japan with his father who survived the war though the father is portrayed as using a crutch to walk.

Faulkner's drawings are extraordinary, warm and full of deft movement. Their warmth contrasts with the considerable violence of the action in the story.

I had to wonder, why was the library getting rid of this? The copy I picked up is undamaged. Perhaps it falls between many stools -- not really a book for "young adults" as it is labeled, uncomplimentary to just about all the races and adults represented, yet not strictly moralistic either. Just what I appreciated.

If anyone in San Francisco wants this book, I'll deliver it to your front door in this season of social distancing. Just ask in comments.

Why U.S. elites are suckers for war with Iran

The U.S. policy elite, usually of both parties, hates Iran with a recurrent, near-maniacal, fury that is not shared by most of us.

I thought about this when I read that one response to the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Suleimani was a rush of queries to Google about a military draft. Are we being drafted into yet another war in the far off place we call "Middle East"? Seems so.

I've probably written this summary before but it seems worth repeating. What explains the endless elite animosity toward a country about which few of us think very often? I see three streams that intermingle.

Historic guilt
Persia -- modern Iran -- is unlike most of the countries we use and abuse in the so-called Middle East. Its boundaries are not some accidental affliction inherited from European colonial conniving after World War I as is true for most of the Arabic-speaking countries. Persia, an ancient Farsi-speaking Shiite Muslim land, was and is more or less what it has always been: a rich and diverse nation that is conscious of its history as the center of the civilized world when Europe was a feudal backwater.

In the aftermath of World War II, Iran was on its way to becoming a modern parliamentary democracy. British oil companies combined with a cowboy C.I.A. agent, Kermit Roosevelt, to overthrow its elected Prime Minister in 1953 and stick the unhappy Iranians with several decades of repressive, authoritarian rule led by the oil companies.

In 1979, Iranians -- left, right, and center -- rose up to take back their nation. Such eruptions are not neat and orderly and Iranians ended up with the Shiite Islamic rulers who still run the place. (Repressively, we should understand.) Along the way, nationalists seized the U.S. Embassy, grossly mistreated U.S. diplomats, and crowed over their dramatic escapade. Protection of diplomats is a real imperative of any international law-based system, but it's understandable that many Iranians didn't much credit the U.S. commitment to good behavior. The ensuing 444 day hostage crisis became a domestic political football in the U.S. and helped bring down Democratic President Jimmy Carter who looked ineffectual while Ronald Reagan wandered around beating his chest. (He was, after all, a celluloid cowboy.) For a slice of the U.S. elite, of which our current president is an exemplar,

If it’s always 1979, it’s always 1979.

David Graham

Iran remained hostile the U.S. while the U.S. remained hostile to Iran. During the entire 1980s, we encouraged and funded Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his war on the Islamic state, a murderous conflict that killed at least half a million combatants.

Iran didn't take U.S. hostility sitting down. In 1983 Iran almost certainly was responsible for helping Hezobollah, its allied Lebanese Shiite militia, carry out Beirut suicide truck bomb attacks which killed 241 U.S. military personnel, 58 French military personnel and 6 civilians. For a somewhat younger slice of the U.S. foreign policy elite, this was the opening act of a war with Iran they've never given up on. It's little remembered today, but that era's pseudo-cowboy president knew better than to be drawn into overt hostilities: Reagan quickly withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon.

In the years since, Iran and the U.S. have warred covertly with a few episodes breaking into public consciousness as when we shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and they supported and trained Shiite Iraqis fightings against the U.S occupation after 2003. Then again, sometimes these enemies have been temporarily on the same side as when Iran, in operations led by the assassinated General Soleimani, helped the U.S. find al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. Iran, too, wanted ISIS eradicated. This is a complicated part of the world -- a little much for monochrome U.S. thinking.

Our sick relationship with the state of Israel
In the U.S., relations with Israel are about domestic politics. Given the (more and more inaccurate) assumption that the route to the (tiny) Jewish vote runs through fealty to Israeli political aims, U.S. politicians have more often than not been onboard with Israeli demands we stand in for them in containing Iran. Israel does have something to worry about. Unlike their venal and repressive Sunni Arab neighbor states, Iran is a modern country of 80 million people, scientifically educated and capable of making a real threat if it came to hostilities. The Obama-era "Iran deal" was meant to walk back the threat of Iran advancing toward nuclear capability.

This wasn't good enough either for Israeli right wingers or our right wingers. They didn't want Iran constrained. They wanted the country obliterated. Trump did their bidding by violating the nuclear deal and thus pushing the region toward hot war.

And then there are our rapture-seeking evangelical Christian whack doodles ...
Apparently Secretary of State Pompeo is one of these, as is Vice President Pence. These nutcases believe that the Persians are tools of Satan and fighting them will bring on the battle of Armageddon, bringing back their weird version of a Messiah. Or some such. If they manage to start a war with Iran, they are just helping fulfill Biblical prophecies.

I cry: "Heaven preserve us!"

Eighteen years and counting

On October 7, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan -- full of rage and ignorant, misbegotten imperial idealism -- in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Our unequaled military might would speedily overawe a bunch of primitive tribesmen wearing scruffy beards and funny hats, or so we thought. A week later, U.S. flyers began dropping this psyops leaflet threatening death from the skies -- an image repurposed from our imperial escapades in Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, and Kosovo.

Image via John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq

Our troops are still fighting in that unhappy country and the killing continues. No, there was not much peace before we came crashing in. But the BBC summarizes the current "unrelenting violence":

An average of 74 men, women and children were killed every day in Afghanistan throughout the month of August, the BBC has found. ...

"The conflict has a devastating impact on civilians," says Fiona Frazer, human rights chief for the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

"United Nations data strongly indicates that more civilians are killed or injured in Afghanistan due to armed conflict than anywhere else on Earth.

"Although the number of recorded civilian casualties are disturbingly high, due to rigorous methods of verification, the published figures almost certainly do not reflect the true scale of harm."

The US and Afghan militaries routinely deny or fail to report civilian casualty figures.

Last month, 32 Afghan pine nut harvesters — sitting around a fire after a day’s labor in the fields — were killed by a U.S. drone strike.

A few days later: 40+ guests at a wedding party — including 12 children — were killed in a raid by U.S. backed Afghan forces.

Last weekend: 5 more civilians were killed in a U.S. airstrike.

These events barely enter our news stream; the war in Afghanistan is just a few weak notes in the background soundtrack of the national cacophony.

There are rumblings in Congress about ending the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" (AUMF) which legitimates the endless wars of 9/11. The House of Representatives has passed such a measure as part of the pending military budget. Will the Senate go along? Will the President sign a bill with such a provision?

Win Without War lobbies tirelessly toward that end. Somebody has to do it; they deserve our support.
... Speaking of those who need support, U.S. veterans of the endless wars of 9/11 are just about the only group whose unemployment numbers are rising in this full-employment economy. That damage persists, along with the war.

That other existential threat we live under

On this date, it feels right and proper to remember Stanislav Petrov -- an obscure Soviet Russian airforce officer whom most of us can thank for the fact we're alive today.

He was on the overnight shift in the early morning hours of Sept. 26, 1983, when the computers sounded an alarm, indicating that the U.S. had launched five nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Then as now, in both Russia and in the United States "babysitting" the early warning systems that underlie nuclear powers "deterrent" forces is a surprisingly low prestige job. These guys are central to launching Armageddon, but mostly it is a posting to mind-numbing routine, isolation, and boredom.

But when Stanislav Petrov saw the warning that September night, he had an intuition that something was not right. Tensions with the U.S. were sky-high: the Soviet Union had just blasted a Korean civilian airliner out of the air -- a Congressman was among 269 passengers killed. But the Russian expectation was that any U.S. attack would a monstrous, full scale launch, not just five missiles.

... we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time, that the Soviet Union's military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay. All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders — but I couldn't move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan."

Petrov sensed something wasn't adding up. ...

After several nerve-jangling minutes, Petrov didn't send the computer warning to his superiors. He checked to see if there had been a computer malfunction.

He had guessed correctly.

"Twenty-three minutes later I realized that nothing had happened," he said in 2013. "If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief."

NPR

Petrov didn't get a medal for saving the world. Then, as now, military bosses were more embarrassed that their systems didn't work properly than glad about the result. He was reprimanded for failing to fill out his log book properly.

He told his story after the end of the Cold War and died a couple of years ago without much recognition. ...
These days, missile operators wouldn't have 20 minutes to stew. Now incoming nukes can arrive in 7.5 minutes, so Putin and Trump only have that long to decide whether to respond to a warning. For all that has happened since 1983, the two countries still point hundreds of missiles at each other, forces whose firing would at minimum end civilization as we have known it. To keep up on the insane threat that nuclear weapons pose to all of us, I recommend the podcast Press the Button from the Ploughshares Fund. Amazingly, it is quite cheerful, despite its dire subject....
In another nuke news development, Foreign Policy reports that in 1979, a U.S. satellite system deployed to help enforce the 1963 Partial (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty, picked up the telltale signal of a nuclear explosion in the ocean south of Africa. Analysts rapidly concluded the bomb was belonged to the state of Israel. The Carter administration of the time concluded that it didn't want to suffer the domestic political fallout from confirming knowledge of Israeli nukes. So they classified the report and hid it away.

The Carter administration was so afraid to enforce the PTBT against Israel’s 1979 violation that it did what it could to erase or keep hidden evidence of its detection of a test. Subsequent administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, went along with this, and the U.S. government still pretends it knows nothing about any Israeli nuclear weapons.

... What Israel says—or doesn’t say—about its nuclear weapons is its own affair. But the United States should not agree to muzzle itself.

Seems right. Here's another essential threat we ought to be interrogating those aspiring Democratic presidential candidates about. None of their plans mean much if we make a mistake and blow the planet to smithereens.

We're crazed

Sometimes my fellow citizens appall me. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked 3000 of us whether they would support a nuclear preemptive strike on North Korea if/when that country builds a missile capable hitting the United States -- even it that strike would kill one million North Korean civilians. People preferred a non-nuclear strike -- but further questioning suggested that about one-third of us would approve of our government launching a nuclear attack.

That's horrible, but I'm willing to chalk it up to ignorance and lack of imagination. But what really got me was that the survey correlated support for using nukes with some other variables. Yes, Republicans were more inclined to a nuclear strike than others and, yes, Trump supporters were even more gung-ho for gore. But that's not what really got to me.

Among supporters of the death penalty, support for a nuclear strike actually rose from 38 percent to 49 percent when the number of expected North Korean fatalities increased from 15,000 to 1.1 million; one such respondent explained that “it’s our best chance of eliminating the North Koreans.”

Washington Post

We're some sick country sometimes.

I was glad to see that respondents did show some prudential sense: support for nuking North Korea dropped when people were told the U.S. military could not prevent retaliation.

Carton from XKCD.com.